UNDERSTANDING CASTING PROCEDURES
Before we get into increasing the audition rate, let's unpack the steps that occur when television breakdowns are published and auditions are scheduled. We'll say this scenario deals with a Co-Star having two pages of sides for a role on a union television show that is currently shooting in Los Angeles. We'll exclude shows that are shooting far in the future or far out of town because, quite frankly, there are more than enough roles casting in Los Angeles for any one actor.
BREAKDOWN PUBLICATION
The initial stage of the casting process follows roughly these six steps:
1. The casting office receives a script from the production.
2. The casting office sends the script to Breakdown Services whose staff reads the script, extracts the role descriptions and sends the list of roles back to casting.
3. The casting office has a discussion with the producers about what billing is associate with each role and what ages and ethnicities will be considered.
4. The casting office annotates the breakdowns with the salary, billing, and other specific requirements of the role (which might include broadening "Any Gender" or narrowing "Diverse Only") and publishes the breakdown at 4:00 p.m.
5. By 4:20 p.m., each role on the breakdown has 1000 candidates submitted by agents and managers. For Caucasian females (the “hard category”) aged 25-35, you can triple the number of submissions (ie. 3000 submissions instead of 1000).
6. For the role we're tracking here, the casting office plans review the 1000 submissions, solicit 30 tapes (that’s 3% for most talent and 1% for the “hard category”) from candidates from which 1-3 candidates will be sent on to the directors/producers for consideration for booking. At 4:30 p.m. the associate(s) and assistant(s) start reviewing the submissions and by 6 p.m. the auditions are sent to agents and managers. There are a variety of ways that auditions can be requested, but we'll assume that the casting office is using the "most efficient" method of scheduling which is utilizing the integrated features of Actor's Access (Eco-Cast).
AGENCY SUBMISSIONS REVIEW
For each individual role on the breakdown, the casting system (Breakdown Express) allows the casting assistant perform the following steps:
1. The initial view of agency submissions is an unsorted thumbnail grid (randomized, apparently, but possibly submissions with video grouped at the top). The thumbnails are the same size as the thumbnails that you see when you look at your own headshots in Actor’s Access.
2. Each face in the grid is an actor headshot thumbnail which has been selected by the talent rep as most appropriate for the role in question. You can see how this works when you do self-submits on Actor's Access: you will be allowed to select one primary photo; this primary photo appears in the master grid; no other images of you are visible without deeper inspection. If you are submitted by two talent firms with two different photos you will appear twice in the grid.
Under each thumbnail is a one-click button to RESUME, PHOTOS, VIDEOS, SLATES. Beneath those buttons are the ranking buttons #1-6. Below that is the name of the agency submitting. Below that, IN RED, is the pitch note (tweet) for the actor.
2. Under each face in the large grid is room for 40 characters (1/3 of a tweet) for a pitch for that role/actor. This tweet can be expanded into the full pitch which is 2000 characters (a page or so) with absolutely no formatting (bold, underline, links). The pitch is plain text. So the best part of the pitch needs to fit into the first 40 characters.
3. Between the agency name, pitch tweet and the thumbnail headshot is a row of six "ranking" buttons which allow the casting office to rank the desirability of the talent for that one role. During ranking, the resume and clips are available from any thumbnail headshot from a popup (additional mouse clicks). They will only see the resume / video clips if they "look deeper". They will only look deeper if the primary submission materials (thumbnail headshot/pitch) elicit further inspection.
4. After ranking (or excluding which is also a form of ranking) the actors, the casting office can automatically send out casting notices (auditions) to every talent in "Group 1" or every talent in "Group 1 & 2". Groups 3, 4, 5 and 6 remain in the system so that if the casting call for "Group 1" does not yield a candidate, a second session can be created for the talent in "Group 2” and so forth,
SO QUITE OBVIOUSLY, IF YOU WANT MORE AUDITIONS IT BECOMES NECESSARY TO GAIN “GROUP #1" RANKING ON MORE SUBMISSIONS.
SO THAT'S THE SITUATION DESCRIBED IN FACTOIDS
Before we get to the proposed solution, let's take time to deal with some actor fantasies:
FANTASY 1 - "If the casting office likes the talent, they will give the clients auditions even if they are not specific to the role". This is sometimes true, but the situations are so rare that it's not a meaningful contribution to the overall question "How do I get more auditions?" In fact, I have specific email responses that casting have sent to me in response to actor pitches that spell this out in no uncertain terms. Example wording: "We love them but they're not right for this."
FANTASY 2 - "If the casting office likes the agency/manager, they will give the clients auditions even if they are not specific to the role." As far as I can tell from observing the auditions from a wide range of agencies, this is simply not true.
FANTASY 3 - "If the casting office could only see my audition, they would know that I am a good choice for the role." This statement, I believe, in fact could be true under certain circumstances; however, given the amount of time that exists between when the breakdown is published and when the auditions are scheduled, it simply is not practical to approach casting with this kind of workflow. For large supporting roles on feature films which are in a 6 month casting cycle, this might actually be a viable solution. But it is not relevant for the role we are studying which is a Co-Star on a TV production that is casting this week to shoot next week. For smaller roles they don’t really want to watch a lot of extra tapes. They want to watch 30 (100 in 2024) of them. Extra tapes are extra work that consume extra time. Everyone, including you, has budgetary requirements for time management. Why would you expect casting offices to be any different?
SPECIFICITY AND COMPETITION
If you're following this little story without any confusion it should be immediately apparent that the goal of all talent with respect to television episodic casting is to get into the "Ranked #1" group for an appropriate breakdown. In general, I do not submit my clients for roles that they are not well-suited for. I do this so that the casting office knows that I am paying attention to their concerns and not just "throwing spaghetti against the wall" to use a colorful analogy. However, CONVERSELY, we should assume that some other agents and managers are not addressing the specificity of the role and that the pool of 1000 actors actually contains a large number of candidates that "are not well-suited for the role".
I have said in the past and I'll say it again here, at this stage of casting, there are only two things that matter: “YOUR LOOK" and “YOUR CREDITS". In fact, we can write a generalized theory about these casting activities here:
"The actors with the APPROPRIATE LOOK are ranked from strongest to weakest credits; the talent with the best credits will be ranked #1 and the rest of the candidates will be ranked according to their credits."
Unfortunately, with credits we're dealing with a chicken and egg syndrome: "How do you get more credits when you need more credits to get more credits?"
The answer is VERY SIMPLE. The pure fact of the matter is that for many casting scenarios, "THE LOOK" is actually more important than the credits.
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