The Casting Director

Casting. It’s fun. It’s maddening. It’s tiring.  It’s sort of like doing a puzzle—trying to fit the pieces together. For HATBOXES, we only have seven roles. That should be easy, right?  But besides being able to act, the person has to look right for the part.  The children must be believable as being part of the same family, for example.

So, to help with this task, we employed the skills of a casting director.  But for so few roles, such a short film, why use a casting director, you might ask.

We decided we needed someone with connections to actors and to talent agencies. And so we brought on Anthony White of Anthony White Casting.

Starting his casting career in 2008, Anthony White was first introduced to the casting world working as casting production assistant with Los Angeles based Reality Casting Company, Doron Ofir Casting. He later worked as a casting assistant for both Sharon King Casting and House Casting.  As an independent casting director, Anthony has cast several independent feature, commercials, industrials, music videos, and short films including ads for Lexus, McDonalds, and Cover Girl.

So Anthony pre-auditioned many actors before the director got to see them.  And ultimately that saves a lot of time.  And, because of Anthony’s connections, we were able to cast from a larger pool of actors.

We’re happy that casting decisions have been made and will be announced very soon.

How NOT To Throw a Movie Premiere

A recent evening attending an indie film premiere was a drag of night out, but a valuable object lesson:

1.  Don't present a rough cut as a "premiere."
2.  Especially, don't charge $25 for tickets to the "premiere,"

3.  indicate the event is "formal" (I wore a silk suit and heels, for crying out loud),

4.  and then have the nerve to ask for feeback from your audience of suckers.

5.  Don't serve one-per-customer treats cold to your "platinum" attendees.

6.  Don't advertise the start time as 7 when it's really 8:15.

7.  Don't ignore the screenwriter you hired to clean up your script and give it some shape and heft.

8.  Don't forget to storyboard.

9.  Don't scrimp on your director of photography.
10.  Don't scrimp on your sound team.

11.  If your movie is going to feature "intertwined stories," intertwine the doggone stories.

12.  Don't rely on music to tell your story ("I have something to tell you."  [musical interlude while the two characters walk in the park] "That's a lot to take in.")
OR to pass for transition
OR to tell your audience what to feel
OR to pad your movie's length.
13.  Rack focus sparingly.

14.  Spell-check your credits.

15.  DO NOT write AND produce AND direct.

When the film was over, I said to my date, "I owe you."  She told me I owe her a bad lesbian movie.  "You're a cheap date," I replied. "When I dragged [a certain ex] to see Bertolucci's Sheltering Sky, I came out owing her seven movies."  And at least Sheltering Sky was beautiful to look at.

Susana Darwin

just like the raid on Entebbe

Because Hatboxes is operating on a fairly tight budget, we have to be creative about envisioning and choosing shoot locations.  The Daley Courthouse, for example, charges $3,000 per day just to film inside it, and that doesn't include any of the labor or other fees, so...outside it is.


Daley Plaza, Chicago (© Burmese Tiger Trap)



One scene takes place in a grocery store, and it turns out that the first store we approached is never actually empty—even when it's closed, workers are stocking and rotating the produce.  Another store has agreed to allow us to shoot there, but it has a more boutique layout, which may entail more intensive set dressing, which means more time spent doing that in a compressed window.


The raid on Entebbe comes to mind:  Israeli commandos had a partial replica of the Entebbe Airport to use for drills before their dramatic rescue of 102 hijacked hostages in Uganda in 1976.  Once we confirm where we will be shooting, one way we can speed set dressing would be to create a partial backyard replica of the produce department to design how we want it to look ahead of time—how high to stack the apples, what pricing signage should look like, where to place the extras.


Susana Darwin

"Yadda Yadda Disquisition Talky-Talk," said George Clooney

I would rather read a book on a plane than try to watch a movie cut and bleeped to mid-air PG.  On a recent flight to Las Vegas not only did I catch a basic point about memorable screenwriting, but I witnessed why The Descendants lost the Best Picture Oscar to The Artist.  And that was just glancing up from Tolstoy from time to time, Coltrane on the iPod...but I digress.

In scene after scene, the King family and those around them sit or stand still, just talking—one missed opportunity after another.  Why bore your audience with static visuals (even if that is Hawai'i in the background) when actors can add dimension to their words with actions? Action can contradict the words, emphasize them, work in counterpoint to them.  A variety of activity from subtle to strenuous can add another axis to the film's picture and the sound.

During casting for Hatboxes, a section of "blah-blah-blah" in the script caught our attention. Hearing the reader—the person who utters the other side of conversation while an actor auditions—have to run through several sentences to get to the actor's next line started to sound alarms, especially since the characters are just sitting there talking.  Actually, it's just one person talking at some length.  As I hear her words in my head, she goes from seething to despairing to mortified, and that could be enough, but laying her words over some actions that can punctuate her speech gives us a better shot at success.

Nothing's writ in stone.

Susana Darwin

A Spoon Full of Masochism

After recently watching Faithless, a film Ingmar Bergman wrote and Liv Ullmann directed...

