Few show business legends have proved as durable as the Hollywood casting couch, a place of mythic ardors and squalid barters, where producers lie to—and sometimes on—well-upholstered starlets. The casting couch’s democratizing promise was that making it in Hollywood depended less upon who you knew than who you were willing to know.
To the extent that those legends were ever true, casting moved off the couch and out of the dark ages in the 1960s and ’70s. The large corporations that bought up the Hollywood studios made over casting offices in the image of their own human resources departments. Which is to say, by filling them mostly with young, professional women.
“Casting directors are Hollywood’s headhunters,” says Laura Schiff, ’91, who most certainly does not have a couch in her office on the Sony studio lot, where she recently completed her second season as casting director for the CBS drama Close to Home. “We’re HR for actors.”
Given a script, “whether it’s a feature [film] or an episode of a television show, we sit down with the director, the writer and the producers, and we find out what they want. What their intentions were in writing it, what spin they want to give it, what direction they want to go,” Schiff says. “Based on what they tell us they want, we would release a breakdown—a notice for all the agents and actors in town.”
Submissions of résumés and photos flood in from those who feel they’re right for a part. Schiff filters these and schedules auditions: “some for us, and some for the director or producers. You help the director and producers decide who to hire, then you negotiate the deal and do all the paperwork,” including notifying the Screen Actors Guild, so an actor’s work is recorded by the union.
There was no such HR process for someone in Schiff’s position during her senior year at Stanford. “All my friends were interviewing at investment banks and applying to law schools that winter and spring,” she says. “I kept calling people at the studios, trying to line up interviews, and they would act like I was crazy.”
It was only later that Schiff discovered the entertainment industry functions a lot like the docks in the movie On the Waterfront; when a job comes open, it is usually filled the next day. Undaunted, she moved to Los Angeles without a job. “I was in it for the long haul,” she says, “and prepared to be unemployed for quite some time.”
But after only two months, she was offered Hollywood’s ultimate entry-level job: assistant to Roger Corman, the legendary king of the B movies. That year alone, he produced eight low-budget movies, most of them with titles like Killer Instinct, Dance With Death and Dead Space. In the realm of Hollywood HR, Corman, ’47, is famous for having cultivated such young directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard and James Cameron.
Schiff had attended theater camp as a kid, but had no interest in acting. At Stanford, she immersed herself in the nuts and bolts of shows, producing the winter drama and spring musical at Toyon Hall as a freshman. By her junior year, she was head of the Stanford Concert Network, booking acts as various as the Grateful Dead and the Indigo Girls. She lapped up film classes and her adviser, Henry Breitrose, allowed Schiff to sit in on graduate-level documentary classes. He suggested her to Corman.
“I’ve always been very careful to recommend the absolutely best students I encountered to Roger for his brand of on-the-job training, which consists of assigning an immense amount of responsibility and minimal time and budget,” says Breitrose, a professor emeritus of communication. “It takes a special kind of person to survive such rigorous conditions, but I knew that Laura would be successful.”
After nine months as Corman’s assistant, Schiff had developed a keen eye for appraising talent. “Ever since I was a kid, I knew who every actor was, knew what they had been in, and I had very strong opinions,” she says. Corman ran “the kind of company where they would take a shot and let you do something you had never done before. I was 22 years old, and poof, I was a casting director.” Within a few years she was a casting director of acclaimed television shows like Boston Public and The West Wing.
A good casting director figures out what a director wants. The best casting directors recognize that directors don’t always know what they want until they see it. “There are actors you cast in their very first job, and later you see them working regularly,’’ she says. “And there are actors you cast years before they become stars. It’s extremely gratifying to look at somebody with a career and think, ‘I helped do that.’”
Bruce Newman is the movie critic at the San Jose Mercury News.
