A Star is Found: Our Adventures Casting Some of Hollywood's Biggest Movies

Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins with Rachel Kranz
Harcourt (2006)
ISBN 0151012342
Reviewed by Joanne Benham for Reader Views (10/06)

If you’ve ever wondered how an actor is chosen for a particular role or, alternatively why an actor who seemed totally right for a part wasn’t chosen, this is the book for you.  Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins are the founders and co-owners of The Casting Company, which they started when Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios closed down in 1983.

A casting director’s job is to furnish producers and directors with a selection of actors for every role in their production.  To do this job efficiently, the casting director needs a huge inventory of available actors in all shapes and sizes to fill every role.  From the bottom of the ladder, the Wannabes, to the top rung, the Superstars, each actor has to be matched to a role.  Another major consideration for the casting director is budget restraints. And if you have several superstars wanting the same role, you need tact and diplomacy to gently discourage someone from a part while still retaining the option of using them in a future production. 

The authors have worked with top directors and producers in the industry such as Ron Howard, Chris Columbus and Cubby Broccoli as well as stars such as Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Julia Roberts and George Clooney.

In between talking about their casting adventures (and misadventures) they discuss their method of choosing someone.  First they read the script to get big picture.  Then they break the roles down into categories like star, extra etc.  Those categories are then broken down further into sections such as hero, bumbler, smart and sexy and on and on.  Then they measure each actor they consider against their own inner criteria of how the actor should look and sound to make the script work. 

Every evening I turn on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) at 7:00 p.m. without fail.  I don’t watch too many of the movies, but I do want to watch the introduction done by the host, Robert Osborne.  He gives you some background on the movie that will be playing, such as the political climate of the day, stories about the actors and how they were chosen and why some were not chosen.  I find this background information absolutely fascinating, even though I’m not a movie buff.  If you are a big movie fan, you will probably enjoy “A Star is Found” even more than I did.

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