Backstage

And number five is online casting profiles.

You have to make sure that, first of all, you're signed up with all the casting sites to make sure that you're with Actors Access, Casting Networks, Backstage, IMDb.

Everybody should have an IMDb Pro account because that's where the industry goes.

You should have one.

it's not i don't see it a lot but i loved how i felt them as they're talking but i know that it's a phone call yeah but if you talk about supporting cast and then go into that that decision

yeah so i'll mention just the patience because that process of casting was completely different to casting uh harry or ronnie or rose or jimmy in that instance it was just your good old-fashioned casting call on backstage.com and combing through thousands of audition tapes literally we had 10 000 people submit for all the patients and not having the money for a casting director, yours truly was the one coming through all of those for days and days and days.

All the hats, right? All the hats you're switching.

Absolutely.

I am curious because you mentioned, as we're talking about the surreal nature of this job and the way it changes and the things that you probably weren't dealing with years ago that you're dealing with now, I think I saw that you say that for Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, you had an audition in the room, which has become not the norm.

And I do not think there is a more hotly debated topic at Backstage than the self-tape.

And when I say that, I mean that people really don't like it.

They do not enjoy self-tapes.

That

was awesome.

Thanks as always to our brilliant producer, Jamie Muffet, and to the whole team at Backstage, Samantha Sherlock, Mark Stinson, Caitlin Watkins, and of course, Casey Howe.

Visit Backstage.com, and don't forget, you can subscribe to Backstage with code ENVELOPE at checkout for a free trial.

Boom.

Backstage.com pops up.

Perfect.

This is awesome.

In 2020, I had started a treatment, um, about a year prior that was helping me, and I thought maybe it would be time to put myself back out there.

So I joined a casting website called Backstage.

Okay.

Um, where people s- usually if they don't have an agent or a manager, it's a good place for up-and-coming actors, uh, and models to post their headshots, post a performance reel, and apply to jobs.

I had received a message on Backstage from a woman, uh, named Georgette, who is actually in my documentary, um, saying that, uh, she was interested in talking with me about potential acting and modeling gigs that also focus on activism, specifically, um, racial injustice and prison reform.

And at the time, coincidentally, I was doing some, uh, prison reform activism, so I had assumed that was why she was contacting me because it wasn't like it is now where I have a lot of social media followers and, you know, I work in Hollywood.

It was...

I think it might have taken some time, to be honest with you.

I wanna know what the casting breakdowns for some of these roles were.

I w- I wanna know, like, what the, what the Backstage magazine listing was for...

Ooh.

Oh, well that's happening.

[laughs] Um, [laughs] go away.

I, I wanna know what...

When everyone got their, their issue of Backstage that week that they put out for extras, I wanna know exactly was it just calling itself Frankenhooker? Mm.

Did it have a different title? 'Cause Frankenhooker feels like the initial funny name you throw out and then you eventually change, but they just kept it forever.

And it's a great way, especially for actors who aren't represented to try to represent themselves and just see what's out there.

So honestly, I found Backstage fresh out of college because I went to Sam Houston State University.

I got my degree in multi-platform journalism, emphasis in film.

Instead of pursuing a pro career in basketball because I went on a full athletic scholarship, I decided to pretty much pursue film full time.

Once I did that and I really started getting into acting, I had some friends in the acting community out here in Houston when I first started who put me on to different things and Backstage was one of them.

I'm talking to Dakarai Akil.

He is a part of the cast of the new film.

You can do anything.

Um, you're willing to take risks, so of course, I looked into Backstage, and they had auditions for Make a Circus, and we were looking for performers.

Performers-

These are like family circuses-

They wanted the dialogue to be improvised.

So they placed a casting call in Backstage Magazine in June 1996 asking for actors with strong improvisational abilities.

And the informal improvisational audition process narrowed the pool of 2,000 actors that they had.

So they narrowed the way down from the 2,000. so according to heather donahue auditions for the film were held at the musical theater works in new york city and the advert the advertisement said a completely improvised feature film would be shot in a wooded location so she also said that during the audition american sanchez posed her the question you served seven years of a nine-year sentence why should we let you out on parole and she had to respond to that it was that kind of they like they i don't know what her answer was but they were like It wasn't just like, we're going to see what kind of improv you would do if you were walking through the woods.

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That's Captain America.

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That's 30 days of access to thousands of casting notices uploaded daily.

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[upbeat music] I think we do know what people are gonna feel is hot, and that might not be just a visual, it's the whole package.

So when we see it in an actor, we're like, "Okay, we know that this person is gonna meet the requirements of the audience." I do like to toot our own horn that that's something we really get and we're tapped into, and sometimes we see it and not everybody else sees it.