Slate: The Salacious Story of a Hollywood Casting Director

by Rowe, Brian

  She sat down in her office and turned on her laptop.

  Alyson looked like she was in need of busy work. “Ms. Slate?”

  “Please. I told you. Call me Vivien.”

  “Vivien, yes. I had a question. Do we have any casting sessions next week you need me to start setting up?”

  Vivien tried to think. “The director is putting Christmas in Quebec on hold for now, so we don’t need to worry about that. Let’s see. Throes of Death is done. Soraya is, well, no more.” Vivien didn’t bother telling Brandon, Alyson, or anyone else in her social network that she had been fired from Soraya. She didn’t get let go from projects often, but when she did, she figured it best not to tell a soul.

  Alyson didn’t get the answer she wanted. “OK. So what do you want me to do?”

  Vivien smiled and looked at the clock in front of her. “I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to call Brandon.”

  “Your associate?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought he was on vacation this week.”

  “He was. He got in late last night. He’s coming in this afternoon.”

  Alyson started tapping her fingernails against the desk. “You sure? Because I think I can handle everything.”

  Vivien turned to Alyson, who already appeared to be positioning herself as Brandon’s replacement. “With respect, Alyson, Brandon’s been working for me for two years, and you’ve been here a week. Get him on the phone.”

  Alyson’s face turned bright red. “All right. Where’s his number?”

  Vivien took out her cell phone. “That’s right. You wouldn’t have his number, would you?”

  Vivien gave her the number, and Alyson called right away. She pretended it didn’t go through, but Vivien had her try the number again.

  With a sigh, Alyson transferred the call. Vivien closed the door and picked up her phone. “Brandon?”

  “Yeah?” He sounded like death.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you gotten any sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “I slept a little on Wednesday. In the day.”

  Vivien felt guilty, but then pushed that feeling aside to bring upon one of immense joy. His lack of sleep meant only one thing.

  “Brandon. Do you know what time it is?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It’s 11:30,” she said. “You have thirty minutes.”

  “I’m already on my way,” Brandon said, his voice sounding as hoarse as an old man who’d been smoking a pack a day for seventy years.

  She smiled. “Do you have it?”

  “I have it,” Brandon said. “It’s good, V. It’s really fuckin’ good.”

  Vivien hung up the phone, raced past Alyson, and burst through the back door into the empty parking lot.

  The manuscript fell into her hands at 11:45. She read it over a vegetarian sandwich.

  Brandon was right.

  It was perfect.

  ---

  Alyson was writing furiously on her notepad. “So we’re releasing a breakdown later today?”

  “Yes,” Vivien said. “That’s right.”

  “What’s a breakdown, again?”

  “You still haven’t learned?”

  “You still haven’t told me.”

  Vivien scooted back into her chair. “OK. Take this down. I’m only saying it once.”

  “Absolutely. Go ahead.”

  “OK. So when we get a new film project, we obviously need to find actors for all the speaking roles, from the lead role to the one-liner. Some scripts I work on have five or fewer characters. Those are easy, sometimes so easy I don’t even need to use a breakdown. But most movies I work on have at least fifteen to twenty roles, sometimes as many as fifty. I worked on a movie once in 1996 that had over eighty speaking roles. Let’s just say I didn’t sleep much that summer.”

  “Eighty? My God.”

  “I know. So when there’s a ton of roles to fill, we casting directors need a bit of help. That’s where Breakdown Services comes in. I’ve been using it since my first day in casting, and I honestly don’t know what I’d do without it.”

  Alyson uncrossed her legs and dipped her head lower so that she could write even faster on her ugly yellow notepad.

  “And so,” Vivien continued, “one of the writers at this service puts together a list of every character in the script, their age, their traits, and usually a sentence or two about who that character is.”

  “OK. I see. Then what?”

  Vivien smashed her hands together as if she had something interesting she was playing with between them. “And then, once I approve everything, the list is released to agents and managers, usually in both L.A. and New York, and they will then send to me the actors they represent who they believe is right for each role.”

  Alyson nodded but looked confused.

  “So, for example,” Vivien said, “say the lead of our newest project is a sixty-year-old bald guy. Agents from all over L.A. will see this breakdown and send to me electronic pictures of the actors they represent who are in their sixties and bald. They won’t send me kids, women, or actors with hair, because they know those actors will never be seen. Make sense?”

  “OK, yeah,” Alyson said with a smile. “This sounds like fun!”

  “It is. Problem is, with so many agents and managers out there today, I get, on average, 500 submissions for each role I put out, so there’s a lot of crap to wade through.”

  “500? Wow. How do you have time to look at every headshot?”

  “It takes forever, but it has to be done. A big part of casting is making sure no choices for myself or the director get left behind. You really do need to look at every headshot. And if you want to get involved with casting, you need to learn that there are no hours in casting. You have to do the work. All of it. No matter how long it takes.”

  Alyson clicked her pen. “Good to know. Is that all?”

