There may be good news this coming pilot season and beyond
for talented, trained actors who’ve watched reality television boom and in the
process blast away network airtime from scripted fare. The fear that has
rippled through Hollywood is that if American viewers get used to watching
“real” people, washed-up celebrities, and/or teen talent competitions, they
might lose their appetite for the comedies and dramas that have kept writers,
producers, and actors in business all these years. Each season we’ve heard
network executives and pundits pronounce this fad played out—but the ratings
for recent fare like The Simple Life,
Average Joe, Extreme Makeover, even the Bachelor miniseries spinoff, Trista and Ryan’s Wedding, have
encouraged networks and cable nets to keep it real.
Well, folks, don’t start counting your mortgage payments
yet, but you heard it here first: The newest trend in TV casting seems to be improv--both integrated within the
reality genre and into spoofs of it.
It’s not as though improv-trained actor/writers from the
Groundlings, Second City, and Acme haven’t been in demand in Hollywood for some
time, as character actors, sketch performers, and sitcom writers. But it wasn’t
until ABC let Drew Carey realize his pet side project, an American version of
the BBC hit Whose Line Is It, Anway?, a few years back that we saw actors
skilled at improv do just that on-camera.
Now they’re starting to spring up in more places, from
Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm to
Comedy Central’s Cops spoof, Reno 911. One could argue that The Jamie Kennedy Experience, with
set-ups perpetrated by Kennedy and his accomplices on unsuspecting real people,
is a kind of improv show, though it’s more in line with the Candid Camera tradition of staging
situations that mingled actors and real people. Sci-Fi’s Scare Tactics similarly puts real people into creepy hidden-camera
situations involving faked violence, accidents, and bloodletting.
Recent Breakdowns have shown further evidence of this
growing trend. A pilot presentation for The
Hotel Franklin sounds like it fits the Curb
model—with a difference. Casting director Eyde Belasco said of the
unscripted one-hour, “The director and writer know what they want to accomplish
in each scene, but we want improv actors, or actors with a background in
improv.” One crucial point: “It’s a drama, not a comedy.” Belasco (who said
that, as far as she knows, she’s not related to the owners of the vintage
Belasco Theatres) indicated that the leads have been cast, but that they’ll
still be seeking guest stars, even though this “pilot presentation” will be a
mere five minutes long. (In fact, we learned that AFTRA has a special contract
for this format, called “5 minutes or less.” Gives a new meaning to the
“under-five.”)
Also producing a 5-minute pilot presentation is
producer/casting contact Debbie Myers, whose The Bubbies might be described as Wise Eye for the Straight Girl: Three hip grandmas--one Jewish, one
African-American, one Italian--will arrive at the home of a young woman in some
kind of personal crisis and give their sage advice. If special needs arise,
they’ll call in specialists: a Latino, a WASP, or a Greek grandma.
So how is this different from the typical reality TV
model? Myers said she’s specifically looking for women over 50 who are actors. Myers explained that she
and her co-producers “spent a lot of time talking about, Should we go to the
temple to find Jewish grandmothers, and to the Italian community to find
Italians, etc.? Sometimes you can find real people who work well, but how many
times are you gonna strike gold that way?” Their decision: to find “real
grandmas who are professionally trained. We want them to have lived what they’re talking about, but we
want talented people who are smart and savvy, who know what beats we want to
hit and how to get there.” In other words, she said, “Thinking talent.” The Bubbies
is intended for the We cable netlet, which Myers described as “a hipper,
younger Lifetime.”
Indeed, the youth demographic seems to be the target, not
only of reality TV but of these new hybrids. Consider Forbidden Cuisine, a new cooking-show spoof series for the National
Lampoon Channel cable netlet described as “Martha
Stewart meets Larry Sanders, with
a bit of Pee-Wee’s Playhouse thrown
in for spice.” Casting director Lorna Bold’s Breakdowns seek actors with
“strong improvisation and/or comedy skills and/or experience.”
We can add to this trend the recently shot Brand X, described in its Breakdown as “Jackass meets Consumer Reports,” a 30-minute pilot for F/X that sought “strong
character actors” with “good comedic timing, improv skills… and a willingness
to do Jackass-style physical comedy and perform pranks in
public.” (Is “physical comedy” really the right phrase to describe the
self-mutilating stunts that made Jackass
notorious?)
