Movie pays tribute to casting directors
A salute to the undervalued efforts of casting directors, Tom Donahue’s new HBO documentary Casting By celebrates the gutsy, eagle-eyed iconoclasts whose intuition defied old Hollywood typecasting and gave rise to the age of the unconventional movie star.
Skirting the seedier side of the audition process, the film instead throws the spotlight on Marion Dougherty, a trailblazing New York casting director who carved out her own niche in the industry while jumpstarting the careers of acting legends such as Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Glenn Close, Robert Duvall, Jon Voight and Robert Redford, all of whom appear in the film to reminisce about the woman who gave them some of their earliest breaks. Dougherty, who died in 2011, remains feisty and insightful in Donahue’s interviews, pouring over mountains of faded headshots with an expression usually reserved for proud mothers.
A would-be actress who fell into her profession nearly by accident, Dougherty began her career on NBC’s Kraft productions, where she used her theater-honed instincts to spot the seeds of greatness in everyone from James Dean to Warren Beatty. One of the movie’s funniest moments comes from a Kraft Television Theatre outtake showing Beatty shamelessly imitating Marlon Brando’s mush-mouthed delivery before Dougherty convinces the future Bonnie and Clyde star to try enunciating instead.
Before long, renowned filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen were knocking on her door, depending on the matronly maven to supply their new projects with the city’s most talented up-and-comers. Allen, who detests auditioning actors, jokingly insists that Dougherty and her all-female casting company saved him a fortune in hand sanitizer. Scorsese is even more generous, at one point saying that casting constitutes 90 percent of the work when it comes to filmmaking.
Casting By also harkens back to a brief, glorious period when talent trumped good looks in Hollywood, at least for male performers. As Dougherty herself says, she and her cohorts were looking for actors, not movie stars. Dustin Hoffman’s groundbreaking turn in 1967’s classic The Graduate ushered in a whole new era of non-traditional leading men, from the rumpled ire of Gene Hackman in The French Connection to Gene Wilder’s sardonic, bug-eyed candy magnate in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Under the old studio system, the majority of these actors would have been typecast as thugs or one-note comic sidekicks. Dougherty and other influential casting directors allowed performers the chance to display their range, even while certain executives longed for the days of safe, bankable uniformity.
Dougherty’s West Coast counterpart Lynn Stalmaster, one of the first casting directors to ever receive credit during a film’s opening titles, also features prominently here. Stalmaster, whose Nebraska-born modesty prevents him from admitting that he ever “discovered” anyone, was instrumental in launching the careers of John Travolta — helping him to secure a part on the sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter — and Bette Midler, who was so desperate to escape Hawaii’s musical theater scene that she begged Stalmaster to cast her in a non-speaking role as a Christian missionary in the 1966 Julie Andrews vehicle Hawaii, the paycheck from which allowed her to book a flight to New York City and start her career.
In addition to the interviews and fascinating archival footage, Casting By makes a rather compelling case for establishing a new Oscar category for casting directors (it’s the only main title credit not currently recognized by the Academy). In doing so, Donahue also reveals a bizarre, apparently ancient rivalry that exists between casting directors and the Directors Guild of America. Taylor Hackford, current Guild President and the director of Ray and The Devil’s Advocate, serves as the film’s de facto villain, belittling the casting process and scoffing at the idea of a separate Oscar — including an honorary one for Dougherty. He even takes issue with their use of the word “director,” saying the title should only apply to filmmakers.
Entertaining, breezily paced and endlessly informative, Casting By should be considered essential viewing for any aspiring actor or curious cinephile. Even if you don’t care about the history of the profession itself, the celebrity anecdotes are definitely worth a watch, especially young Voight’s paranoid conviction that his over-the-top performance in an episode of Naked City would be enough to sour Dougherty on the acting skills of his entire generation. He needn’t have worried. Marion Dougherty always saw the best in people, often in ways that made cinematic history.