MY CASTING COUCH
Being a casting director meant a front row view to crazy. A cool kind of crazy. An accidental career, it evolved from me being an actress, to landing a principal role on America's Most Wanted as Atlanta's Buckhead Cat Burglar, to the producer and I ice-skating and becoming friends, to her then hiring me to “cast” all Southeastern episodes for Fox TV and America's Most Wanted.
Might I mention that the producer is the only person that I ever had to rush to the emergency room from the ice rink? She fell on the ice and I skated across her outstretched hand with my recently sharpened blades. Ouch. She was an amateur with rental skates, I was a competitive skater with pro skates. We bonded over that nutty experience and her 21 stitches and an adorable midnight doctor. I'd never hurt anyone on the ice before or since. And when a skater falls, it's a good idea not to flail the fingers across the ice, but blood spots left behind do tend to slow down the rowdy skaters, so there's that.
I thought I'd get fired! Instead, we became besties.
I'd already been moonlighting and working for another casting director and had picked up a few assignments, but AMW was my longest and biggest client. They were great to work for. And that allowed me to go out on my own and I flourished.
AMW kind of casting was mostly “real people” casting. They sent me Polaroids (yes “sent”, and “Polaroids”... ha... look it up), and I had to find actors or real people who looked like the thugs or victims. This was the beginning of “reality TV” and evolved from a long writer's strike in the 80s.
Real stars were mostly out. No Sandra Bullock or Pierce Brosnan. Real people. I'd go into restaurant kitchens, flea markets, stores in the mall, anywhere to find my match. It was great fun. People who cooked a meal at Rio Bravo on Tuesday could be filming on a set by Friday and making in one day what they might make in a year. There's good money in stardom. That's why so many people want it.
I got to travel the world. I worked with big stars, little stars, and everything in between. Auditions were a hoot. Nearly everyone fibs a little. Alright, LIES. Mostly about age or height and always about abilities. The guy who said he could ride a horse looked like an ass when I had to ride out to rescue him from the top of a hill. He was screaming and the horse was bucking.
I liked on-camera, in-person auditioning. I miss that. It's not done the same way in the age of technology. When auditioning in person, there's a unique communicative process that does not translate to the current self-tape submissions. It was harder work, that's for sure, involving phones and papers and glossy headshots and now it's zip, zip, done.
It was stunning to audition Miss America one time for a big part. I'll never forget her arm muscles and my break with professionalism to ask her how she got those guns. Answer: 150 pushups every day. (I started the next day. With 2.)
My personal favorite was after 9/11 when Cartoon Network made a short for the kids about what happened. It was filmed inside an active quarry and everyone in the feature dressed like the Flintstones and I just went ahead and cast myself in a special part. (I'd worked with Turner Studios and they trusted my choices.) It sounded like fun and I wanted to see a quarry! They had to make me really dirty and poured rocks and dirt and all kinds of soot all over me. We had a great meal catered deep down in the quarry for dinner. It was a fantastic setting. Then I drove home half-naked in my Wilma Flintstone suede animal hide, filthy dirty, and prayed no police would see me and stop me. I'd had dozens of parts and played many characters. This was a fun one. But I don't do dirty very well.
Many commercial clients rewarded employees with roles in adverts or industrial films. (Commercials or in-house made movies for training purposes.) There was an industrial for Memorial Medical Center in Savannah and besides real actors, they sent doctors and nurses and exemplary staff to audition. An obnoxious lab-coated “doctor” pushed his way to the front of the line, said he was in a hurry and had to get done. “I'm a doctor! I can't wait out here. I'll have to leave in a few minutes.” Hmmmm. I feel that way when I go to a doctor's office. Why do I have to wait?
My camera guy and I had worked together for years and had developed a sort of silent eyeroll/eyebrow signaling method. This guy wasn't going to make it, but I had to be polite and carry on. No way is this asshole getting the part.
You see, people think casting directors have loads of power. That's not necessarily true. The power we do have is to make sure a particular person is never seen. See how that goes? We can recommend people and yes, casting people have their core talent that get special advantages, but that's another story. These were the days of tape and video tape could be rewound and your auditon “lost”. Being a jerk is never a good idea.
Anyway, we auditioned the guy. Everyone waiting shuffled awkwardly outside and we heard the buzz and we carried on like normal and we were nice and it was done. We said bye. We moved on.
A few minutes later, the guy burst back in the room … I kid you not … and laughed and said, “By the way, I'm not really a doctor, but thanks!” I guess he wanted to demonstrate that he could act. I don't know. But without missing a beat, I said, “No problem, I'm not really a casting director.” I winked at him and waved. He slunk away. We pulled out his headshot and ripped it to pieces and backed up that tape and took him off.
I cast adverts for Anheuser-Busch decades ago, then they opened a huge plant in Cartersville, GA. It was luxurious in there! Unexpected marble everywhere, plush surroundings in the middle of “nowhere”. They wanted to use employees, so I'd come out and audition them on camera. I had to be extra caring, because these were beer guys or executives, not actors. They didn't know what to do and most people are uncomfortable with a camera pointed at them.
Each guy would say his name and what he did, “slate” in film terminology. They mostly ended with “BP&S ma'am” (it's the South and boys are raised to be polite. I wasn't really a ma'am in my 30s).
BPS. BPS. BPS. It was funny to me and my cameraman, but we just smiled and moved on. Finally I asked a guy, what the heck BPS stands for? “Beer, packaging and shipping, ma'am.” Everybody laughed.
But he was the BPS chief of operations and when the auditioning was over, he whispered to me to bring my car to the back of the compound and he would be waiting there for me. I did. I pulled to the fence behind all the buildings and there they were: all the BPS boys lined up with cases and cases of beer and every conceivable Anheuser-Busch branded goodie they had. My car could barely scrape off the pavement from the weight in my trunk.
I went home and unloaded the treasures from a day's work and enjoyed a film starring the Anheuser-Busch clydesdales while crunching beer nuts. Cartersville holds some splendid secrets. And being a casting director is a cool way to uncover secrets.
Just Another Lori Story
