A Star is Found

2006, Harcourt Inc. 307 pages. $25.00

Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins, with Rachel Kranz

Many different aspects of filmmaking have been documented in books but this is the first one I’ve seen that focuses primarily on the casting process. Written by two professional casting agents — and long-time working partners — A Star is Found delineates the strange, ever-changing status of Hollywood stardom as it applies to commercial filmmaking. What is to the casual movie fan a rather simple process of picking the right person for the right role is, in detailed consideration, revealed to be a complicated, difficult, wild, surprising and rewarding enterprise that affects every film that contains even one cast member, professionally chosen.

Janet Hirshenson and Jane Jenkins, working as a team, both separately and together, depending on the project, found, negotiated with, hired and sometimes even coached critical cast members of such films as Air Force One, Apollo 13, Beetle Juice, Body Double, Dune, A Few Good Men, Friday Night Lights, Ghost, Ghosts of Mississippi, The Holiday, In the Line of Fire, Jurassic Park, Licence to Kill, Mystic Pizza, Night Shift, Poseidon, Rumble Fish, Stand by Me, The Sure Thing and When Harry Met Sally . . .. Stories about and anecdotes from these movies illuminate how the Hollywood hierarchy is structured and how Stars, Names, Working Actors and Unknowns all vie for roles and attention as these movies are made.

The discussion of this weird hierarchy is most fascinating to me, especially as it is ever evolving. The authors even address this when they list (as of 2006) the seven true Superstars: Tom Cruise, Matt Damon, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt and Will Smith. In the next paragraph, they note that perhaps Ford is too old, and George Clooney should be there instead. And we all know what soon happened with Mel Gibson. Power players in Hollywood (and in sports, and in business, etc.) will always attract the attention, and gossip, and speculation.

Another asset is the discussion of the authors’ years at Zoetrope Studios, working for Francis Ford Coppola. Until that studio went bankrupt, it was a dream location for movie talent, and it proved to be a great place for dreaming big, learning the ropes and then figuring out a way to make things work. I’ve never paid much attention to Coppola’s fledgling studio, probably because its output never matched its announced slate of titles. But now I’m much more interested in what he was trying to do, and I’m going to have to read up on it.

In A Star is Found, particular concentration is paid to a handful of movies that Janet and Jane feel are landmarks either in the film world, or in their specific careers. We learn a great deal about how A Beautiful Mind came together; how Audrey Tautou was chosen for The Da Vinci Code; how the two American ladies took over the casting of the first “Harry Potter” film; how the young, immensely talented cast of The Outsiders came to represent a generation; how regional considerations affected the production of The Perfect Storm and how difficult it was to find Princess Buttercup for The Princess Bride. Along the way we learn tidbits about stars like Julia Roberts, Timothy Dalton, Josh Lucas, Laura Dern, Tom Hanks and John Cusack, as well as directors such as Ron Howard, Wolfgang Petersen, Rob Reiner, David Lynch, Brian De Palma and Peter Berg. But what we don’t get is dirt.

Because these ladies were still working when the book was published in 2006, and presumably wanted to keep working, they don’t have anything nasty to say about anyone specific. Certain unnamed people and projects are discussed, but this is a vastly positive, somewhat instructional journey into how to properly cast a movie. Great care is taken to illustrate how difficult — yet important — it is to cast certain roles in ways which do not detour the story, distract from the stars or destroy the director’s vision. Casting is easy to judge from a theater seat; the trick here is to predict how Stars, Names, Working Actors and Unknowns will produce, beforehand. As with any movie project, it’s always a crapshoot. Is James Woods really the right guy to portray an aging racist bigot? (He was!). Would Minnie Driver really not have been right for the Kate Winslet role in The Holiday? (Writer-director Nancy Meyers didn’t think so). Was Ernest Borgnine really being considered for the Don Corleone role in The Godfather? (I don’t recall hearing that claim before). These are all casting conundrums that affected the movies with which you are familiar, and which infuse this book with enough detail which, along with its general readability, make this chronicle a worthwhile read. My rating: Good. 30 September 2019.