I didn't ask for the anal probe!...Yesterday I helped cast a 'short' that a friend of mine is doing. Not bad. We had 16 actors show up, and a lot of them had done professional work on movies and TV before. One was in
Joe Somebody, and several others are working in John Ervin's new film (currently in production) called
Proinhibition**, and many other had bit parts in TV and local theater.
(**Ervin did a locally shot Ed Wood/Russ Meyer film called Vixen Highway some time ago).Anyway, the casting went something like this:
First, the location: They rented a room at the
Tapestry Folkdance Center in South Minneapolis. The audition room was a big dance studio with a couple of folding tables set up at one end of the room, surrounded by a daunting amount of empty space and a single folding chair for the actor. Think of the room in Flashdance where Alex had to do her big ballet audition. That was the room, pretty much. I was very tempted to run around the room singing "He's a man-i-ac, MAN-i-ac, and he's dancing like he's never danced before..." But I didn't. They weren't casting for dancing parts, so why squander my talent?
Seated behind the table were Dan, Tom, and Jennifer -- the writer, director, and casting directory, respectively. I was the fourth wheel on the tricycle -- waterboy would be an apt description. I nodded a lot and tried to look important for half of the time, and the rest of the time I spent in the lobby area signing in people and handing out pages to read. THAT was an experience, mostly because of the locale.
In the room next to us, clearly visible through a glass partition, was a family folk dance class. Here, you could see a group of motley, rhythmically-challenged whitebread Minnesotans TRYING (in vain, I might add) to dance to some scherazade type of Arabian folk music. It was pathetic -- a cattle drive would have been more graceful and potentially less dangerous. Meanwhile, I'm sitting next door shaking my head in horror and passing out water to a bunch of gay actors all talking about their previous night's escapades. So, in my field of vision is this horrible, awful Lutheran shaman dance, and all I can hear in the background is some nasally Arabian music and the lurid details of who slept with who in the gay actor community.
Surreal. Fortunately, in this film half of the parts were for women, so there were occasional interludes of hanging out with hot waitress/actress/model types. Sadly, I don't seem to have much in common with them, so I just smiled a lot and pretended I was important. Actually, I wasn't pretending... I was acting... So, ultimately I just handed out water and tried not to look gay or like a folk dancer. I'm not sure how successful I was.
The audition piece was fascinating. Each actor had to read a couple of scenes, and some had prepared monologues. My favorite was a woman who did a scene from
Passionfish. It starts out with "
I never asked for the anal probe..." and it just got better from there. I would have cast her on the spot. Any time you can unabashedly tell a story about alien anal probes, that's pretty much the sign of a good actress. In my book, anyway.
I think they got most of the casting pretty well squared away. I'll try to finagle my way into later parts of the production -- you know, in case they need the continued use of a waterboy.
The new Minnesota 
Not much today. Go make some prank calls with these 
