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Not long ago, the actor and writer Tavi Gevinson got an audition for a movie—a supporting role in a comedy. Like most auditions nowadays, it was a self-tape. This was eight o’clock on a Wednesday night; the tape was due Friday morning. Gevinson was in an Off Broadway play in the East Village, so she asked for an extension. She was sent three scenes, totalling nine pages, plus boilerplate instructions. (“Please have another person read the other character’s lines offscreen.”) She spent the next few days memorizing and preparing. The following Wednesday, between an appointment and her show that evening, she borrowed a friend’s apartment in Manhattan, since she didn’t have time to go back home to Brooklyn. She did her makeup in the bathroom, rearranged the living-room furniture, perched her phone on a stack of books against a windowsill, and FaceTimed on her computer with an assistant at her agency, who would be her scene partner. (“I feel bad asking my friends to read with me at this point,” she said.) They spent an hour or so doing takes, then Gevinson spent more than an hour comparing them and choosing the best ones. Soon after sending the tape off, she learned that another actress had been offered, and had accepted, the role days earlier.
In some ways, this is an audition story as old as time. Auditions are a brutal fact of life for actors, save for the élite few who are “offer only”—and even Gevinson, who at twenty-seven has appeared on Broadway, on “Gossip Girl,” and on magazine covers, isn’t among them. Actors know that the math is against them, that auditions are the crucible that separates the starry-eyed from the stars, or at least the employed. Actors take audition classes. They find day jobs with flexibility. They calm their nerves, or try to, and hope against the punishing odds. In other ways, auditions are nothing like what they were twenty years ago. Picture a waiting room with a bench full of nervous actors, getting called in one by one to stand before yawning people in folding chairs behind a table. That mostly doesn’t exist anymore: the pandemic has turned remote auditions from an option to a default. The indignities, it seems, have only multiplied. In 2020, the actor Lukas Gage was on a Zoom audition and overheard an unmuted director observing how “these poor people live in these tiny apartments.” What’s stayed the same is that auditions are among the most fraught and personal kinds of job interviews.
But what if they’re not that at all? What if auditions, as a group of actors are arguing, are work that should be compensated? A few months ago, an actor friend told Gevinson about the concept of “audition pay.” “I thought, We’ll never get that! Auditions are job interviews! I don’t mind everything I have been putting myself through since I was sixteen, to do this work for all these nice people! And it’ll never happen, basically,” she recalled. But the more she looked into it the more it made sense. “They’re actually not job interviews. If they were interviewing me, I would go in and have a conversation with someone, or maybe show them a portfolio, which I guess is my reel.” She knew from experience that auditions require an immense amount of work—in time, in artistry—and that, thanks to self-taping, she was essentially running her own production shop. She is now part of a cadre of SAG-AFTRA members who are pushing the cause of audition pay in the run-up to the guild’s contract negotiations with producers, in June. They just launched a Web site under the banner “Auditions Are Work.”
Their trump card, as they see it: audition pay for screen actors has been required for eighty-six years, but few seemed to notice until recently. In 2019, the actor Charlie Bodin, whose credits include Octavia Spencer’s boss on “Truth Be Told” and Joan Crawford’s dentist on “Feud: Bette and Joan,” was paging through an old SAG contract he’d found in a library. “I had hung up my waiter’s apron for about ten years at that point,” he told me. “I realized I didn’t know anything about our contracts.” He’d got most of his union news from literature in audition waiting rooms. Now, opening to random pages of the novel-size contract, he noticed benefits he’d never heard of—say, travel provisions he could have claimed for “Transformers,” in which he played a military tech. “I was, like, ‘What the hell else is in here?’ ” He started buying old union magazines off eBay and, developing a “new love for spreadsheets,” created an extensive chart comparing every version of the SAG basic agreement throughout the decades, clause by clause. (Along the way, he became a “thirties-film junkie.”)
Bodin’s most startling discovery was that SAG’s very first contract, from 1937, guaranteed pay for players who were called to do “tests” for films they weren’t used in. Ten years later, the word “Auditions” was added in a subheading, along with the line, “If the player is not given employment in the picture, the player shall receive one-half (1/2) day’s pay.” Except for “player,” which now reads “performer,” the line has gone unchanged, if largely unheeded, in Schedule A 15(B) of SAG-AFTRA’s standard contract. Actors began circulating Bodin’s chart, and, last September, in a blog post titled “Audition Pay: The Biggest Secret That Shouldn’t Be a Secret,” the actor Shaan Sharma wrote, “The current scale day rate is $1,082, so for every audition you have but where you didn’t book the job, you’re owed $541.” This, he calculated, would amount to “hundreds of millions of dollars of additional earnings in performers’ pockets every single year.” If few people file for audition pay, Sharma figured, that’s only because they didn’t realize they were owed it or feared retaliation.
The guild, far from embracing this discovery, called an emergency meeting and, in late September, posted a notice acknowledging a “lack of clarity” around the issue. It listed a handful of circumstances in which actors can claim audition pay, including when they are “expressly” required to memorize lines or when they’re made to wait for more than an hour. Since then, actors have been noticing disclaimers on their audition instructions saying that they don’t have to memorize lines—which the audition-pay advocates see as a technicality, since anyone who wants to get the part is going to memorize anyway. The guild pointed out that the industry has changed since 1937, when actors were practically owned by the studios, and warned that across-the-board audition pay could have “negative consequences, including a reduction of access to casting opportunities.” A casting director I talked to, Henry Russell Bergstein, echoed that worry. “It’s already so prohibitive to produce indie films and all that stuff,” he said. “If you started paying actors, my fear is that we wouldn’t be able to audition as many. Producers would cap the number because of cost.” Plenty of actors are sure to agree.