In feature films, there have been a few directors who’ve
used improvisation to develop scripts, such as Mike Leigh, and of course
there’s the uniquely deadpan aesthetic of Christopher Guest, whose
mock-documentaries began with This Is Spinal
Tap and have become, with the follow-ups Waiting for Guffman, Best in
Show, and A Mighty Wind, a kind
of Method comedy. And recently in Breakdowns was a notice for Junkyard Willie, a non-union feature
film based on a Jerky Boys-like posse of prank callers, which is seeking
performers with comedic improv skills. Casting director Stephen H. Snyder’s
Breakdowns throw down this gauntlet: “We want the actors to know there is no
ceiling on the levels you can hit at the audition.”
Is this a trend that will take off? Myers thinks so: “This
is the next evolution of things—blending the two, reality and talented people.”
It’s about time someone recognized that “reality” and
“talent” are not mutually exclusive terms. You know it and I know it, but it’s
great to see some folks in Hollywood rediscovering the obvious: This town is
full of real talent.
Shuffling the Race Cards
Mike Judge’s new comedy feature 3001, about an Army Private put into a top-secret hibernation
project, only to wake up to a world that’s dumber and worse off than the one he
left behind, has an interesting note on the Breakdowns sent out by casting
director Mary Vernieu: “All characters from the future should look as if they
were of mixed race.”
This sounds like an obvious enough authorial point—that at
the current pace of interracial marriage and breeding, the distinctions between
races will be blurred in a few hundred years. Or, as Venus Kanani, one of
Vernieu’s assistants, put it, “Everyone will be a shade of brown.”
But, though it’s written in bold and all-capital letters,
the note has pretty much been ignored by agents and managers, said Kanani. “We
haven’t been getting that many mixed-race submissions,” she said. “We’ve been
getting submissions for white and black people. It’s a tough thing.”
Indeed, what exactly would a mixed-race actor look like?
Who would be the prototype? Halle Berry, for instance, is more or less
precisely mixed—white mother, black
father—but, as generations of such mixtures have found, even a small percentage
of African-American color marks a person as black. (Where else but in a country
so obsessed with the color line would an absurd concept like “octaroon” exist?)
The Rock? Vin Diesel? Samoans and Filipinos, for example, can often confuse
easy classification, as can Native Americans, often cast as Latinos and vice
versa.
Given the confused response from agents—after all, do you
know any agencies that specialize in the category of “mixed race”
actors?—Kanani sounded skeptical that the movie would “end up casting that way.
We probably won’t cast people who look too ‘all-American.’ But in the end, you
want to cast the best actor. We’ll see how it goes.”
The lead they’re seeking, she said, is the unambiguously
Caucasian Luke Wilson.
British Invasion
Like the Americanized Whose
Line, the ploy of a number of TV projects this year has been to take
popular Brit hits and adapt them into American versions. (And, just so we’re
clear on the myth of Europe’s cultural superiority, where do you think many of
these reality shows originated?) The mercy killing of the egregious NBC version
of Coupling—a British series that is
itself an Anglicized Friends—hasn’t
deterred NBC from going ahead with a pilot for The Office: An American Workplace, based on the popular BBC
mock-documentary, nor ABC from Doing It,
described as one-hour Americanized from a British novel by Melvin Burgess.
Interestingly enough, both are being cast by Allison Jones, whose TV credits,
while impressive (Taken, Freaks and Geeks, Spin City, Family Ties),
don’t show a particular emphasis on Brit imports.
The story summary for The
Office says, with almost plaintive hopefulness, “The American show is
aiming to capture the humor and poignancy of the original.”
Of course, if Americans a few centuries ago hadn’t make
the executive decision to depart from the British original, so to speak, there
might not be an America at all.
Worth the “Sacrifice”
I recognized casting director Angela Campolla’s name on a
recent Breakdown for a USC graduate thesis film. I’m always intrigued by those
CDs who’ll take on a student project. What’s the draw?
The money, partly. “They do pay the casting director, even
though they don’t pay the actors,” confessed Campolla. The experience as a
casting director is another—Campolla has worked primarily as an associate (for
such CDs as Joel Thurm, Robin Lippin, Ted Hann & Pamela Basker, and Susan
Bluestein) and more recently, as a CD for cable promos, but she wants to take
her career to the next level. “I’m earning my wings,” she said, in an appropriately
holiday-themed reference.
The other draw, she said, is “helping actors get footage
for their reels.” Some name actors will take student film roles if it’s a good
script, and if it represents a “chance to play a role they wouldn’t normally
get cast in.” Some of her recent casting coups included nabbing Gary Busey and
Keone Young for the student film The Tao
of Pong, and seasoned local thesp Jack Kehler for a student film called Snackers.
