Casting By, directed by Tom Donahue is a tribute to casting pioneer, Marian Dougherty (1923-2011) who changed the way ‘casting’ was perceived - giving kudos to the 'casting director’ in film and TV. Dougherty was considered an iconoclast of her time, influential in the move from old Hollywood studio (1920s-1940s) to ‘gut instinct’ creative casting of the ‘50s.
This is how it worked - each studio had a large number of actors on contract who were assigned to whatever films were being made at the time by that studio. Such casting was made more efficient by placing an actor in similar character roles, especially if an actor was particularly well received in that role by the audience. “Hollywood had no idea about casting” Dougherty tells us in the film, “they’d look through the list and pick from A or B, whoever made a good film, because type was money – they’d use in film after film, the same ‘pin-up girl’, femme fatale… they used what people looked like physically to define the characters, they sought movie stars not actors.”
Casting By, directed by Tom Donahue is a tribute to casting pioneer, Marian Dougherty (1923-2011) who changed the way ‘casting’ was perceived - giving kudos to the 'casting director’ in film and TV. Dougherty was considered an iconoclast of her time, influential in the move from old Hollywood studio (1920s-1940s) to ‘gut instinct’ creative casting of the ‘50s.
This is how it worked - each studio had a large number of actors on contract who were assigned to whatever films were being made at the time by that studio. Such casting was made more efficient by placing an actor in similar character roles, especially if an actor was particularly well received in that role by the audience. “Hollywood had no idea about casting” Dougherty tells us in the film, “they’d look through the list and pick from A or B, whoever made a good film, because type was money – they’d use in film after film, the same ‘pin-up girl’, femme fatale… they used what people looked like physically to define the characters, they sought movie stars not actors.”
But then, the studio system, with all its glamour collapsed, people wanted something different. By the ‘60s, most of the contract players were dropped, which changed the whole dynamic of the business. Now that the studio didn’t provide a casting director, suddenly there was an opening for a profession. An aspiring actress herself, Dougherty got a taste for acting in college but was quick to find out that acting jobs were hard to come by. In 1947 she moved to New York, for work she designed the windows at Bergdorf Goodman. By the late ‘40s television was just getting started and a friend, who at the time was the casting director at NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre, hired her as an assistant - four months later, she was running the show.
Under Dougherty’s guidance a new kind of casting director emerged out of New York and transformed Hollywood. These New York actors were trained and “displayed an inner being of emotional truth”. She continued casting talent for shows, notably Naked City and Route 66, then set up her own agency Marian Dougherty Associates where she mentored some of today’s top female industry agents. Juliet Taylor - best known as the casting director for more than 30 Woody Allen films – said, “Marian would say to directors, ‘I will bring in three to four actors, they all will be very different, but they all could play the role”.
“Dougherty pioneered a shift to choices based not on looks or cookie-cutter persona but on the ability to create a character”, says film critic David Rooney and she took this approach to Hollywood. Starting as casting director at Paramount Pictures, then vice president of casting at Warner Bros., she was responsible for over 100 films over a 30-year career. Thanks to her, 2,500 actors would get their big break.
From The Owl and the Pussycat (1971) to modern day Batman and the Lethal Weapon series, Casting By includes all the great stories about how some of today’s biggest actors came to be. James Dean, Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate) and Jon Voight (Midnight Cowboy) were of the first actors she cast. Then unknowns – Robert Redford, Christopher Walken, Glenn Close and Al Pacino – were picked up off the street or scouted at the theatre. With these character actors she brought a culture to the screen – they weren’t by type, or in anyway superficial. She raised the bar in her profession and set a standard for a certain quality.
“More than 90% of directing the picture is the right casting, the casting person is the main collaborator, they’re in on the creative vision” director Martin Scorsese will let you know, and yet, as filmmaker Donahue points out, acknowledgement to casting and casting directors has been overlooked. Lending weight to the case, directors Oliver Stone, Allen and Scorsese talk about a common misperception and underestimation of what casting directors do. To this day, casting is the only main title credit without an Oscar category.
In 1999, Dougherty was replaced at Warner Bros. and funnily enough just at a time when there was much talk about the changing face of Hollywood. In my humble opinion, and especially in relation to the Hollywood Blockbuster, casting seems to have taken a U-turn and for the worse. I came across an interesting article on Polygon’s Culture when I was researching for this piece - ‘How does a ‘terrible’ movie make $300 million in three days?’ the title read. It was about Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014), the fourth in the series of films. The critic talks about it being one of the biggest hits of the year and yet one of the worst reviewed. The first two Transformer films, Megan Fox played the lead and the third, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley did. Don’t get me wrong, both are total babes that goes without saying but seriously, lead in a film? Not surprising, Huntington’s reviews weren’t so great, and I don’t say that in a nasty way, but it’s just, well, she’s a Victoria’s Secret model not an actress.
It’s two thumbs up from me for Casting By; Marian Dougherty will always be remembered for the quality she brought to the screen and some of today’s oldest yet brightest stars will forever be thankful to her for the work she did. Donahue has done a nice job documenting the evolution of ‘casting’ over a significant 50-year history.
11/02/201510:40am
27/02/201509:55am