Excepting a few bumps in the last few months, I’ve been doing this column every week since October, 2003—about six months in all. From actors, I’ve gotten mostly good feedback, amid the usual follow-up requests for addresses and phone numbers; from casting directors, I’ve mostly gotten a warm welcome into their busy offices, with the occasional mistake or misunderstanding that needed correction (you’d think that a roving reporter asking questions and scrawling in a notebook would indicate to casting directors that they’re on the record, but apparently it hasn’t always been that clear).

I was impressed recently by the quality of a few responses I got from readers—small things, but, as I always told the staff at Back Stage West, one letter effectively stands in for the hundreds or thousands of others who had a similar reaction but didn’t bother to write in. What two recent emails indicated to me is that “Inside Track” appears to have a pretty savvy, educated readership. One came from someone named Jen, regarding my Feb. 10 column item about Big Love, an HBO show about a Mormon patriarch with three wives. I referred in passing to the totally unrelated Chuck Mee play of the same name; wrote Jen: “I'm so glad I'm not the only one that thought of flying wedding cakes and onstage bathtubs when I saw the breakdown for Big Love.” You’d have to know the Mee play—a free-wheeling adaptation of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women, about a bevy of brides defiantly fleeing from an agreement to be married off—to know what Jen is talking about. Mee’s play had a definitive local production, bathtubs and wedding cakes and the works, at Venice’s Pacific Resident Theatre in 2002.

And an email I got this week from a helpful fellow named Tom pointed out that the title of a new half-hour comedy for the Oxygen cable network has been changed from the attention-grabbing My Best Friend Is a Big Fat Slut to the much more coy Good Girls Don’t, scheduled to debut in June. I checked around and found that this information was barely reported in the trades and Reuters, and only last week, as part of a press release announcing a slate of original programming on the netlet—most of it unscripted “reality” series. Obviously my readers are pretty “inside” themselves, or at least very observant; thanks for the tip, Tom.

And since it’s clear that my readers are reference-savvy, can anyone guess where Carsey-Werner-Mandabach, Good Girls Don’t’s producers, might have found such a nifty title? Hint: It was the B-side of an insanely catchy 1979 hit single, as I recall.

One of Oxygen’s unscripted shows isn’t quite the threat to the future of the acting profession that many reality shows seem to be: Girls Behaving Badly, cast by Michelle Foumberg, hires comic actresses, usually with improv chops, to stage hidden-camera pranks on real people, à la The Jamie Kennedy Experiment. The sweet-faced but foul-mouthed Chelsea Handler, who recently made a splash at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, is among the show’s regulars.

And Oxygen just announced this week that the show’s been picked up for a fourth season, during which the show will be conducting a nationwide search, “Calling All Girls Behaving Badly,” with open auditions at comedy clubs in New York, Chicago, Denver, Seattle, and Atlanta. Each applicant will get a two-minute audition for the show’s executive producers, Barry Poznick and John Stevens of Zoo Productions, and the funniest five women will guest on the show.

Yes, I noticed that Los Angeles wasn’t included in that list of open calls. Presumably Foumberg has culled all she can from the local comedy scene (and the show is non-union, which narrows the available talent pool a bit). Foumberg is also casting a SAG Limited Exhibition short called What’s Bugging Seth, about a young deaf man trying to make his way in the world.

Kid Rock

Easily one of last year’s most enjoyable films, though not the sort the Oscars have time for, was the Jack Black vehicle School of Rock, in which an ostensible loser with nothing but his belief in the power of rock ’n’ roll going for him inspires a class of grade schoolers to overcome their insecurities, and their parents’ exacting expectations, to unleash their inner rock hero. It was a perfect vehicle for the irresistible Black, who kicked around Hollywood for most of the ’90s as an Actors’ Gang member and guitar-wielding prankster before his star began to rise with appearances in The Cable Guy and a series of HBO shorts based on his two-person mock-rock band Tenacious D.

In fact, I remember interviewing Black in ’95 along with actor/playwright Raymond J. Barry, who was rehearsing a father-son play, Back Then Back When, with Black at the time. Black was extremely subdued and soft-spoken, as I’ve heard he still is in interviews—except when he and Barry treated us to a hilarious, clipped exchange from the play. Black didn’t go on to perform it with Barry, as his film career soon began to take off. In addition to Cable Guy, there was his striking if small dramatic performance in Tim Robbins’ Dead Man Walking as one of Sean Penn’s brothers. And then of course came High Fidelity, Shallow Hal, and Orange County, among others, solidifying Black’s rep as a go-to scene stealer.

Which is why it was so gratifying to see him not so much steal as graciously share the screen with the talented, endearing kids of School of Rock. According to Liz Lang Fedrick, who did the kids’ casting from Los Angeles (Ilene Starger did the casting from New York, where the film was based), that this crew of young prodigies came together as the result of many weeks of searching. I spoke to Fedrick at her office on the Warner Bros. lot recently, where she just wrapped a pilot and is starting up a new independent film.

