Casting may be the most "human" part of any television or filmmaking process: Individual actors meet with directors, casting directors, and producers in offices, without sets or lights or editing bays or completion-bond companies in the picture. And they're not mere job interviews but considerations of the human dimension of a film or TV project--its walk, its talk, its waistline.
How well, then, might this essentially human process play in cyberspace? Can the click of a mouse replace the imperceptible click that happens between artists in a casting room? Increasingly, the casting and agenting industry which matches talent with roles is being asked to consider its future in terms of ISDNs, search engines, and page views. At least two competing on-line services are currently up and running, offering casting directors searchable databases of agencies' client rosters, providing agents the daily casting "breakdowns" of available roles, and giving actors the chance to submit themselves and get "sides" (script excerpts for auditions) faxed to them through an on-line service provider.
In an exclusive Back Stage West/ Drama-Logue poll of casting directors and agents, they say they're using these on-line services, however skeptically or grudgingly. Of the casting directors polled, 84 percent said they are on the Internet at their workplace, and these computer-savvy c.d.s estimated on average that they're doing 19 percent of their casting business there. Agents, only 78 percent of whom are on the Internet, nevertheless said they're doing slightly more of their business on the Internet, 23 percent.
Most of those polled foresee the future of their business on the Internet as inevitable, estimating on average that the changeover is a little more than two years away. Forty-four percent of those polled agreed that on-line casting promises to streamline their jobs, while a total of 15 percent--most of them casting directors, incidentally--complained that it only promises to make their job more complicated.
A Catch-22
To understand how computers may or may not change the landscape of casting, consider the present lay of the land. Currently, casting directors release a list of roles not already packaged or pre-cast to services which then distribute the information to talent reps. The industry leader, and de facto monopoly on this service for the past 27 years, is Breakdown Services, Ltd., which delivers around 100 theatrical and commercial breakdowns daily by messenger, and now over the Internet, as well, to agents, who pay $42 a week for the information.
Agents then submit clients' photos and resumes by mail or messenger, and follow up with pitch calls trying to land their clients auditions or meetings. Even at its fastest, this protocol can take a full business day or three--and that's before the auditions, callbacks, and negotiations (not to mention the agent's 10 percent). And by week's end, the stacks of submitted photos and resumés can number in the tens of thousands.
At their hypothetical best, on-line casting services like Castnet and the Link can speed up that process to mere minutes: A casting director could release a breakdown on-line in seconds and an agent could almost immediately respond with electronic submissions of headshots and resumes. The agent could still make his usual follow-up phone pitch to a casting director, who could call up and view the submission as they speak. Theoretically such a system would save not only time but paperwork and money.
In fact, it is already doing that for some casting directors.
"I've done last-minute jobs and specifically asked agents to submit through" an on-line casting service, said the busy commercial casting director Sheila Manning. "I just this second got a breakdown filled with very strange parts--skateboarders, surfers, hippie females--that I need to cast tomorrow, with pictures. How else am I going to get that in time?"
But Manning lamented that "not enough agents are on the service." This is echoed on the other side by agents, who lament that not enough casting directors currently receive electronic submission.
"We're in a little Catch-22 right now," explained Karen Stuart, Executive Director of the Association of Talent Agents. "A lot of casting directors and agents are upgrading their equipment and learning the Internet, but the casting directors are saying there aren't enough agents on the other end, and my members are saying there are not enough casting directors looking at it. But our stand on that is: Each added participant adds to the value for everyone else."
"It's kind of a stand-off," agreed Alicia Ruskin, an agent with Kazarian-Spencer & Associates. "'As soon as you get more of your actors on, we'll start using it,' 'Well, as soon as you start using it more '"
But with their access to the work and power over hiring, casting directors are in many ways the key to any change in this process. As ATA chief Karen Stuart admitted, "We could sign up every client at every agency, and if there's nobody on the receiving end, it's worthless."
So whatever system of distribution and delivery casting directors favor is likely to dominate. For the moment, most still prefer to look at black-and-white headshots.
"I use computers for basic things, like list-making. I don't love 'em," said Rick Millikan, who casts The X-Files and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch. "My assistants have [an on-line casting system], but I feel like by the time they've turned it on and I've gone through it with them, I could have been through a stack of pictures."
On the other hand, said Millikan, "I'm sure 10 years from now, I'll look back and say, 'I can't believe we ever had headshots.'"