*

...I've been thinking about the telling of painful stories well.  In Faithless, an aging screenwriter conjures a woman to help him tell a layered tale of deception and betrayal between her, her husband, and the husband's best friend.  Ullmann and Bergman made striking choices about which parts of the story the woman narrates while moving from window seat to armchair to guest chair in the screenwriter's seaside study and which parts get staged in Paris and Stockholm and the Swedish countryside.  The appearance of a key prop tells us which of the two men the screenwriter is, and also lets us know that this affair really happened.**


Now, I happen to like movies with Russian-doll plot lines like this.  Carlos Saura's films Carmen and Tango stand out for their intricacy.  My question is why writer-directors like Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen choose to be mean to their characters.  Is it auteurial self-loathing?  Sure, they're gifted filmmakers, but their later films in particular show a disappointment in humanity—a misanthropy—that just begs scoffing and dismissiveness.  The pity is they slime the audience with that misanthropy as thoroughly as their characters. Self-loathing doesn't have to lead to cruelty.  Suicide suggests self-loathing, but David Foster Wallace's contrasting kindness towards his fictional characters and the world leaps to mind.  Wallace could write about vile characters doing despicable things, but never with a whiff of cruelty towards them.


Maybe Faithless could have focused more on the effect of the adults' actions on the woman's daughter, like Fanny and Alexander centered on the children, but the screenwriter in Faithless insists the woman articulate her sin and his.  At least she's allowed to protest the anguish of the recounting and grieve the damage to the girl (thank you, Ullmann?).  By the end, the characters are wrung out, and so is the audience.  What does it take to explore difficult truths in film without requiring the collusion of the viewer's masochism?

Susana Darwin

*http://www.discshop.se/filmer/dvd/trolosa/P29100
**"really" as in within the film and "really" as in in Bergman's real life

No Gong Needed

No gong needed.  No shepherd's crook, no mask-of-gelid-politeness dismissals.  This is yet another great thing about working in Chicago—we saw a dozen talented performers read for roles in Hatboxes in the first set of auditions a couple of evenings ago, and every one had talent.  Sure, some were stronger than others, some were more in their groove, some connected better with the emotional nuances in the script, some took direction particularly well, but not one called to mind Jennifer Tilly as Blanche "Monica" Moran...

or any of the other 36 cringe-inducing also-rans in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

Far from it.

Truth is, auditions are very unglamourous.

                            


But, in very modest surroundings, some interesting performances happen.

And it's helpful for me as writer and director. The auditions were energizing and clarifying.  I saw ways to tighten the Hatboxes script and heard variations in rhythm and timbre that will help tell the story better.  I look forward to the next round.

Susana Darwin

Passover

I’ve studied a half-dozen Passover  haggadahs in the past month ahead of  hosting a “salon seder” last night with a great group of women.  We used the recently published New American Haggadah  (check out the “simultweets”).  The haggadah is the book that  guides the seder ritual, and tell you what, Passover is a marvel of an  all-over-the-place holiday:  we  observe the festival because the  Almighty told us to, but we’re also supposed to tell the story of the mass  escape of the Israelites from Egypt.  The story, the festival table, even the food, are all heavy with  symbolism, but the underlying message is self-determination.  Freedom.

Often everybody attending a Passover seder has a book in hand—the  haggadah—men and women, young and old.  Literacy affords an unparalleled promise of  freedom.

matzah = flight  from Egypt into the desert…the Israelites took off without time even to let  their bread rise; charosset, a  mixture of fruit, nuts, and spices = the mortar the Israelite slaves used  in building for the Egyptians; beitzah (hard-boiled  egg) = mourning the destruction of the Second Temple (and celebrating springtime); maror, here horseradish = the bitter harshness of slavery; z’roa (shankbone) = the  Passover sacrifice and the protection of the firstborn from the last plague; karpas (parsley) dipped in salt water =  the tears of the Hebrew slaves.

The orange is a  late addition to some seder plates:  a rabbi’s wife is alleged to have said that women belong in the  rabbinate like an orange belongs on the seder plate.

We do love our irony.

Four questions tell  us about different types of children, or different types of Jews.  Four  glasses of wine mark the holiness of the occasion, the telling of the  Exodus story, grace after the meal, and the psalms of praise.  A cup of wine welcomes the prophet  Elijah.

An observant Jew might hear the Bible’s telling of Exodus once a year, like  clockwork.  If you’re not so  observant, though, maybe you channel-surf past The Ten Commandments,  but you may be a bit vague on the details (Moses, reed basket…ten  plagues, “Let my people go,” miraculously divided sea…).  The parts of Exodus that get into the haggadah  and then into English translation assume an intimacy with the story that many  celebrants may not have. Like…Did you know that Moses had a speech  impediment?  Did you know that the  first thing the Almighty said to Moses after calling him from the burning bush  was “Take off your shoes”?   Did  you know that four women get named in the Exodus story, and the Jewish people  owes its existence to them all (Miriam, Shiphrah and Puah the midwives, and  Zipporah, the Midianite who married Moses)?

Susana Darwin