In this new series, the Daily arts department invites campus artists to share their singular experiences as they practice their respective crafts. This week, learn the ins and outs of television casting with show producers and sophomores Miles Donovan and Harry Waksberg (who also writes for the arts section.)
Casting a television show is, in many ways, akin to being castrated with a fishing hook: It is really difficult and painful, and it's probably a good idea to bite down on a bar or something to keep yourself from swallowing your tongue or cussing loud enough for ladies and children can hear. We can reasonably recommend to you that if you ever make a television show, do it like "The Andy Milonakis Show": Cast one personable young man who lives in a Jewish retirement community and call it a day.
Actually, this seems to be a convention on TUTV; they call it the Andy Milonakis Model. One or more people will decide to make a television show (e.g., two people sit in a room and read articles from the Primary Source out loud in silly voices), and if they need more actors, they will ask their friends to come over and bring their silly voices.
We have no friends, which gives us an opportunity to pretend that we have high standards; this drove us to do an open casting call. We put ads on Craigslist.com,
Tuftslife.com and Livejournal.com. We got many responses to these ads, except for the one on Tuftslife.com, which got no responses - presumably because we did not offer $10 for a psychology study.
The primary problem one has with casting a television show is that so few people are talented. Out of the general population, about 5 percent are talented actors, and the figure is even smaller among those interested in acting. If we had known of these startling statistics when we began working on the show, we would have written a show with about 20 very small parts, so that we could cast everyone such that that their screen time would be short enough that the audience could actually enjoy seeing overweight twenty year-olds stammering out some of the cleverest words you'll never hear.
While that seems like a solid solution, it is actually a stupid idea, because the actual process of casting is so excruciating that one eventually never wants to see these people again and relishes the notion of sending them e-mails informing them that they are no longer welcome anywhere around here. At first, one wants to be cordial in these e-mails ("Thank you so much for auditioning ..."), but soon, one realizes that it is so much more fun to be curt, or dourly verbose ("Look, butthead ...").
This system is easiest when casting adults, who one rarely runs into around campus. The ad on Craigslist.com appealed mostly to adults, and we got a pretty substantial turnout of people who could definitely tell us to eat our spinach (which would force us to accuse them of being fascists and then go listen to Black Flag).
These auditions were awkward at best, because few people were interested in the project once they understood the plot (about halfway through reading their audition script): There are several prisoners of war (a fictional war in which America is involved) who are sent to Tufts to work construction during the day and tortured for information at night. If they have not surrendered whatever information they have in six months, they are to be summarily executed. Tufts students side with the prisoners, covertly making their lives easier.
These adults were not comfortable in Donovan's dorm room, which is smaller than the average iPod but contains more illegal music. While we could have used our clout as the directors/writers/producers of the show to make these people believe they would have to fight for our affection (the same strategy works with romantic partners), we elected to be very polite and put them at ease. We offered them sodas even though we had none (they always turned us down). We thought they left happy, then, one at a time, they e-mailed us telling us about all sorts of conflicts that would prevent them from being a part of the show.
Choosing which actors to use was supremely difficult, because the adult parts all require foreign accents, and we forgot to decide where from before the first audition. We asked everyone to do an accent of their choice, and very few were recognizable, but all were Icelandic. It was like Bjork had had a child in Donovan's room and that child had asexually reproduced a dozen times.
Ultimately, you have to learn to compromise on these things. There's no point in holding out for the next Jason Alexander, because you cannot (assuming you are in our exact situation) pay any money at all. You have to judge the actors based on their personal appearance, giving the most attractive the most screen time, the second most second most, etc., until you're down to casting a Jon Lovitz lookalike to be the guy who crosses the street in front of the main characters.
Actually, it could be Jon Lovitz.
