Audition Movie Quotes

Her voice was trained, supple as leather, precise as a knife thrower's blade. Singing or talking, it had the same graceful quality, and an accent I thought at first was English, but then realized was the old-fashioned American of a thirties movie, a person who could get away with saying 'grand.' Too classic, they told her when she went out on auditions. It didn't mean old. It meant too beautiful for the times, when anything that lasted longer than six months was considered passe. I loved to listen to her sing, or tell me stories about her childhood in suburban Connecticut, it sounded like heaven.

Do you know those movies about the scary cult of, like, creepy kids who can read minds and worship the devil and live in the cornfields or something? Well, if they were casting for one of those movies, this girl would get the part. They wouldn’t even have to audition her. They would take one look at her and be like, Yes, you are creepy girl number three.

Addicts don't like when you tell them they are all the same. Of course not. Who would? But to me, addicts are like actresses, who all audition for the same role in a horror movie. It doesn't matter how they got to the audition. It doesn't matter how or where they grew up, once they get to the audition, all the actresses act in the same way and read the same lines. They all become the same character.

In Los Angeles, moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open, and in them you might find a movie star, or a successful audition, or a chance encounter with a powerful person who, with a snap of his fingers, would change your life, like a wizard.

When I did finally come to, I reported to Patrick that Valentino (not the dress designer but the silent movie star) had auditioned Patrick and me. At the climactic moment we had to twirl pantless, go into splits, and leave on the floor an inked impression of our anuses. Valentino had liked my impression more than Patrick’s and called me back for a second audition, which didn’t go so well.

All that day we went about stunned – we, the small town of real people behind the corporate logo of a ringed blue planet spinning through starry space. In the studio's Corner Store, in small groups that met on the company streets and in a hundred offices, we pieced our own experiences together with what was coming to light in the media. The suspect: a deranged, 43-year-old drifter who two days earlier had allegedly killed three people in Albuquerque, NM. He had fled to California where for reasons unknown he had been trying to contact actor-producer Michael Landon on the day of the shootings. The employees he had approached had repeatedly turned him away, since Landon had no particular connection with our studio. But just after dark the man had come back to the main gate again. He had walked up to a young actress waiting for her ride after an audition, said "hello" to her and then stepped over to the guardhouse. "I heard a shot and looked up," a secretary who had been passing nearby told me. "I saw Jeren fall and heard him groan. And there was this guy in a gray jacket just standing over him, pointing down at him with a gun. Then he raised the gun and pointed it at the other guard and shot again, and I saw Armando fall out the other side of the guardhouse. For a split second – just because we're at a movie studio – I thought it must be a movie they were filming. But there weren't any lights or cameras, and I realized it was real, and I thought, ‘He's gonna come after us because we saw it!' So I ran. I felt I was running for my life.

What I like to see is when actors use their celebrity in an interesting way. Some of them have charitable foundations, they do things like try to bring attention to the plight of women and girls in Afghanistan, or they're trying to save the White African Rhino, or they discover a passion for adult literacy, or what have you. All worthy causes, of course, and I knowtheir fame helps to get the word put. But let's be honest here.None of them went into the entertainment industry because they wanted to do good in the world. Speaking for myself, I didn't even think about until I was already successful. Before they were famous, my actor friends were just going to auditions and struggling to be noticed, taking any work they could find, acting for free in friends movies, working in restaurants or as caterers, just trying to get by. They acted because they loved acting, but also, let's be honest here, to be noticed. All they wantedf was to be seen. I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certainquestions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliche but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the night-club. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. Afterthat, we want to be remembered.

In the movie La La Land, Mia has to put on a brave face at auditions, then put on her best clothes and go out on the town with the little money she could scrounge up, trying to find a way to meet the difference-makers in Hollywood. Even when she was about ready to give up, she ultimately came back for one more reading, the one that made her a big star. Almost every Hollywood actor who is successful today has a real-life story like that. Their goal was the same as everyone in the business world: to land a big fish. People noticed Natalie Portman and John Wayne the way they eventually noticed Mia. No one would have bought what she was selling if she hadn’t presented herself like a winner, even when she was on the verge of moving back into her parents’ place in Boulder City. My mom will tell you I wanted to be a millionaire by seven years old. It was always on my mind. So from day one of my business career I acted the part. I had no money but I dressed like a professional. I wore a suit, which was the thing to do back then. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was pressed and clean. Bottom line is, if you’re shooting for the moon, you better act like an astronaut.

