Casting Craziness

I am officially ¡DONE! with my last paper for the time being, and thus am now on Thanksgiving break (or, as Production Manager J. Carballo puts it, "T-Gives"). Now we can finally revisit the script with Lucas, call one last script session (a reading this time), and cast the five lead roles: Jason, Eddie, Nirav, Joseph, and Eve.

On casting:

Lucas, in typical Lucas fashion, pulled off the impossible... or at least the highly improbable. For a casting call to go into print (on Thursdays), productions usually have to submit by Friday @ 3pm to Backstage (New York's most popular actor's resource), with an extended deadline of Monday @ 3pm. I read this yesterday (Monday) at 5pm, and figured we were screwed as far as being in print was concerned. The office was closed, and I was fighting fatigue while writing this paper.

But fear not! Lucas called Backstage early this morning and wiggled our casting call into this Thursday's print edition. In the first few hours of the online posting, we received a TON of responses. I believe we're up to ~60 folks interested in auditioning for the production. Which sounds great, EXCEPT for one small detail...

Folks, if you're an independent filmmaker looking to produce a short (nonpaying) film, do yourself some good and write for an all-female cast. I, on the other hand, made the mistake of creating four male leads, and only one female. Judging, it's WAY too early to really start worrying about this (the casting call has only been up for a few hours), but the overwhelming majority of our headshots/resumes are coming from females, all of whom would be auditioning for the same role (Eve). I will almost invariably complain about this later. But, on the whole, there seem to be some pretty strong applications in the heap.

It's really bizarre to imagine these actors playing my characters. I get butterflies. So right now I'm basically glued to my computer – even though I haven't slept in days, thanks to paper-writing – refreshing the "Lived Here" Gmail account over and over, wondering why it has been 20 minutes since our last submission, when before they were flooding in every minute or two.

Ack,

Michael

UPDATE: And not just any four male leads – 2 gay guys, a South Asian, and a senior citizen. It's like a scavenger hunt. Difficulty set to VERY HARD.