An audition used to involve showing up with other actors, waiting your turn, eyeing the competition. When your name was called, you went into a room, handed your picture (an 8 x 10) and résumé (credits, acting teachers, hobbies, and skills) to the casting director, and there might be a few words from the director: “I see you were in (name of play), I saw it, you were wonderful,” or the ubiquitous “Tell us a bit about yourself.”
Today, actors self-record themselves doing the scene and text it over. A callback is now a Zoom, and if you do well, a meeting with the director. Stars audition, too. Brando read for The Godfather. I assume the casting director did not say, “Tell us a bit about yourself.”
Agents advised their actors: “You are there to solve the producer’s problems, not yours. You may need the money, but their problem is bigger: if they choose the wrong actor, the whole play, movie, or TV show could fail.” Most actors thought that was crap; they were there for rent money.
The toughest audition was the Actors Studio. Being a member of the Studio was like having a union card in the Teamsters. If you saw a Studio actor in a waiting room, you knew you were dead: “Fuck, that’s Jimmy Olsen. Might as well go home.”
To audition for the Studio, you needed to be invited, and that meant already being a working actor, a star, or—the Second Commandment of show business—knowing someone. My someone was the actress Estelle Parsons. She put in a word with Lee Strasberg, and I got the coveted invitation. No monologues; ideally, a five-minute scene from Chekhov. If not, then it had better be one of Strasberg’s favorites: Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Miller, or Clifford Odets. Feydeau, Goldoni, and Anouilh were certain death. My scene partner would be Warren Finnerty, a charismatic, volatile actor, well known for playing Leach in Jack Gelber’s The Connection at the Living Theatre.
“You could audition, too,” I told him.
“Fuck them,” Warren said.
“Who? Lee Strasberg? Harold Clurman? Cheryl Crawford?”
“All of them. Peter Falk got in without an audition. I’m better than him. They want me, ask me. I’m not lowering myself to auditioning.”
A week later at the Studio, Cheryl Crawford said, “Warren, how nice to see you. I hope you are auditioning tonight along with Michael.”
“I’m not,” he said.
“Would you like to make this your audition, too?”
“No, thanks,” he said.
We did a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire. I got a nice note from Crawford asking me to return for a second audition, perhaps with a different scene partner.
Crawford also invited me to be an “observer,” which allowed me to audit Lee Strasberg’s acting sessions and Harold Clurman’s directing class. Clurman wore three-piece suits and carried a walking stick, and when he was asked why there wasn’t more experimental theater in New York, he replied, “A show opens on Broadway with a budget of a million dollars and closes the next night. I think that’s rather experimental.”
As for Strasberg, I was a member of the Living Theatre playing a Marine in The Brig. We didn’t let acting teachers make us cry about our mothers.
Eventually I gave up acting and turned to writing and directing, and the role was reversed. Now I was casting actors. Toni Howard, the casting director, advised me: “If you have to tell an actress why she didn’t get the part, always say, ‘You are too beautiful.’”
I wrote a TV pilot, Black Bart, based on Mel Brooks’s film Blazing Saddles. Lou Gossett was the sheriff, and for the mayor our casting director brought in Gabe Dell, who had been one of the Dead End Kids. Gabe walked in and barked, “You got some fucking nerve asking me to audition. Who the hell do you think you are? I’ve starred in 10 movies, and I don’t need this lousy show, so take your script and shove it.” He paused, smiled, and said, “That was my audition. Thank you, gentlemen,” and walked out.
He was right—it was exactly the character of the mayor. We wanted him, but CBS’s head of casting, Ethel Winant, vetoed Gabe, and we had to find another actor. Our choice was Noble Willingham. After the obligatory run-through for the CBS executives, Ethel said, “Everyone’s good, but I want you to replace Noble.” We auditioned more actors and settled on his replacement. After the next run-through, Ethel said, “Noble was better than this guy. Bring him back.” The problem was that when we shot a scene, Noble was so insecure he would finish a line, and before the director said “Cut!,” Noble would say, “Was that O.K.?”
“A show opens on Broadway with a budget of a million dollars and closes the next night. I think that’s rather experimental.”
Black Bart was a Western, so we also had to cast Lou Gossett’s horse. There was a line of 10 horses with their owners. We walked up and down, finally choosing one. What do you say to an auditioning horse? “I saw you in Laramie. You were very good in Shane. Tell me about yourself.”
In the 70s, the classiest porn wasn’t produced by Mitchell brothers in San Francisco or Gerard Damiano or Russ Meyer; it was made by a Brit, Suze Randall, and her husband, the South African novelist Humphry Knipe. Suze had been a photographer for Playboy and Hustler and had decided to turn her camera from photographing nude women to shooting women having real sex with men.
Suze’s films had a feminist bent. The women ordered the men to perform for their pleasure. Suze liked to film sex in the kitchen, but the men always wore the aprons. I wouldn’t go so far as to say, “If Lina Wertmüller made a porno,” but Suze’s locations were fairly elegant. No cheap motels, or back seats of taxis. She knew where to point the camera, her composer friends did the music, she paid attention to lighting, and Humphry wrote witty dialogue, even if it was delivered by beautiful women and men who, according to Humphry, “couldn’t act their way out of a paper bag, but sure could fuck their way out of one.”
I owned a house in Benedict Canyon with good art, Ligne Roset furniture, a hot tub on a deck with a view of downtown L.A., and—most importantly—no neighbors to observe the making of a porno. Suze asked if she and Humphry could have a look at the house as a possible location for their next film, Little Women Demand Big Dicks. It would be $1,000 dollars a day. My house was going to have an audition.
Suze and Humphry arrived. I showed them the kitchen, the view of Benedict Canyon from the wooden deck, the hot tub, and the Ligne Roset bedroom, and then left them alone. Suze took some photos. I could sense Humphry creating the story. They had a quick chat. Then Suze said, “Sorry, Michael, your house won’t work for the film we have in mind. But thanks for letting us have a look.”
“Any reason? Was there anything wrong with my house?”
“Not at all. It was just too beautiful.”
Michael Elias has written for film, television, and theater. His latest novel is You Can Go Home Now