Universal City Oakwood, a complex of furnished temporary-stay apartments on Barham Boulevard. The Oakwood was popular with businessmen, airline pilots and stewardesses, recently divorced fathers, and actors staying in LA for auditions, episodic guest shots, or movie shoots. Visiting assassins liked it, too. The best part of staying there was the sex. Unless you had leprosy, it was almost impossible not to get laid. And even then, your chances were still pretty good.

The casting had been more difficult. Macdonnell and Meston both wanted William Conrad for the lead, but CBS objected. Conrad was known as a heavy from his movie roles (Body and Soul; Sorry, Wrong Number; The Killers). He was also a busy radio actor (Escape, Suspense, The Adventures of Sam Spade, many others) with a distinctive air presence. As Conrad told Hickman: “I think when they started casting for it, somebody said, ‘Good Christ, let’s not get Bill Conrad, we’re up to you-know-where with Bill Conrad.’ So they auditioned everybody, and as a last resort they called me. And I went in and read about two lines … and the next day they called me and said, ‘Okay, you have the job.

I don't understand! Why am I tied up?” Thane walked around the bed, his eyes never leaving her. “You said you wanted to be in a movie, didn't you?” “Yes, but, I thought...”” “You thought you were coming to a casting call. And you are. Oh yes, you are,” Thane said. “But...€”but what about Chloe and the other girls? I'm so confused. I need my clothes. Please, please untie me!” Her head pounded, and her brain felt so fuzzy. She couldn't think. Why was the room spinning? Thane laughed again. “You still don't get it, do you? You wanted to be in a movie, and you're just in time for your audition.” Diamond tried to think straight. Nothing made sense. She felt drugged. “Wha? What? I...€”I don't understand.” Thane flicked on the lights, and Diamond twisted her head away from the sudden brightness. “You will be the star tonight, my dear girl,” Thane whispered. Then, in a louder voice, he called, “Lights. Camera. Action.” Diamond blinked her eyes open, straining to see in the harsh, glaring light. Two large movie cameras were positioned directly over the bed. Oh, no! Oh, no! Her heart thudding, she jerked and thrashed against the ropes once more. “No!” she screamed. “Let me go! Please, please, let me go!

When I turned twenty-one, having hardly started working as an actor, I was asked to do a reading with Elia Kazan, practically the biggest director in the world in both stage and screen, for a new movie he was casting. It was called America, America, and it was going to tell the story of a young Greek man’s journey to the States. They were trying to find a young actor, relatively unknown, probably ethnic looking, to play the lead role. I thought I had a shot at it. I don’t know if I would have excelled at it, but I felt I had a real chance because I fit the description. But I was late and I missed the audition. I went there and they were gone and it was over. They got somebody else.

Failures as people: millions of Americans felt that this description fit them to a T. Seeking a solution, any solution, they eagerly forked over their cash to any huckster who promised release, the quicker and more effortlessly the better: therapies like “bioenergetics” (“The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind”); Primal Scream (which held that when patients shrieked in a therapist’s office, childhood trauma could be reexperienced, then released; John Lennon and James Earl Jones were fans); or Transcendental Meditation, which promised that deliverance could come if you merely closed your eyes and chanted a mantra (the “TM” organization sold personal mantras, each supposedly “unique,” to hundreds of thousands of devotees). Or “religions” like the Church Universal and Triumphant, or the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, or “Scientology”—this last one invented by a science fiction writer, reportedly on a bet. Devotees paid cash to be “audited” by practitioners who claimed the power—if, naturally, you paid for enough sessions—to remove “trauma patterns” accreted over the 75 million years that had passed since Xenu, tyrant of the Galactic Confederacy, deposited billions of people on earth next to volcanoes and detonated hydrogen bombs inside those volcanos, thus scattering harming “body thetans” to attach to the souls of the living, which once unlatched allowed practitioners to cross the “bridge to total freedom” and “unlimited creativity.” Another religion, the story had it, promised “perfect knowledge”—though its adherents’ public meeting was held up several hours because none of them knew how to run the movie projector. Gallup reported that six million Americans had tried TM, five million had twisted themselves into yoga poses, and two million had sampled some sort of Oriental religion. And hundreds of thousands of Americans in eleven cities had plunked down $250 for the privilege being screamed at as “assholes.” “est”—Erhard Seminars Training, named after the only-in-America hustler who invented it, Werner Erhard, originally Jack Rosenberg, a former used-car and encyclopedia salesman who had tried and failed to join the Marines (this was not incidental) at the age of seventeen, and experienced a spiritual rebirth one morning while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge (“I realized that I knew nothing. . . . In the next instant—after I realized that I knew nothing—I realized that I knew everything”)—promised “to transform one’s ability to experience living so that the situations one had been trying to change or had been putting up with, clear up just in the process of life itself,” all that in just sixty hours, courtesy of a for-profit corporation whose president had been general manager of the Coca-Cola Bottling Company of California and a former member of the Harvard Business School faculty. A