Her current project is USC grad student Eric Wostenberg’s
sci-fi/horror/musical Sacrifice,
described in the Breakdown as “a cross between Moulin Rouge and 28 Days
Later.” That’s not just a fascinating combo—it’s also insanely ambitious
for a student film that has less than 2 weeks to shoot (and, since it’s a musical,
2 days to pre-record songs).
Campolla pointed out that Wostenberg is shooting in
high-definition video, which will make production and post “easier to handle.”
The student filmmaker decided to shoot the works, Campolla said, because he
reasoned that he’s spent so much money at USC, why not go out with a bang? It
doesn’t hurt that he is, according to Campolla, “one of the most organized of
all the directors I’ve worked with.”
I’ll interject here that I went to USC Film School lo
these many years ago, and while we production majors were required to take one
class on acting—which was unquestionably helpful in directing and understanding
actors—we were told precious little about the casting process, or how to run an
audition. Apparently little has changed since then.
“Casting is not something that’s covered,” Campolla said.
“I’ve talked to the faculty there, and told them they have to teach the
students how it works, how to run an audition.”
Campolla, who also works as an acting coach (her website
is www.auditionacting.com), knows her way around auditions, bad ones included:
“I’ve seen actors with great skills just come in and become talking heads—they
just zone out.”
The key is adjustment.
“There may be dogs or cats around the office, the phone may be ringing, there
may be 6 other people in the room you haven’t met—and that’s the time you’re
supposed to shine.” But that’s the job, she said. After all, movie sets are
often not beacons of secluded quiet or perfectly framed proscenium stages, and
a fair amount of acting these days is done in front of green or blue screens
with unseen elements to be added later by CGI. If an actor can’t adjust to a
cramped or noisy room or to unreceptive readers, or to an out-of-left-field
direction, how is that actor going to do good work on a set rigged with kleig
lights, with grips milling about, often with cameras or co-stars at strange,
unreal angles, or with a director who wants take after take, each one
different?
She’s on the actor’s side, Campolla emphasized—but she
knows why many of her colleagues may seem cold and hard toward actors. “It’s
kind of like the way a doctor becomes hardened to the pain,” she said of the
grind of watching actor after actor get rejected. To elaborate, she used
another profession for comparison: “Casting directors are like lawyers—we get a
bad rap. It’s a thankless job, and we don’t get paid a lot of money. We’re not
thanked at awards shows. Though when they start out, actors want to be best friends
with casting directors, once they get their break they forget about us. It’s
like we’re parents, and they leave the nest.”
Ivy’s League
In my Nov. 14 column, I wrote about the spanking-new
offices of CDs Paul Weber and Zora Dehorter (She Spies, Stargate SG-1,
Dead Like Me) in MGM’s fresh Century
City digs, and tried to convey the sense of humor and conversational ease of
the workplace. But in quoting associate Ivy Isenberg on her advice for actors,
I perhaps over-sold the negative (a common journalistic tendency).
She made the point that actors have to make a “real
commitment to acting; don’t play at it.” I quoted her as calling many actors
“lazy” and “not emotionally available,” and saying that “beautiful people are
spoiled.” These were indeed all things she said, but after looking back at my
notes I realize I left out some crucial linking logic: The reason actors must make a real commitment to their craft is because
acting is a discipline like any other, and just as no one would expect a
surgeon to get up one day and decide to operate on people, wannabe actors who
happen to look good and think acting is easy money are not likely to go far.
The access I’ve had to these casting offices—mostly in the
company of Breakdown Services’ casting reps Dave Becker, Brian Roberts, and the
recently departed Gerard Marin—has been crucial to this column, and I wouldn’t
want casting directors or their associates to regret having given me such
access. For my part, I regret the mistaken impression of coldness or bitchiness
my Nov. 14 column may have given of Weber and Dehorter’s office—not least
because it was in fact one of nicest, most accessible casting offices I’ve had
the good fortune to visit.
Edible Parts
My favorite note from this past week’s Breakdowns? For Phyllis
Nagy’s feature film Mrs. Harris, to
star Annette Bening and Ben Kingsley and currently being cast by Junie Lowry
Johnson and Libby Goldstein, a preamble that read: “All roles are delicious.”
Does that mean that instead of screen tests, they’ll do taste
tests instead?
(Good thing I’m not paid for the jokes.)