For his part, casting director Marc Hirschfeld of Liberman/Hirschfeld Casting (Seinfeld, Third Rock From the Sun, That '70s Show, and From the Earth to the Moon) is already sold on the potential of on-line casting and is upgrading his equipment so all the computers at Liberman/ Hirschfeld have Internet access.
"It will make it easier to sort submissions, then print out the ones you want," Hirschfeld said. "Actors are still going to need pictures and resumes, and we'll request they bring the hard copy to the audition. But to submit electronically will save tons of money in messenger services and postage, and an enormous amount of money for actors who keep having to print up headshots."
Business Models
While some have taken sides in the competition between Castnet and the Link, most casting directors and agents are in a wait-and-see mode, looking at both services to see which they like best--and to see where the chips fall.
The Link, with its nearly exclusive access to the casting breakdowns and its impressive roster of talent from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' venerable Players Directory, would seem to have the leading edge in the market. But Castnet, a division of the Entertainment Internet, Inc. founded by Jay Sloatman and Kathryn Thyne, is aggressively marketing itself as the on-line standard for the dawning age of computer casting.
The services are superficially similar: Both allow agents to submit headshots and resumes electronically and to update clients' resumes on-line any time a new credit is added, and both allow casting directors to do talent searches of the entire database, which can be especially helpful to find actors with special skills and backgrounds.
But the business models are different: The Link is bankrolled by the nonprofit Academy and funded in part by actors' annual $75 annual Players Directory placement fee, while agents gain access to the Link through their Breakdown Services subscription. Meanwhile, Castnet is entirely funded by its actor members, who now pay $150 a year to be placed on the site, and for various other actor-friendly on-line services like faxing of sides and agent submission templates.
To market its fledgling service to the industry, Castnet has been generous with ISDN lines, computer training, and tech support to casting offices and agencies, and it holds regular seminars to introduce actors to the service. Still, of its purported 36,000-actor on-line directory, only 10,000 are paid-up members, and most were "front-loaded" gratis from agencies' rosters.
"It's an education process," admitted Castnet President Richard Horgan. "There are sort of the 'Level A' people, the casting directors and actors who are joined at the hip to their computers--they get it, and we have them on board."
Said Players Directory Editor Keith Gonzalez, "The problem has been convincing casting directors of the speed of viewing submissions on the service. We're not there yet. But the system is functional and ready when the technology improves."
And the industry is keeping abreast of developments, with the casting departments at studios like Disney and Warner Bros. fully on-line and testing out both services. Independent casting directors, too, are learning. Karen Vice, who cast Cybill and is currently casting the animated Fox series Family Guy, is already an Internet convert, but while she's giving the on-line casting services a try, she's withholding judgment.
"We find the Internet invaluable--we literally couldn't live without it," Vice said, adding that she uses it mostly to gather text-based information--of which she then typically prints out a hard copy. "In fact, we find the Internet more valuable as that kind of service than these electronic breakdown services. People just aren't using them. I don't know that most agents ever will. It's such a personal, talking-on-the-phone business."
For his part, Bob Preston, an agent at the mid-sized commercial agency Cunningham Escott & Dipene, is willing to ply his trade on-line--when the dust settles.
"All agencies will have to be on the same system, have the same kind of process, for it to work," said Preston. "Now there are these different companies, and they've each grabbed their own little section of the industry--these casting directors look at this system, these agents submit through that one. That doesn't work in general for the whole, and it's not going to do any good."
Like all technological revolutions, generational issues may play into this equation. It's not just that offices with younger, more computer-savvy employees are more likely to be on-line and exploring their options--it's a fact of life that, as agent Bob Preston said, "We have little kids today who live on the computer--that's the world they live in."
Indeed, the children now surfing the Net may one day remake Hollywood in their own JPEG image. But the changeover may come sooner than that. Said Thom Mount, Producers Guild president and the new co-chairman of Castnet's parent company, "There's a generational bias, as there is with everything on the Internet. But we find that the assistants to the casting directors are much more computer-literate, much less afraid of the Internet, and as time goes on, the casting directors who won't touch a computer themselves will say to their assistants, 'OK, if you can get that information for me that way, fine.'"
Today's assistants are tomorrow's casting directors and agents, of course. It's just a question of when exactly that tomorrow will come, and what it will bring.