The next few auditions were just as rough. It didn’t help that Tommy had placed a bed in the audition room—the same bed he later used in Johnny and Lisa’s apartment. Almost every woman who came in needed to be reassured that The Room, whatever it was, wasn’t a porno.

Do you know those movies about the scary cult of, like, creepy kids who can read minds and worship the devil and live in the cornfields or something? Well, if they were casting for one of those movies, this girl would get the part. They wouldn’t even have to audition her.

True to her word, Iris began getting me meatier auditions. Working in Romania had given me a taste of what it was like to make a movie; I hoped it would be the start of something more. With that expectation came a lot of scary internal pressure. I was shocked to realize how much more pleasant it was to feel like an underdog.

forth on our front lawn for a half hour while I try to memorize my lines for an upcoming audition for a low-budget movie called My Daughter’s Tears. Could there be a film title more perfectly suited to my Special Skill?

After the show Humphrey Barclay, a highly talented Harrovian Head Boy who could act, direct, and draw cartoons, introduced me to John Cleese, a very tall man with black hair and piercing dark eyes. They were very complimentary and encouraged me to audition for the Footlights. I had never heard of this University Revue Club, founded in 1883 to perform sketches and comedy shows, but it seemed like a fun thing to do, and a month later Jonathan Lynn and I were voted in by the Committee, after performing to a packed crowd of comedy buffs in the Footlights’ Club Room. Jonathan, a talented actor, writer, and jazz drummer, would go on to direct Pass the Butler, my first play in the West End, and also write and direct Nuns on the Run, a movie with me and Robbie Coltrane. The audition sketch I had written for us played surprisingly well and, strange details, in the front row, lounging on a sofa, laughing with some Senior Fellows, was the author Kingsley Amis, next to the brother of the soon-to-be-infamous Guy Burgess, who would shortly flee the country, outed as perhaps the most flamboyant of all the Cambridge spies—for whenever he was outrageously drunk in Washington, which was every night, he would announce loudly to everybody that he was a KGB spy. Nobody believed him

For her audition, she performed a scene from All About Eve, her favorite movie, and as she brought the unlit cigarette, stolen from a woman’s purse in the lobby, to her lips, she said, “Slow curtain. The end,” and took a long drag. The director began to clap, smiling broadly, looking from side to side at the other people at the casting table. “That was wild,” he told her, shaking her hand, “just wild as hell.” When she walked into the lobby, her parents asked her how it went. “Fasten your seat belts,” Annie said, the cigarette dangling from her lips, “it’s going to be a bumpy night.” The Fangs had no idea what the hell she was talking about.

My father told me that when he was a kid, it was the best place in Syracuse to go to the movies. I told him I didn't think movies had been invented when he was a kid. He said he loved me, but if I didn't shut up and fill out my audition form, he'd probably kill me. I told him if he really felt that way he should give me a pen.

The two companies also clashed over creative control. Marvel wanted guarantees, for instance, that Peter Parker would be a heterosexual male who didn’t lose his virginity before age sixteen and never slept with anyone under sixteen (which Sony agreed to) and that he would be a Caucasian of average height who doesn’t smoke, drink, use drugs, or curse (which Sony would not accept). Both sides were regularly auditing each other, and Sony eventually formed a committee that met weekly just to deal with the nonstop barrage of Marvel-related issues.

The actors who played the Weasley twins only auditioned for the role because they wanted to take the day off school.