I have two assistants and a very small office. My assistants are great. One still lives at home with her parents, she's in her mid-twenties. And for my money, she doesn't seem like she has a lot of life experience. She has been an assistant to casting directors for years. And she's great in the office, and great at organization, but I find her humorous because there is nothing else. I mean she actually grew up wanting to be a casting director. And when you grow up wanting to do this, your reality is slightly stilted. So that's her. And then there's this guy who is a waiter part-time, at night, because I don't pay him enough. And he's gorgeous, and gay, and he fills a niche in the office for any kind of film that may come in that is slightly--I don't know how to say it--he has a great personality. People always like him and, like me, he just fell into this business.

It's interesting being a woman boss to a man, because there's this testosterone thing where guys just don't want to take orders from women. So you have to manipulate the situation. I don't mean I manipulate him in an evil sort of way, but I understand that it's hard for him to take orders from me. So I defer to him and basically let him think that what I want him to do is his own idea.

Overall, I don't think I'm a very good boss. I am always worried that I am making the wrong decisions and I'm always trying to second-guess my employees. And I'm pretty uneven: sometimes I can be a real control freak while other times I kick back, but I'm always panicking inside. In other words, I don't know that I know how to be a boss yet. I'm learning as I go.

I work a lot. Now that I own my own business, I'm here all the time. Eighteen hours a day, weekends, nothing is out of the question. And when I say I am working all the time, I really mean all the time. I only occasionally go to the bathroom. I never have a lunch break. It's not one of those jobs where people spend a lot of time around the water cooler. It's a very serious business.

A typical day is you go in and you set up auditions for whatever project you are on. And you go in in a calm manner, ready to begin your day, and the minute you walk in the door you get ten phone calls--five actors have canceled, there are four new jobs, somebody has lost all their funding for a movie. Every day it's like that. You go in calmly, but it's pretty much shot to hell within an hour.

So then I'm on the telephone a lot. And then I'm with the actors. On an average day, I can meet up to sixty actors. If it's for a commercial audition, they're put on videotape--they do their lines or whatever and we record them and show them to the client later. If it's for a movie, I'm auditioning them with the director. Or there's a thing called pre-screening, where I meet actors I don't already know and have them audition for me alone to see if they are right for a particular role.

Sometimes I wish I pre-screened everyone. Actors can be unpredictable, to put it mildly. I had an audition once where an actor pulled a long knife out during the reading and everyone ducked behind a chair, because nobody knew who this guy was. He thought he was just being real, you know, just being an actor, right? But it was really scary. I could fill a book with stories like that. Just recently, we were auditioning girls for a movie and a few of them took it too far. One girl came in a see-through dress and no underwear on, and proceeded to basically unzip the guy who was reading with her and perform sex acts, without technically performing them, in the audition. And it was very uncomfortable to just sit there and watch this, but it's hard to stop somebody and say, "This is inappropriate behavior." There's a lot of that.

And it can get really weird. I remember once at the beginning of my career, somebody wanted me to meet this actor to talk about casting his movie. I was just starting and I think I was also working retail, you know, doing this part time. Anyway, someone sent this actor to me, and the guy called and said he wanted me to take a look at his script. I didn't have an office, and I don't know what I was thinking, but I said: just come on over to the house. So this guy shows up and he's very cute, and he had maybe five hundred sheets of yellow paper rubber-banded together. It was a manuscript, but like, a huge manuscript. And he walked in and put it on the table and said, "I'm sorry it's not typed." So we're talking, and he tells me that this script is really personal, because it is about something that happened to him when he was eighteen years old. And then he told me that he had been camping with his girlfriend and that they had been taken into a spaceship one night and had been operated on by Martians, and then released back to Earth. And she refused to talk about it, and refused to talk to him again. He'd been lugging this story around for a long time, and finally decided to write a script about it. So I was alone with this person, who I didn't know, in my house, who was telling me that he had been on the planet Mars. I was trying to be sympathetic to him, but I called one of my friends who had to come down and sit with me while this guy was there. He had to sit with me until I finally said, "Bye-bye." In the end, I realized, he didn't want me to cast the movie, or anything like that. I mean, there wasn't any movie. He just wanted to talk, or something. I don't know.

