Guess what? Even casting directors can't always get what they want. This past week, three separate breakdowns went out with very specific casting needs--and in each case the CD had to adjust the role based on the submissions and/or auditions.

Sometimes an actor can come in and suggest a new angle on a poorly defined character, or reshape a role to his or her personality rather than the other way around. Or he can invent a new character on the spot: Story is that when John Ratzenberger was auditioning for the role of barfly Norm on the Cheers pilot, he offered a bit of unsolicited advice to the producers, to the effect of: "Do you guys have a know-it-all character--a guy who has an answer for everything, and it's usually wrong? You oughta have a character like that." And so, some rewrites later, officious postman Cliff Clavin was born, and Ratzenberger owned the role.

In the case of this week's notices--let's call them the Three Broke-Down Breakdowns--no such casting miracles occurred, and no series regular roles were at stake. Instead, in each case the casting director had to lower or at least alter expectations when producer's requirements couldn't quite be met.

Lisa Miller Katz sent out an Everybody Loves Raymond breakdown last week seeking an older man, 65-70 years old, to play the piano at a lodge gathering of Peter Boyle's character Frank. And not just any generic piano tune, but specifically "Let Me Call You Sweetheart." This ivory tickler would also have a line.

"First we tried to read piano players to see if they could do the line," said Katz. "That didn't work. So then we tried to read actors who could play the piano, and it was getting really complicated--we don't have a piano here at the office."

The solution was relatively simple: "There are a lot of old guys in the scene, so we just gave the line to another actor, and got a real piano player." (Don't shoot him 'cause he couldn't do the line--he's just the piano player.)

Marnie Saitta's office sent out a breakdown seeking female twins, aged 4-5, for an under-five recurring role on The Young and the Restless. Turns out this was an Olsen-twins-on-Full-House kind of call: There were no twins in the script, just one young character the producers thought would be better handled on altenate days by twins.

"We did have a pair of twins come in," said Saitta's assistant Suzanne. "But we found one 5-year-old girl who was great, and we decided to go with just one actor. It's not a big part--kids are usually only in one scene per episode on a soap."

Finally, a role on Boston Public didn't need to be changed, exactly, but expectations of the talent pool's depth and breadth had to be revised.

The breakdown for the guest role of an 18-year-old African-American girl in a wheelchair did not explicitly state that disabled actors, or only disabled actors, should apply. But Sari Knight, an assisant to casting director Carrie Audino, said they were expecting to at least have the option to cast a wheelchair-bound actor in the part.

"We received one submission from a special-needs person," said Knight, explaining that the CDs got the submission from Performing Arts Studio West, a talent group that specializes in disabled and special-needs actors. And that submission was for an actor with cerebral palsy--a condition that sometimes confines sufferers to a wheelchair, but which didn't fit the role as written.

Knight speculated that it was likely the combination of youth, ethnicity, and disability that made it such a hard role to match with a real-life performer.

"I have a background in social work, and I know that a lot of people that fit that description aren't performers," Knight said. And so, it seems, the obstacles to truthful on-screen representations of disabled people exist not only the demand side but on the supply side, too.

A side note: I noticed a breakdown for the role of a "rabbity-looking Asian-American drug dealer" in his 30s to play a villain on Threat Matrix. Um, rabbity? Casting director Mary Jo Slater, who casts the show along with Steve Brooksbank, admitted, "I have no idea what that means. I'll probably have a conversation with the producers about it."

And suggest a change in their expectations, no doubt.

Online Casting: No Waiting

Is the tide finally turning?

About five years ago, when I was at Back Stage West, we surveyed casting directors and agents about how much they used online casting services, and how they felt about the future of such solutions. (I also wrote a story about it, helpfully reposted here.) One survey question asked how long these talent pros thought it would take before the casting business had made the full switch-over from hard copy submissions to electronic-only. The average estimate came to "little more than two years away."

Well, the year 2000 came and went without a radical reinvention of the casting business. And since then, I was starting to get the feeling from casting directors I spoke to that online casting was still a distant dream. The Internet was a valuable tool, this line of thinking went, for doing research on credits and other facts, but not for doing the business of casting. Apart from the electronic delivery breakdown and sides, online wasn't catching on as a technology to replace the old-school way of hard-copy submissions, huge mail bins, and piles of headshots.

Now, as we head toward the end of 2003, the landscape has changed, seemingly overnight; serious online casting is here, and it's not going away. The change took a little longer than expected to get here, true--but I guess it was kind of like a New York subway train whose light you can see way down the tunnel long before it arrives, and which seems to take much longer than it should to reach the station. Once it comes in, though, it's at silver-bullet speed.

