One thing that I try to continue to embrace is the idea of not being too married to a particular way of doing things. In screenwriting, there are “rules” or “standards”. To increase your chances of being read, you generally want to paint within these lines. However, things do gradually change and some of these rules or standards shift with them. It feels like one of those standards is starting to shift. And that standard has to do with character descriptions and their impact on casting.
In the recent Scriptnotes podcast Episiode #349 (if you aren’t currently subscribed to, and listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, stop reading this, find it on your podcast app of choice, and start listening immediately), hosts John August and Craig Mazin receive a letter from a listener by the name of “Jack”. Jack wrote in response to a previous discussion that took place on the show where they were talking about the perceived problem of reading a script and then casting the project. The suggestion was that these casting decisions tended to result in a “default white”, when a characters race is not specifically mentioned.
In the past I was taught, and have read numerous times, that unless specific character attributes like race, body type, age, and sometimes even gender, is not crucially relevant to the story, there is no need to be specific about it in the character descriptions on the page. It takes up space and it would certainly allow casting to put whomever they want into the role. Write without bias, cast without bias -that seems fair, right? Besides, you don't have any control over the casting department, anyway. Apparently, it’s not quite as simple as that. Jack’s letter identifies himself as having worked in casting for more than ten years, both as part of the one of the major companies that releases casting breakdowns for the industry, as well as a casting director. When generating casting breakdowns, Jack states, “If a character does not have a defined race in the script, the role is listed in the breakdown as ‘all ethnicities’.” Jack’s letter then describes the process where agents start to receive the casting breakdown and considers their talent pools. What ends up happening is that the majority of people being submitted to ‘all ethnicities’ roles end up being white. One of the reasons for this is that historically, the majority of talent agent rosters are made up of white people. In addition, the agents will tend to choose the people that are the most successful and make them the most money, which have historically been, mostly whites. So if a role is listed as “all ethnicities” the odds are that the character will be cast as white, because statistically the odds are that is who the agents are sending to the auditions. Jack’s letter further comments that there is no conspiracy here, but that the agents are simply doing what is “familiar and easy”.
So, what might feel on the surface as writing characters with a color-blind attitude, will actually work against people of a non-Caucasian ethnicity. It’s just the numbers. However, if writers describe a character as having a specific ethnicity, the agents will send those individuals to the auditions. Jack insists that the more writers do this an increasing number of ethnic minorities get hired, and that all-important moneymaking list will become more diverse as well.
Jack’s letter continues on to encourage writers who may not feel comfortable about racially defining their leads, to at least write in some of the smaller day players with specific races, so as to ensure the agents don’t go with the “familiar and easy” default white. Along with the encouragement to define the races of characters, he suggests to include specific ages, especially in the over 40 category. Again, movies tend to default to the young and beautiful, because that is what is “familiar and easy”.
August and Mazin continue to support this idea and also build off this notion of what has become a default mode in casting. We understand that the majority of people who end up on camera tend to be young, fit, and attractive. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it is the normal. Add on to that the wonderful skills of makeup and wardrobe and you have a very polished, albeit not very realistic portrayal of life that comes through cinema. In most of our lives, not everyone who crosses our path is a hot 20-30 something with perfect teeth, hair, and sculpted body. If getting a more realistic slice of the world is important to the story, try to encourage the casting of people who don’t always fit the classic Hollywood body type. Include characters who look like “normal people”, for lack of a better term. This also comes in handy when you might be working on a script where wide ethnic diversity may not be appropriate. For instance, the film Braveheart takes place in the late 13th Century Scotland and England. Not a lot of racial diversity there at that time. To try and force a wide range of ethnic roles would be inaccurate to the period material and would probably feel like pandering. However, the film did do a good job of casting many characters that had different body types, facial scarring, receding or patchy hair, asymmetrical facial features, young and old, etc. The past standard has been to try and write with an open mind and, unless it needs to be specific, make your characters available to all ethnicities. However, when analyzing how casting is traditionally done, and how past trends tends do not work in favor of diverse casting, we can now make adjustments. In the future, I’ll certainly be making this adjustment to be more specific about the diverse range of races, ages, and body types, that give our stories another note of authenticity, as well as give more jobs to very talented people that might have been looked over in the past.