I think at this point it's a cliché, but if you tell any casting director that you want to be an actor, they'll say, "Isn't there anything else you'd like to do?" Because it's a horrible life. Life as an actor is terrible. You have to be totally self-centered, because it's all about you, and it's all about getting the job, and it's all about rejection. And then if you do get the job, it's all about doing it correctly and getting the next one, and the next one, just trying to get famous. And if you do get famous, it's all about being famous. And then it's about when your star is going to fall. It's a completely self-involved profession. Still, everybody wants to be in movies. I was in the middle of Europe once and this guy said, "Couldn't I be in the movies?" I mean, he could barely speak English but he could get out, "Couldn't I be in the movies?"

But you know, that's also the great part of my job, my favorite part--I love actors. And I think that makes me good at what I do. I mean, I think I possess a quality that not everyone has: the ability to feel for others. And I thinks it help in the casting process, both to feel for the actor, as a human being who is auditioning for you, and for the character you want them to play. I think it's just an ability to understand life experience and to watch well. I watch people all day long. You learn a lot from that. I watch how they enter a room and I can tell what they're thinking, just by watching. And I like that. It's interesting to me. And I love to be entertained. And when the job is going really well, I am thoroughly entertained all the time.

And if you'd asked me this two years ago, I would have told you that I like being an integral part of the creative process of making a movie; but I don't think that's so true now that I'm moving up. I think that's kind of bullshit. I mean, unless you're working on a really low budget movie where you're actually out there looking for the talent, casting is really a just a phone game with the big agencies, trying to get stars. And that's really not creative. Most big movies come with at least one person attached--you know, that's how they get funded. This is a Harrison Ford picture, or someone like that. And I don't pick the stars like that--those people are picking their pictures themselves. So, on that level, the films I'm starting to work on are not that interesting to me. It's not as vivid.

The worst part of this job, by far, is the people who work in the business--the producers and so forth. They're liars, cheaters, you name it. Most of them are far too concerned about fame and money. And they have very short tempers. There are some really angry people in this business. I myself have become much more bitter about human nature because I've seen so much depressing shit. I see people who have a project that they want to get off the ground and that is all they think about--there is absolutely nothing that will get in their way. It's awful what they will do. And then you watch actors who have problems with substance abuse or their personal lives, and that saddens me. And then you see a lot of non-talented people getting ahead and that's not what the world should be like. I think there is something wonderful about working hard and reaping the benefits of that work, but I think that a lot of people in movies and commercials get ahead only because their parents know people, or because they're rich. And once they get ahead, they usually just coast.

And as for my peers, so to speak, well, I think that a lot of times people go into casting for revenge. I think that a lot of people who are angry and bitter go into casting. Or maybe they become angry and bitter from casting. It becomes a control issue, because they think that they can control other people's careers. So you see a lot of casting people who aren't happy, and they seem to take it out on actors who aren't famous. I've always said that a lot of casting people were really unpopular in high school and this is their way of getting back at all the people who didn't ask them out.

But I actually like this job a lot. I want to keep doing it as many years as it will have me. As long as I can hold on to it with my teeth (laughs). I think it's that kind of business--it's like being a musician or something--as long as you can hold on. Because it's a youth-oriented business, you know? It's all about what is hot and what's in. And the people are getting younger and younger, particularly in commercials. I mean, I have to answer to twenty-five year olds all the time now. I think that maybe my time has come. But I also think that people see me as being a little younger than I am. And I think that they think that I know what is hot, and that I'm good at finding it.

So I like doing this, but I'm not sure if I had my life to live over that I'd do it again. There are a hundred other things that I could see myself doing instead, like owning a bookstore in some weird little town somewhere. Or maybe some nine-to-five job where I could just turn it off at the end of the day and go home to my husband. I guess I just don't find this job meaningful. I mean, it's meaningful to people who want to get jobs as actors, and people who are making movies, but that's about it. I suppose you could argue that if I help make a commercial that helps to sell Bounty, that's one more person who has a job making Bounty, but that's really stretching it (laughs). I guess I'm a little jaded.

I've also become much more self-involved and generally, I think, just worse from doing this--worse as a person, as a friend, just worse. As I become more successful, as we like to say in the office, it's all about me. And I don't like that, which is why I wish I had more of a life to go to when I leave the office. I think that would balance things out. But I don't. I have no social life. Because who do I meet? I meet actors. And it is inappropriate, I think, to date actors in this profession. Especially in light of what I just said about the control issue. And I work all the time so it's hard for me to go to functions, and when I do go to functions they are business-related, so I don't really meet anyone. It's all work. Work, work, work. But still, you know, there are perks. I get to see a lot of interesting movies and plays; I get into the hot clubs and restaurants; I travel--and the only hazard is shaking people's hands all day long. That and waking up in the middle of the night terrified and sweating (laughs). And the fact that I'm going to end up a spinster.

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