(USA, 89 min.)
Dir. Tom Donahue
Feat. Marion Dougherty, Ellen Lewis, Juliet Taylor, Danny
Glover, Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, Clint Eastwood, Glenn Close, Robert
Duvall, Jeff Bridges, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Diane Lane, Jon Voight, Bette Midler
and John Travolta.
 |
| Casting Director Marion Dougherty |
The Ottawa premiere of Tom Donahue’s documentary Casting By couldn’t arrive at a better
time. It was just yesterday that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences announced
that it is finally adding a unique branch for casting directors. Casting directors
have been invited to be a part of The Academy for years, although they were
lumped into the broad group of Members at Large. The move is a step in the
right direction towards acknowledging some of the unsung talents in the film
industry. (Casting, as the film notes, is the only main title credit without a category
in the Oscars.) After seeing Casting By,
though, viewers will agree that casting directors deserve as much credit for
their contribution to film as any actor or director with whom they collaborate.
The art of the casting director receives a warm and fitting
tribute by Donahue and his team as Casting
By explores the legacy of one of the profession’s pioneers, Marion
Dougherty. Dougherty’s name might be unfamiliar to even the most serious of
film buffs—I had never heard of her before seeing the film—but her influence on
the cinema is obvious after just a few scenes. Through Donahue’s interviews
with Dougherty, who passed away in 2011, Casting
By reveals a shrewd talent with an intuitive mind.
Dougherty explains her early days working in television in
the 1960s. It was a time when the Dream Factory of the Hollywood was changing
and the star system was running out of fumes. Typecasting, contracts, and
cinematic regurgitation made casting directors somewhat redundant up until that
point because casting a film was more about lubricating the Hollywood machinery
than about finding the right fit for parts. The overall wave of change in cinema at
the time helped—or was helped by—people like Marion Dougherty who looked beyond
classically beautiful leads and made stars out of true actors.
Casting By offers
testimony from a star-studded array of actors and directors whose careers were
shaped by Marion Dougherty’s creativity. A-list Oscar winners like Robert
Redford, Al Pacino, and Jeff Bridges (just to name a few) offer fond, yet
insightful, anecdotes about early meetings with Dougherty that helped define
the cinema as it is today. For example, Glenn Close, who makes some of the more
persuasive remarks in the film, notes how she bombed an early reading, yet
Dougherty called her back because she saw something in her worth pursuing. Dougherty found
inner qualities to match the characters of the script, which sounds common today but seemed
audacious decades ago.
Similarly, a prominent chapter of Casting By explores a turning point in both Dougherty’s career and in
cinema itself. Who, Casting By asks,
can image Midnight Cowboy without Jon
Voight or Dustin Hoffman? The circumstances of pre-production put ample faith
in Dougherty’s ability to find the right people to play Joe Buck and Ratso
Rizzo, and Dougherty took a gamble on unknown, unproven stars. Voight and
Hoffman didn’t have the appeal of some of the other names tossed about, but
they carried in their screen presence some ineffable quality that Dougherty saw
as distinct and unique. It worked, as Midnight Cowboy went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture and
garnered Best Actor nominations for both Voight and Hoffman. Dougherty’s work
gave Midnight Cowboy two faces that
still give it power today, but she didn’t even get her name in the opening
credits.
Midnight Cowboy is
just one example in Casting By of the
work that audiences and industry peers alike take for granted when watching a
film. The documentary offers interviews with many of Dougherty’s peers and
protégés in addition to the actors and directors. Casting directors such as Lynn
Stalmaster, Juliet Taylor, and Ellen Chenoweth describe their seemingly obscure
role in both the art and the business of making films. Like Dougherty, they
provide stories that illuminate a creative process that goes into casting a
film, especially when a casting director finds a face that fits the role, but
not the director’s vision for the role.
The imagination and resourcefulness of the casting director
are evident in some of the choices noted in Casting
By. Take, for example, the kid in the “dueling banjos” scene from Deliverance. He didn’t fit director John
Boorman’s alleged request to fill the role with an albino, but the boy that
Lynn Stalmaster found for the part has a backwoods vibe that is so spot-on it
remains effectively creepy forty years later. People don’t remember Deliverance
for Burt Reynolds.
Similarly, testimony from and about Marion Dougherty shows that casting directors helped usher in waves of change into the old Hollywood system. One revealing moment of Casting By chronicles Dougherty’s efforts casting Lethal Weapon and sees director Richard Donner recall his surprise over Dougherty’s suggestion that Danny Glover play Roger. “But the character isn’t black,” Donner remembers saying when comparing the actor to the script. The gap between Donner’s interpretation and Dougherty’s interpretation of the appropriate actor demonstrates the influence that a casting director can have not just on the artistic vision of a film, but also on the evolution of the industry as a whole.
Similarly, testimony from and about Marion Dougherty shows that casting directors helped usher in waves of change into the old Hollywood system. One revealing moment of Casting By chronicles Dougherty’s efforts casting Lethal Weapon and sees director Richard Donner recall his surprise over Dougherty’s suggestion that Danny Glover play Roger. “But the character isn’t black,” Donner remembers saying when comparing the actor to the script. The gap between Donner’s interpretation and Dougherty’s interpretation of the appropriate actor demonstrates the influence that a casting director can have not just on the artistic vision of a film, but also on the evolution of the industry as a whole.
Perhaps the invisibility of the casting director’s role—versus
the more obvious mark of an editor or a cinematographer with a cut or a pan,
respectively—leads the work of people like Marion Dougherty to go unrecognized
in film. Casting By also gives time
to the other side of the argument and lets peers in the industry explain that
casting, although a valuable contribution to the creative process of making a
film, is not a form of directing and, hence, not an appropriate role for the
credit of “Casting Director.” Taylor Hackford, for example, gives a fair rationale
on why people in the casting business should be credited as “Casting By,”
saying that the final casting call rests on the film director himself. (In
Hackford’s defense, his answers seem like the diplomatic responses that the president
of the Directors’ Guild of America would be expected to make.) Whether one
sides with ignorance or with auteur
theory, though, the work of the casting director is relatively unacknowledged
in film.
Many film buffs, however, will surely agree that people like
Marion Dougherty have made a significant impact to film when they see the
roster of familiar faces talking up her influence on the industry. The fact that
Donahue assembles so many stars for a Talking Heads-style film demonstrates Dougherty’s
success: These actors are now people of authority. They are actors who have achieved
noteworthy success in the industry and many of them might not have a spot on the A-List had someone like Marion Dougherty not taken a
chance on them in the early days of their careers. The stars would be much
different if they were chosen by studio execs alone.
Casting enjoys an imperceptible quality when it’s done right—if
all the faces seem to fit, or if they are believable, then the casting director
has done his or her part well. Casting By
reveals the innovation that goes into filling a film with the right faces to
make it effective and keep it fresh. The collaborative process that goes into making a film is generally well known, but the prevalence of authorship in film discourse doesn't let the team share the wealth as much as it should. The film, while showing how forward thinkers like Marion Dougherty helped change the business, could be an ultimate nail in the coffin for auteur theory since it ends by noting that assuming credit for casting is not something a director can easily take. A director is the generally the key creative lead, but the director is not the only creative lead. Film is simply too collaborative a work to allow for easy credit. Casting
By is a must-see for all film buffs, really, as it affords a slice of film
history rarely put to print. Casting By
gives credits that are long overdue.
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)
Casting By screens in Ottawa at The Mayfair August 2-4.
