CASTING CALL | THE PROJECT

March 11, 2016 5:21 PM

Real female actors seeing and reading real casting calls for the first time and being captured on film.
posted by signal (30 comments total)

I agree with the content but not with what they did to that poor typeface.
posted by Senor Cardgage at 5:27 PM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Well that went straight from, "lol what kind of idiot writes this stuff," to, "holy fuck there are shitstains out there who write this stuff and oh right there is a sizable US demographic that supports Donald Trump and what is this liquid coming from my eyes."
posted by cmoj at 5:36 PM on March 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

This made me cry. As I viewed it, the funny slowly ebbed and all I was left with was reality.
posted by Ink-stained wretch at 5:54 PM on March 11, 2016 [6 favorites]

The "no pay, but you get to ride in a limo with midgets", was just the icing on the cake. The writer's version is "no pay, but great exposure", but never have limos and little people been involved.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 5:57 PM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wow, just wow.
posted by Jernau at 6:05 PM on March 11, 2016

I'm from LA..

I live in Oakland now.
posted by Monstrous Moonshine at 6:14 PM on March 11, 2016 [4 favorites]

I need a rage-proof keyboard before I comment further.
posted by zippy at 6:14 PM on March 11, 2016

That was great. I wanted to learn more, and found the Casting Call website. There's nice profiles of all the actresses there.
posted by kanewai at 6:26 PM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Editing-wise, I thought it was kind of odd how the music switched to pitch-perfect Life-Affirming Viral Twist partway through, with no actual change in content. Like I thought suddenly the casting calls were going to start reading "ur inherent human worth is beautiful" and it would turn out each of their birth mothers was behind a curtain the whole time or something but nope...just more egregious misogyny.
posted by threeants at 6:27 PM on March 11, 2016 [14 favorites]

Holy CRAP.

The people who write this shit have mothers. Some of them have sisters.

Christ on a crutch, I want to burn everything down.
posted by suelac at 6:41 PM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Thank you for posting this. Watching it was gut-wrenching. Their intelligent, unapologetic, amazing, often hilarious reactions were the only reason I got through it.
posted by juliplease at 6:44 PM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wow. That was powerful. It's one of those videos where 4-5 minutes just barely scrapes the surface. Between this and the female description in film scripts I'm really happy with how this is being called out and addressed. I cannot even begin to imagine how overwhelmingly shitty it must be for actresses, even the ones who've made it. I remember reading about what Thandie Newton (and countless other actresses) went through during the casting procedures for certain projects and it just makes me want to sit down and cry.
posted by Neronomius at 7:04 PM on March 11, 2016

Can we not use the little person thing as a punchline? They probably have even worse casting calls.
posted by davejh at 7:24 PM on March 11, 2016 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Couple comments removed. I know folks are quoting the source, but "midget" is pretty significantly regarded as a crappy and outmoded term by the folks who actually have any skin the game and it'd be good to skip retreading it for the lulz or so on.
posted by cortex (staff) at 7:28 PM on March 11, 2016 [8 favorites]

odinsdream: " oh right there is a sizable US demographic that supports Donald Trump

That's this video. "

That was quite disturbing and frightening.

Anyone know where a left leaning, sincere yank can meet a nice Swedish or Norwegian woman to marry? I gotta get out of this country.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 8:13 PM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can someone clue me in to what she meant by "performance space is limited?" The actress made that into a big deal and I can't understand why given the context of all the other awful statements.
posted by greermahoney at 9:02 PM on March 11, 2016

The ad apparently read "must be slender build as performance space is limited"... which is bananas.
posted by malphigian at 9:05 PM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Can someone clue me in to what she meant by "performance space is limited?

That was the best joke in the whole script, riffing on medias' obsession with thin women; as though the model's physical size could affect the amount of room in the location. And yes, the reactions it elicted were sadly hilarious. That the actors would actually buy such unmitigated nonsense as possibly being real was the bonus! Gonna watch it again, just for that.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 9:11 PM on March 11, 2016

Oh, I get it now. It was so ridiculously ott, I missed it. Thank you for explaining for the dimwit. :-)
posted by greermahoney at 9:17 PM on March 11, 2016

Uh oh. I initially watched it on the inline video pop-up-window without reading the post. Wanting to get the full effect on my 40" monitor, I rewatched it on Youtube, and discovered that the lines being read weren't parody for effect, as I thought, but taken from actual casting calls. So ... the dimwit here is me.

I was wondering why some of the posters above were so angry, because I thought that the film-makers had made that shit up, as an exercise. Now I understand the rage. Burn it down, indeed.
posted by PareidoliaticBoy at 9:26 PM on March 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Note to Zippy: no such thing as a rage-proof keyboard. They're aerodynamic for a reason.

And whoever writes copy like that deserves searing laser side-eye. That one tear brushed away placemarked the countless tears of women actors who must tolerate dicky thinking and behavior in the acting profession.

One of my relatives left the acting profession because of demeaning, soul-stealing, crap-assery like this. I hope the actors in this video (and the many others not seen here) are, by some act of grace and possibly human evolution on the part of copy writers, able to make their way with dignity and joy.
posted by datawrangler at 9:56 PM on March 11, 2016

I guess I could imagine a performance in a phone box requiring two reasonably svelte actors.

Otherwise, nope: I’m out of ideas.
posted by pharm at 1:54 AM on March 12, 2016 [1 favorite]

I. Just. Can't. Even. being an actor is crappy enough ...

There is a running joke in my house whenever a crime procedural is on TV and there is a lifelike corpse one of us turns to to the other and dryly states "They auditioned for that". Soo depressing.
posted by Faintdreams at 2:44 AM on March 12, 2016

pharm: I guess I could imagine a performance in a phone box requiring two reasonably svelte actors.

Something like Phone Booth (trailer), perhaps.
posted by James Scott-Brown at 4:07 AM on March 12, 2016

I guess I could imagine a performance in a phone box requiring two reasonably svelte actors.

Otherwise, nope: I’m out of ideas.

Perhaps they were literally going to fridge the character.
posted by SometimeNextMonth at 4:48 AM on March 12, 2016 [3 favorites]

I like the one where it said 'the characters's cleavage is her best quality', as if her cleavage had a personality and a sense of humor and opinions and was going to actually act apart from the human attached to the cleavage. I mean, I'm a guy, don't get me wrong, I like me some cleavage, but when I'm looking for a performance from a woman I'm not evaluating the impact of said cleavage on the overall emotional content of the role. Why don't they just get a pair of silicon implants, stick them on a mannequin and have like a PA dressed in all black wheel it around during the entire production?
posted by spicynuts at 8:01 AM on March 12, 2016 [2 favorites]

Watching this go viral has been a bit of wake-up call for me. Because I'm a female actor, and part of me watching these is like "Yeah, they're kinda bad I guess, but pretty normal...". Methinks I've internalized some SHIT.
posted by stray at 9:52 AM on March 12, 2016 [4 favorites]

This is why the Bechdel test exists. Because movies are made by douchebags.
posted by b33j at 4:11 PM on March 12, 2016

A lot of casting directors are women. (certainly more than film directors) I'm not sure if that makes this worse somehow. Of course, it sounds like a lot of these are low budget jobs possibly without legitimate casting directors.
posted by Megafly at 3:21 PM on March 13, 2016

I would rather see the people who wrote the casting calls read them out loud.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:03 PM on March 13, 2016 [1 favorite]