The new system is picking up a lot of passengers. Increasingly the breakdowns--which, not coincidentally, are now delivered all through the business day, as they come in and are processed, rather than just once each morning, like a daily newspaper--have bolded notes that say "Submit electronically ASAP," and even "Electronic submissions only." Admittedly, some casting directors are now also including notes to indicate, "Hard copy submissions only." Whatever the percentage of CDs online vs. offline, neither of these are notes that would have been seen on breakdowns even five years ago.

I called Joey Paul Jensen's office to ask about a recent breakdown for Phil of the Future, a series for the Disney Channel, that had the note "Online Submissions Preferred." The producers have a 14-episode order, with the expectation of a three-season run on the family netlet, and the producers are already up to episode 13. As Jensen's assistant Kathryn Taylor explained, the fast pace and extraordinary demands of the past few months of Phil casting have demonstrated the indispensibility of the electronic solution.

"The show has been going through a lot of changes, a lot of writing changes, with things coming down late, up to the last minute," said Taylor of the futuristic show. "My boss said to [us assistants] yesterday, 'If it had not been for you aggressively getting this office online--basically forcing me and this office to get online--I don't know how we could have cast this show.' The normal 24- to 48-hour turnaround--not only do we not have the time for that, but everything changes so quickly on this show. If agents get a breakdown in the morning, by noon the sex of the character has changed. Doing this online, agents can submit, then resubmit when there are changes the same day."

Not everyone is hopping gleefully on board. On a recent visit I made with a Breakdown rep to Eileen Knight's casting office, her associate had questions about a juicy breakdown she'd put out around noon on a recent Monday, which attracted only a handful of submissions by the following Tuesday afternoon. The problem, it turned out, was that agents she spoke to, who had checked the breakdowns on Monday morning, hadn't looked at the breakdowns again that afternoon. And with the influx of new notices by Tuesday morning, they missed the "new" notice from the previous noon.

"A lot of agents are devastated," admitted Taylor. "Because we're telling them: If you only offer hard copy submissions, there's no way we can consider your clients. This is definitely a case of the early bird gets the worm." She's not saying she doesn't rule out mailed submissions--"You'll never see an envelope in my trash that isn't opened," she said--but simply that too many of them are falling behind the pace Jensen's office is keeping.

What kind of pace are we talking about? Taylor described a recent turnaround that would have been unthinkable in the pre-electronic days: "I got the script on a Monday night at 6:45 and broke it down. It was up [online] Tuesday morning at 10 a.m., and by noon I had scheduled producers' sessions for 5 p.m. that same afternoon."

For Taylor, the sweetest byproduct of this faster method is that she can get more out of, and put more into, the casting part of her job. By receiving submissions and scheduling auditions online, she can cut down on her typical "5-8 hours of opening and sorting mail submissions," and she can spend time on the phone taking quality pitch calls from agents and managers rather than spending all day setting up call times. Like most assistants, Taylor hopes to be a casting director herself one day--and it's safe to say that she's learning a lot more from time spent in sessions and pre-reads than in the drudgery of sorting through submissions and answering the phone.

Another result of the system's quick turnaround is that, increasingly, actors are getting a crack at self-submitting through Actors Access, Breakdown Services' newly launched service. You don't need to get the sales pitch here. Suffice it to say that online casting seems already to be changing the way casting is done in this town. And that if there is a shakeup as a result, here's hoping that actors are among the beneficiaries. For so long completely shut out of the casting process, even when they had representation, actors may soon begin to find themselves in a position to compete directly for many of the roles only agents and managers could submit on before.

Maybe that's just a tad too optimistic. After all, computerized casting makes everything faster--including the delete function.

JAM the Files, and "10-8" Update

A breakdown from JAM Casting (Mara Casey and Jami Rudofsky) last week sought several actors "18 and older to plaly college students… all ethnicities EXCEPT CAUCASIAN" for The Gilmore Girls. Was the WB show, which this season has followed its young lead Rory to her freshman year at Yale, planning some kind of Very Special Episode about racial diversity on campus? Not likely on that irony-thick, quick-witted show.

"We just needed to bulk up our files in that area," said assistant Sarah Hutchinson. Their files of Caucasian actors, after three seasons of populating the sleepy and largely white town of Stars Hollow, are plenty bulky by now. By contrast, Yale and its surrounding environs of New Haven, Conn., are very diverse. Hence the seemingly exclusionary instruction, which did the trick said Sarah.

In other news, JAM has just taken over the casting duties on the police drama "10-8," previously cast by the team of Judith Holstra and Lori Sugar. I reported last week that Sugar had moved to the production office of "Strong Medicine," another former Holstra/Sugar joint project, while Holstra was remaining as CD for "10-8."

This town moves fast, even in November. Blink and you'll miss the train.