Casting By
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Casting By is a 2012 American documentary film directed by Tom Donahue. It combines over 230 interviews, extensive archival footage, animated stills and documents to tell the untold tale of the Hollywood casting director, Marion Dougherty. Dougherty died before the film's release; it is dedicated to her memory.
Synopsis
The film is a celebration of the casting profession, highlighting its previously unsung role in film history while also serving as an elegy to the lost era of the New Hollywood. It focuses on casting pioneer Marion Dougherty, an iconoclast whose exquisite taste, tenacity and gut instincts brought a new kind of actor to the screen that would mark the end of the old studio system and help to usher in this revolutionary new period. The film draws a line through the last half century to show us the profession’s evolution from studio system type-casting to the rise of large ensemble films populated with unique and diverse casts.
In their July 25, 2013 cover story on the film ("Rise of the Casting Directors"), Backstage wrote, "the film features what is arguably the greatest assemblage of talking-head star power in any documentary ever made."
