HOLLYWOOD — The waiting room at Rosalind Vane’s casting office used to be the loudest part of the job. Actors lined the benches with their sides rolled in one hand, mouthing lines, sizing one another up, and the sign-in sheet filled front and back before ten. On a Tuesday last week there were three names on it by noon, and two of those were reschedules.
Vane has cast small and mid-size roles out of a second-floor suite near the Boulevard for twenty-two years — the day players, the co-stars, the one-scene parts that never make a poster and always make a call sheet. Her business is a leading indicator of the one everyone else worries about. A show casts before it shoots, so when the shooting slows, her phones go quiet a season ahead of the soundstages. They have been quiet for a while.
“I used to run three rooms on a busy day and turn people around every ten minutes,” she said, walking an empty hallway that still had blue tape on the floor marking where actors should stand for the camera. “Now it’s one room, and some weeks not even that. The breakdowns just aren’t coming. When they do, the parts are smaller and there are fewer of them, and the fees on the low end haven’t moved since I started.”
The shift to self-taped auditions, sped up during the pandemic and never reversed, has hollowed the room a second way. Much of what Vane once did in person now arrives as video files, actors performing to a phone propped on a stack of books in a bedroom, and while she grants the convenience, she mourns what it costs. “You cannot read a room over email,” she said. “Half of casting was watching who talked to whom on the bench, who was generous, who you’d want on a set at four in the morning. That is gone, and nobody voted on it.”
She has let her second associate go, a young man she had trained for four years and would have made a partner in a better decade. The regulars notice the empty desk. A character actor who has read for Vane since the nineties, and who asked that his name stay out of it because he is still auditioning, put it plainly on his way out: “When Rosalind’s slow, everybody’s slow. She’s the canary. Right now the canary is doing a lot of sitting.”
Vane is not closing, and she bristles at the suggestion. She has weathered thin stretches before and keeps a shoebox of thank-you notes from actors whose first paying job came through her rooms. But she is honest about the arithmetic. Rent is due whether or not a network greenlights a pilot, and a casting office with no sessions to run is a phone bill, a lease, and a woman who knows every working actor in town waiting for the work to remember where it lives. “I’ll be here when it turns,” she said. “I’d just like it to turn while I still have the second room.”