  “That’s the whole chicken caboodle.”

  Alyson turned back to her laptop, just as Brandon walked in after having spent at least ten minutes in the bathroom.

  “Did you fall in?” Vivien asked.

  “If you want to know,” Brandon said, “I’ve been sitting in a chair for four days straight. I just took my first shit since Sunday.”

  Vivien looked over at Alyson. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  Alyson turned to Brandon. “Why have you been sitting in a chair for four days? I thought you were on vacation.”

  Vivien and Brandon looked at each other with panic and awkwardly laughed at the same time.

  “He just means he did too much basking in the sun while he was in Hawaii, right, Brandon?”

  “Yeah,” he lied. “Yeah, I just did a lot of reading.”

  “Sounds boring,” Alyson chipped in. “You know, you don’t look very tan.”

  Why didn’t I just tell the intern he was out sick, Vivien thought. Too late now.

  Vivien needed to change the subject quickly. She approached Alyson with some tasks. “OK, so I need you to go through the saved messages and write them all down for me.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Vivien looked down at the phone to see that there were forty-six saved messages to listen to. She figured that would keep the little runt busy for a while.

  She glanced back at Brandon, who looked ready to keel over and die. But even in his lethargy, she could see an excitement rising inside of him that she had never seen in two years of their close relationship.

  All right, mister. Let’s get to work.

  ---

  Vivien had been casting for much of her adult life, but she had never been so anticipatory of a project as she was for The Men.

  The screenplay that Brandon had written was a tour-de-force of comedy and tragedy, concerning the lives of five attractive but dissimilar brothers who re-unite after many years apart when their overly adventurous father accidentally kills himself
in a boating accident.

  Each of the five characters had specific traits that tantalized Vivien with the possibilities. The twenty-one-year-old was a blonde surfer, which meant she’d be bringing in actors who were ripped and tan. The forty-year-old, who promised actors closer to Vivien’s age, was a fisherman living in England who sported both a beard, a bad attitude, and a British accent.

  The only quality that Vivien felt questionable was in the twenty-five-year-old, a character who had suffered a bad fall as a kid and now had a life-long scar on his chin. She thought she had made it clear to Brandon that she wanted only hotties to audition, not sad-looking amateurs with facial imperfections. But then Brandon reminded Vivien about movie magic—the scar could be added later.

  Most surprising to Vivien was the strength of the story. There was a lot of humor in the first half, when all five of the estranged brothers meet up for a long weekend that begins with an informal wedding. All of their idiosyncrasies led to many funny dialogue exchanges that brought more and more out of each character. The piece started to get more serious, however, in the final act, when the funeral arrives, and the boys have to resolve their differences and work to become a family again. The script was one of the better reads she had experienced in the last few years, and her associate had written it in four days.

  She looked at Brandon, who was hunched over in his computer chair staring at his laptop. His eyes were bright red, and his facial hair was as unkempt as ever. Vivien had always thought of Brandon as a mildly attractive young man, but he didn’t look good now.

  “Brandon?”

  He didn’t hear her. He started typing something on his keyboard with one finger at a time. He looked like he was going to fall down to the floor and take his laptop with him.

  “Brandon! Hey!”

  She snapped his fingers at him.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You need some coffee or something?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Brandon, come in here.”

  He stood up with embarrassing slowness and stumbled into his desk before making his way into Vivien’s office. He plopped himself down in the chair opposite her with the coordination of a blind trapeze artist.

  “Are you OK?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Tired?”

  “Uhh, yeah.”

  “OK, Brandon. Here’s the deal. Your script is great. It’s better than I expected by a long shot. I’m so impressed right now I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Thank you, V. That means… that means…”

  “Brandon? BRANDON!”

  Vivien watched in horror as Brandon fell to the floor unconscious.

  -26-

  Alyson was slapping Brandon in the face with more force than she needed to when he woke up a minute later. Vivien was standing over the two of them with a moderately concerned look.

  “I think he’s coming to,” Alyson said.

  Brandon opened his eyes wide and looked all around the room. “Did I fall asleep again?”

  “Has this been a regular thing for you?” Vivien asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Last night I kept falling asleep at my desk and waking up with drool all over my keyboard.”

  “At your keyboard?” Alyson asked, confused. “I thought—”

  “Alyson, get him some coffee,” Vivien interrupted.

  “OK.” She walked out of the room, leaving Brandon to sway back and forth on his own.

  “I think I need to go home,” Brandon said.

  She helped him back down to his desk. He was looking more and more like one of George Romero’s zombies.

  “I’m gonna let you go home in a second, but first, I need you to release the breakdown of our movie.”

  “I don’t know if I can.”

  Vivien looked over to see Alyson walking back in with the coffee.

  “Where do you want me to put it?” she asked.

  Vivien looked down at Brandon, and then back at Alyson. “Come over here.”

  She took a few steps closer.

  “Throw it at him,” Vivien said.

