ENTERTAINMENT
Tinseltown's wheel-and-dealers may have caught the dot-com bug, but much of the business of show biz is still done the old-fashioned way. "In this industry, it's still 1997 and they're just getting around to email," says Scott Globus, co-owner of casting.com, a San Francisco-based online casting agency. Directors and producers can log on to casting.com and conduct an electronic talent search rather than sort through binders stuffed with 8-by-10 glossies. Talent can be searched by gender, ethnicity, hair color (including "green, etc."), hair length ("bald, shaved, receding, long"), and union status. Actors pay the agency $20 a year to post their photos and vital stats, but the real revenue comes from the movie companies that make use of casting.com's database.
"People are getting booked right off the site, without an audition," says casting.com co-owner Maria Ray. However, the agency still holds live auditions for clients who want to see the merchandise in person. At a recent cattle call, the firm's lobby was filled with scruffy, air-guitar-playing actors competing for the role of rock 'n' roller in an ad campaign for the satellite delivery service iBeam.
The site casts for productions in LA and the Bay Area, and is talking with partners and investors about taking the business national. It's also gearing up for a broadband service that will allow clients to see and hear casting.com's 3,500-plus actors in action. Other contenders have jumped into the sector; Castnet.com and talentworks.com also charge actors to post their headshots and résumés.
So far, casting.com's biggest obstacle has been the entertainment industry's reluctance to embrace technology. "I thought all we had to do was say 'casting.com' and people would flock here," Globus says. "But we'd go see agents and find they were still tracking their clients on paper."
Josh Silver, co-owner of Jericho Entertainment, an LA film production and artist management company, typifies Hollywood's digital laggards - he began using email only last year. Silver says he doesn't use the Internet for casting, and notes that only a very small percentage of his colleagues are even online. "I'm on the phone all day," Silver says. "That probably won't change."
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