CASTING BY (Tom Donahue). 90 minutes. Opens Friday (July 19). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NNNN
Casting By has a hidden agenda: it’s an activist documentary designed to lobby the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to consider an Oscar category for casting directors.
Casting, it turns out, is the only opening-title category not currently eligible for an Academy Award, and Tom Donahue would very much like to change that. And he makes a pretty good case over a sprightly hour and a half, arguing that casting directors are as important to a given project as production designers and art directors.
Donahue’s focus is Marion Dougherty, who more or less invented the idea that casting could be a specific skill in the 50s and early 60s with stints on Kraft Television Theater, Naked City and Route 66, where she filled bit parts with new faces drawn from New York acting schools – you know, nobodies like Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman, Jean Stapleton and Jimmys Caan and Dean.
Hired by Warner as their VP of talent, she came up with the idea of pairing Mel Gibson and Danny Glover for Lethal Weapon – a colour-blind casting decision that still evidently shames director Richard Donner, who admits he reflexively discounted Glover because he was black.
Donahue interviewed Dougherty extensively before her death in 2011, and she’s a great subject – as is pretty much everyone else in the film, which feels like two-thirds of Hollywood (including Dougherty’s old pals Al Pacino, Clint Eastwood and Jon Voight).
It’s an insider project, but that’s the point.