“It was just such an extensive search,” said Fedrick, who combed churches, conservatories, and schools in Orange County and Los Angeles for musical prodigies. “What’s wonderful is when you have a producer who understands that in order to get the kind of cast that they got, they would spend both the money and the time searching for it. I ended up searching for six weeks. Not many producers would pay for that. Ilene [Starger] searched all of NY, and they hired casting directors in Detroit, Chicago, all across the country. It really shows in quality of the cast when people pay for it.”

Though Fedrick ended up casting only “pros” from her office—the seasoned Miranda Cosgrove as the skeptical manager-in-training Summer, and Jordan-Claire Green as Michelle, one of the young backup singers—she did her share of searching among non-actors, and indeed most of the other youngsters who ended up in the film were non-actors, selected primarily for their musical skills. But did they find any young actors whose acting chops were so undeniable that they let them get by just faking an instrument?

“No, not at all,” said Fedrick. “We didn’t even try that. What was so integrally important to the piece was that their talent musically go beyond anything else, and it really worked. The kids that we saw were the best of the best.” As far as acting went, Fedrick said that came pretty easily to these precocious performers: “We weren’t asking them to be more than themselves, and so long as they could play, that was the most important part.”

And take note, parents of young performers who wonder whether Junior should give up violin lessons to go on auditions:

“I think across the board, if you find a child who already excels at something, there’s a sense of self-confidence that comes through,” said Fedrick. “These kids already have a sense of self, that, Hey, I’m good enough to get into this great school, or to be the best.”

She recounted with pleasure the final round of callbacks, in which Jack Black figured prominently.

“We actually rented a whole set—we had an electric guitar, we had a drum set, we had a keyboard available, and people brought their own, as well,” she recalled. It sounds a bit like another busy night at a Hollywood club: “We would have, like, set changes in between, and sound and all the rest of it.”

At this point, Black was brought in to “jam” with the kids’ auditions.

“We only brought back two or three of each category of the kids to do that, and it was so funny because the kids were so excited,” said Fedrick. “I had no idea what a huge fan base Jack had [among] 10-year-olds. And so one of the funny things that we did—it actually kind of embarrassed Jack to do it, but we took Polaroids. The kids played guitar with Jack [in the audition], so we took a Polaroid of them playing guitar together, and then Jack signed it for them, so they could take it away. The little boy who didn’t end up getting [the lead] framed it in his room! And he could take it to school and say, ‘No, look, I did go and audition—here’s a picture of me and Jack, and he signed it.’ ”

“What we tried to do with all the children, since [many] were non-pros, is we tried to make them think that each step they got to, that was it, that was the best, and that they should just be so proud of themselves that they got that far. Because even with adults, when you get to that point where it’s either you or the other guy, you know, it’s a lot of money, it’s a lot of prestige, it’s a big fat hairy deal. To then miss out on that can be so devastating if not handled it in the right way.”

Fedrick knows her way around youth casting, having cast for the short-lived Tarzan series and doing additional casting of youngsters on We Were Soldiers.

“Nobody wants to do kids, because they’re new every single time, and it’s a lot of work,” said Fedrick, who’s also been credited as Elizabeth Lang, or simply Liz Lang. “But I love it.”

She recently did an extensive search for the leads for Willy, about a high school basketball coach in Louisiana to star Ice Cube. She spent a generous eight weeks looking for mid-teen African-Americans who could play basketball and act—and in this case, invest a bit more than the young musicians of School of Rock.

“We needed some real emotion in Willy,” Fedrick said. “I found two 16-year-old [non-pros] who are great. But, you know, they’re young African-Americans; it’s not like we’re asking them to play something they’re not. We went to Carson, we went to Leimert Park, we went to poor neighborhoods. You know, I grew up in Orange County and I’ve been in L.A. for 12 years, and in those 12 years I’ve never been in that square that is east of the 405, west of the 705, south of the 10, and north of the 105, where Watts Towers is. I know that neighborhood intimately now; I know those kids now.”

The theme of the film, in which a team faces a game-rigging scandal, spoke to the kids she auditioned, to whom she gave a simple direction: “What happens when the wrong thing happens to you, and justice doesn’t prevail? These kids were very well able to tap into that. You can’t go and get a couple of black kids from Bel Air and have them tap into the same—I don’t believe I would have as much success.”

The challenges of such searches aside, Fedrick said she likes the immediate gut response required, and elicited, by youth casting.

“The great thing about kids is they either have it or they don’t,” she said. “With kids, it’s not easy to find them, but once you find them, they’re either good or they’re not.”

Does she know yea or nay the second they walk in, as some casting directors have claimed is true of many auditions?

“No—but after the first minute of the audition you pretty much know,” she said. “Sometimes you can pull it out of them if it’s not in that first bit.”

Indeed, if even a Polaroid and an autograph from the film’s star isn’t incentive enough to deliver the goods, the kid is probably in the wrong business.