The “Auditions Are Work” group, however, says that self-tapes have tilted auditions into something akin to a lottery. When casting people are in a room, they can see maybe thirty to fifty people in a day. When they’re getting self-tapes, they can easily solicit a hundred to five hundred submissions per role, meaning that the chances of getting a given role are vanishingly small. “Everyone’s doing more labor for a smaller chance of actually being employed than ever,” the actor Thomas Ochoa said. Others doubted that casting directors really watch all the tapes. “Casting treats tapes like Tinder: swipe left, swipe right,” one actor complained. In a recent Deadline piece, the casting director Alexis Allen Winter admitted, “Do we watch them all? Yes. Do we watch ALL of them all? Not all of the time.” (Bergstein told me, “Listen, I watch all the tapes,” but he limits submissions so that he doesn’t “go blind.”) This can lead to tricky cost-benefit analyses. The actor Christian Telesmar was recently asked to audition for the lead role in a Mike Tyson bio-series, even though he knew that he was an extreme long shot. Was it worth spending the hours preparing a tape? “Sometimes you have to choose between three auditions, two auditions and eating, or one audition, eating, and taking care of your family,” he said. “If you were getting paid for this, it’d be a lot easier to make those choices.”
On top of that, actors now have to provide resources that have traditionally fallen on casting offices, including equipment, space, and people to read with. Variety recently estimated that outsourcing scene partners to auditioners has saved producers some two hundred and fifty million dollars annually. “It creates a whole culture where all of us have to have a clutch of collaborators who are willing to be our readers,” Ochoa said; think of all the boyfriends, roommates, and UPS guys dragged into audition scenes. Caryn West, an actor in her sixties, who has joined up with the millennial-skewing advocates (“I’m the old broad of the group”), told me that she has had to instruct older actors on what lighting equipment to buy and how to upload videos online. “I have seen many meltdowns of very famous people,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been a techie-nerd therapist to the stars.”
West has been a SAG member since 1980—she’s played a lot of “crying moms”—and has witnessed how auditions have evolved. “With every decade, I’ve seen it get harder for actors,” she said. “And now they’re doing three-quarters, maybe seven-eighths of the casting director’s job.” In the old days, before fax or e-mail, there was more cold reading, or you had to drive to studios to pick up sides. “Yes, we paid more in gas money,” West said. “But I remember, until twenty-five years ago, we just had two black-and-white photos. Back then, you had to get VCR demo reels produced and send them around to casting offices. Then there was the CD demo reel you had to send out to people, with a self-stamped envelope to send it back to you. Now an actor has to pay for subscriptions to multiple online casting platforms, and even more for each reel, clip, or color photo uploaded to every site. Digital made everything faster, but it made it so fast that people expect an Oscar-winning performance in twenty-four hours.”
Besides the financial burdens, West observed, self-taping has struck at a deeper vulnerability. She has been an audition coach since 1986, and there’s always precariousness and stress. But today there’s a “mental-health crisis I’ve never seen before,” she said. “We’re in a vacuum, and the only person who can give us feedback is ourselves. Actors are sensitive and fragile and self-doubting and self-loathing. It’s part of what makes us crazily creative and wonderful, but we need to collaborate.” There are clear benefits to self-taping—if you’re feeling off, you can do it later—but, as West lamented, “when we went into rooms, they saw the entire audition. Sometimes it’s three-quarters of the way through, and they see that moment and say, ‘I like that! Do it again.’ Now, with self-tapes, these casting directors mostly just type people out.” Bergstein, the casting director, said that self-tapes don’t allow him to see how actors respond to direction, or whether they’re able to deliver without redoing a scene over and over. He predicts a hybrid model but is hoping to return to more live auditions soon, even if self-taping saves him overhead on space rental. “I miss being in the room with actors,” he said.
As the writers’ strike has shown, Hollywood is undergoing a period of acute labor unrest. SAG’s board just voted to send a strike-authorization vote to its members, signalling a tough negotiation ahead. In the streaming era, creative workers are wary of entertainment conglomerates profiting off their work while compensating them less. “Actors are some of the most easily exploitable people, and, without having some type of protection, we will shoot ourselves in the foot for an opportunity to be seen,” Vanessa Chester, who began her career as a child actor in movies such as “A Little Princess” and “The Lost World,” said. “In the thirty years that I’ve been an actor, I have not booked at least a thousand auditions, which means I have not been paid at least half a million dollars in my lifetime. For actors who normally make seven thousand dollars a year, who are doing seventeen side hustles because that’s encouraged instead of encouraging our worth—it’s just asinine that our union, the place that I pay dues to biannually, did not make me aware of something that I’m entitled to. And we’ve been groomed to not stand up for ourselves.”
The counter-arguments are legion. Isn’t this what conservatives mean when they gripe about “participation trophies”? Wouldn’t mediocre actors just float on a sea of failed-audition fees? But the advocates see audition pay as a check on an out-of-control system that feeds on aspiration. “If auditions cost producers nothing, then the expectation of what actors are supposed to do for a competitive audition—there’s no end to it,” Gevinson said. While performers have individually filed for claims and been paid, the idea is far from being implemented systematically, and it’s possible that its newfound visibility will prompt SAG-AFTRA to trade it away as a bargaining chip for something else. But Gevinson and her compatriots want actors to be at least aware of what they’re entitled to, and they insist it can be done if the payments are automated through online audition portals. The reason it resonates is as much philosophical as economic. Auditions are laborious, but they’re also a very personal kind of offering. To place a dollar value on them, practical or not, means that all those hours aren’t as futile as they often feel. “The deeper we all go,” Gevinson said, “the more it gets at the heart of what we do and how actors’ own work has been misrepresented to them for decades.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