  “What?” Alyson asked.

  “What?” Brandon repeated.

  “Do it.”

  Alyson didn’t take a second more to think. She flung the contents of the cup right into Brandon’s face.

  “OHHHHHH FUUUUUUUUUUCK!”

  He jumped up and screamed at the top of his lungs, knocking his desk lamp to the floor.

  “What the motherfucking fuck fuck shit of a whore!”

  Vivien patted him on the back. “You awake now?”

  He put his hands over his face and started rubbing his fingers through his grimy, unwashed hair.

  She kept patting him. “Come on, Brandon. I need you now.”

  He glared at Vivien with more coldness than ever before. “Where’s my check?”

  “I’ll give it to you in a moment, sweetheart. I just need you to release the breakdown.”

  Brandon pointed at Alyson. “Why can’t you just have her do it?”

  “She will. In time. But this one’s important. I need you to do this one.”

  Alyson sat down at her desk and clicked her pen a little on the loud side.

  Brandon sighed and logged onto the Breakdown Services web site.

  “That’s my boy,” Vivien said. “Alyson, please take your lunch break now.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “One hour. Go.”

  “I said I’m fine.”

  “GO!”

  Alyson grabbed her bag and walked out of the office, some attitude in her step as she made her way down the hallway.

  “OK,” Brandon said. “Let’s go through this.”

  “OK,” Vivien said.

  “The title. Should we still call it The Men?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I wrote some women into it. Did you see that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re just gonna hold casting sessions for the five guys.”

  “OK. Who’s the director?”

  Vivien crossed her arms. “Shit, I didn’t think of that.”

  “Yeah. Kind of important.”

  “I think we should just make up a name. What do you think? A director doesn’t need to exist when we actually hold the auditions. I mean I’ll be pre-reading everyone, anyway. By the time the agents demand callbacks with the director, I will have pulled the plug on the project.”

  “I know what we should do,” Brandon said. “I think we should say it’s me.”

  Vivien knew the kid wanted to be both a writer and a director, but she shook her head.

  “No,” Vivien said. “And I’m sorry but we can’t list you as the writer, either.”

  Brandon’s mouth dropped open and he jumped up from his chair. “WAIT, WHAT!”

  “You’re my associate, Brandon! You can’t be the writer of the script and be my associate! That’s a conflict of interest!”

  “Conflict of interest? You want to talk about a conflict of interest, V? You’re making the entire town believe in a movie that doesn’t exist!”

  “Like I don’t know that?”

  “V, here’s the deal.” Brandon turned back to his computer screen. “You don’t want to say I’m the director? Fine. But if you won’t give me credit for the script that I wrote, that I just put my sweat and blood into for the last four days, then my work here is done.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. You’ll have your shot someday, Brandon. Just not now, OK?”

  Brandon didn’t respond. He grabbed his laptop and started walking out of the office.

  Vivien couldn’t believe the balls on this kid. She never thought he actually had any. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Good luck, V! Good luck with everything!”

  Vivien closed her eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, fine. I’ll give you the writing credit. But I have to take your name off as associate. I im
agine most of these agents don’t know your last name, so I think we can get away with it.”

  “Sounds fine by me.” Brandon was back in his chair before she took another breath.

  “All right,” he said lightly, as if their little tiff hadn’t taken place, “who should we say the director is?”

  Vivien bit down on her lower lip. “Well, we have to make up a name. If we put down someone real, then that person’s agent’s gonna hunt us down and call us out for the frauds that we are.”

  “So not Spielberg.”

  “No. Don’t put Spielberg.”

  “Let’s go with something generic,” Brandon said. “How about David Smith?”

  “Perfect. Dull as ever. Nobody will ask who he is.”

  “OK. Who’s the producer?”

  She paused, and then smiled. “Put me,” she said.

  “You?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  Vivien always had vague aspirations of producing. Now was the time to throw her name out there.

  Brandon wrote down her name. He looked over the list of everything he needed.

  “OK, just a couple more things. What’s the budget?”

  Vivien started making crazy faces as if she were a clown at a child’s birthday party. “Hmmm…”

  “Five million?”

  “No. We need everyone to take this seriously. Let’s say ten million.”

  “OK,” Brandon said. “Start date?”

  “Winter.”

  “More specific?”

  “January.”

  “And where’s the shoot gonna be?”

  “I feel like I’m taking a test.” Vivien got down on her knees and looked at Brandon’s laptop. “Let’s say Alaska.”

  “Alaska?”

  “Yeah. It seems appropriate for this story, no?”

  “It does, actually.”

  “Remember, Brandon. We’re not actually filming the movie. We could put down China if we wanted. But that would just raise more questions.”

  Brandon typed the final letters and looked at his e-mail. “Do you want to take a look at this before I send it off?”

  He stood up and let Vivien sit down in his chair. She read through the e-mail. She felt dirty, looking all the lies on the screen. “Looks good.”