CASTING CALL

by James Lincoln Warren

One of the indispensable skills of an effective story-teller is creating good characters. As with coming up with plots, this is may be regarded as a matter of mixing invention with convention, a blend of novelty and familiarity. I usually “design” a character to fit the circumstances I wish to explore, but I almost never start from whole cloth—one of the things a reader looks for in a character is a sense of recognition, a feeling that I know this guy, but spiced up with enough personal peculiarities to give him the appearance of being unique.

There are many places to shop for the base model—the custom packaging comes later. You can turn to the typical: archetypical, stereotypical, prototypical, etc. Or you can imitate someone real, either a person of your acquaintance or someone you may have encountered at a distance, as through reading. Or you can buy a hybrid—mix in equal parts soft-boiled phantasmagoria and hard- nosed empiricism. A minor character may be defined exclusively by the rôle he has to play in the tale, but a major character has to be better informed to be three dimensional, and offer a more exciting ride. Whatever the case, if you’ve done your work well, you should be able to close your eyes and picture him.

And then comes the Casting Call. Every writer I know plays this game. If they claim they don’t, rest assured that they are lying and that they play it in secret. The game consists of a single question:

Whom would I cast to play my character if his story were made into a movie?

I very rarely come up with what I consider to be definitive answers. For my 18th century detective Alan Treviscoe, I chose British actor Jack Davenport (the son of the famous film and TV actor Nigel Davenport) some years ago, before he appeared in the Disney Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, because I’d seen him in a few Brit costume dramas and he appeared to have the proper combination of verve, intelligence, and style to pull it off.

For Carmine Ferrari, my former NYPD private eye in Beverly Hills, I sort of like Chris Noth, but I can be talked out of it. Custer Malone, his retired Texas Ranger partner, is a much more difficult call—he has to have a shock of wavy white hair over a keenly intelligent face, a hard lean body, and an orator’s rich baritone voice—and be capable of pulling off a genuine Texas twang, something almost all actors get completely wrong unless they are Texans, like Rip Torn, or at a pinch, an Oakie like Ben Johnson. If Larry Hagman were twenty years younger, I could put him in a wig and he would probably do.

But that’s not what I’m here to write about.

I’ve mentioned that I’m starting a novel project. It is still very much in the planning stages, but let me mention two of the characters I’m going to need. The first is a delusional mobster who for his own twisted reasons wants a certain celebrity assassinated. Him, I have a pretty good handle on. The second, though, is the hitman. He’s more problematic.

I always show my stories to new eyes before I submit them, to gauge reactions and to identify flaws, in short, to give me some indication if the tale is yet mature in its telling. But I also turn to certain friends for help on some stories when they are still in development, and there is no one I trust more or turn to more often than Paul Guyot.

He suggested that the assassin be a frustrated actor, as colorful and bent in his own fashion as the mobster is in his. Paul is primarily a TV writer, so one suspects that he may have made the suggestion out of some deep-seated resentment towards idiot thespians. But I think not. It’s a great idea, even though I’m not sure it will work with what I have in mind. But it did give me an idea for a new short story.

For the story to work, I needed to find out, What actually happens in a Hollywood casting call?

Luckily for me, I live in Los Angeles, and one of my friends is a real live casting director. So I asked him if I could tag along and watch him in action. He agreed, and what I saw was utterly fascinating. I’m not going to say more about the prospective short story, but here’s a short description of the casting call.

My friend Jonathan is young, in his mid to late 20s I’d guess, but obviously very competent at his work. The picture he was casting for is a low budget adolescent slasher pic—you know the drill. A group of young people go camping and there’s something evil in the woods. Jonathan told me that this is a particularly rich time to cast such pictures because with business in Hollywood being so depressed right now, a lot of very fine actors are looking for work, any work, and are available for projects they would normally not deign to look at. And so it proved.

The casting call took place in a small room in a highrise out Century City way. There was a small desk with a widescreen 25″ HD monitor set on it and a small HD videocam on a tripod. Lights shined on the opposite wall, just bright enough for the desk and the chairs crowded behind it to be in relative darkness. Jonathan was there with two young assistants and the young director. (The director left after a few readings, trusting Jonathan to separate the wheat from the chaff.) Each time an actor came in to read, one of the assistants would start to record him, first holding up his head shot in front of the camera like a clapboard. Jonathan didn’t watch the actors. He watched the monitor, because he was less interested in what they looked like live than in how they appeared on screen.

When the actors came into the room, Jonathan would ask them if they had any questions about the script. A few of them did, very general questions, usually framed in such a way that it was obvious to me they were seeking assurance that they were interpreting the part correctly, and some not at all, saying with some certainty that they understood the character. Nevertheless, Jonathan would usually tell them, “You’re a retired big city cop now working as the chief of police in a small resort town. All of your officers are young and inexperienced, and you have a sort of paternal relationship with them.”

He wouldn’t say very much more, although there was a lot to say. This is because he wanted to see how deeply the actors had read into the part—obviously, the actors who had the most insight without being told what the rôle was about were better suited. But that wasn’t all. Even when the actors performing the part gave him exactly what he was looking for, he would ask them to change it up—he was seeing if they could take direction and how they reacted, not as actors, but as people. He told me, “The most important thing in my job is not to hire somebody crazy. These people are going to be on location for weeks, living and working together in a high pressure environment without a lot of amenities —and they have to get along.”

There was one line in the script that I found interesting, relating to a cop at the scene of the crime who had just radioed in to PDHQ:

“If he’s smart, he’ll keep his gun at his side.”

Now remember that this is the seasoned old hand talking to a bunch of neophytes. For me, it was obvious that the veteran lawman was circumspectly telling them, “If you’re smart, you’ll keep your gun at your side.”

I said as much to Jonathan, who nodded. “And the first actor who understands that,” he said, “is going to get the part.”

Well, I certainly got what I came for. I was there looking for background data for a story, but because of that morning, I will never play the Casting Call game the same way again.