Thoughts On Casting

After a long weekend of late nights, we’re nearly done wading through the 1,000+ (and still incoming) headshots and resumes submitted for our upcoming auditions for our 4th Season:Don’t Look Away. Heather, Kelly and I ended up splitting the huge e-stack (we looked over all submissions online for the first time) into thirds after communicating our unique needs of each three plays.

Some take-aways from reading all those resumes:

• A black and white headshot is rarer than ever, but they’re still out there.
• There is a new craze for describing yourself through comparison to three movie stars, i.e. “I combine the offbeat charm of Nick Cage with the unsettling humor of Gene Wilder and the rebellious heat of a young Judd Nelson.”
• People continue to put the name of the space, instead of the name of the producing organization, which can make it trickier to parse their actual history.
• It’s great when people read the casting breakdown carefully and choose roles for themselves that make sense; it’s especially cool when you can tell they’ve read the website/blog and make informed statements about the work we do. Its not always enough, but it does make a difference.
• For the first time, I’m noticing a number of actors who have worked on shows I’ve written that I’ve never seen, which is both weird and cool.
• We have around 120 slots available, meaning we’re going be seeing 10-12% of those 1,000 people who took the time to submit. That really sucks, especially when a resume is not a reliable guide. We’ve taken steps to change the way Flux gets to know artists, primarily through out Flux Sunday workshops, but they simply can’t handle that kind of volume. While it might not be our job to see every single interested actor, there has to be a better way.

We’ll finish sorting though them tonight!