Casting About

Filmmaker Barry Hershey's impressionistic documentary about the casting process is the antidote to years of comic "audition montages," those guaranteed laugh-getting freak-show parades of no-talents mangling monologues and pulling nutty stunts in hopes of standing out from the crowd.

In 2000, while developing a WWII-era drama with three major female roles, Hershey got the idea to somehow include pieces of audition footage in the finished product. So when he and his producer began seeing actresses, they hired a cinematographer to shoot the hundreds of candidates in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, London and Berlin who read for the parts of an artist's model, a...