I'm sorry, I'm still not over Lilo being cast as Elizabeth Taylor and now that I have to stomach driving past a mile-high billboard of her as Liz in down sunset and try to make breakfast from coming up, I'm going to give you some more examples of shitty casting in Hollywood obviously by idiots who have never seen a movie made with the subject of their respective bio-pic therefore resort to stunt casting in order to make desperate dollars off an unassuming public. Someone please start getting it right, it's getting ridiculous. There are only a few examples here, there are so many but I don't want to go too far back or spew my resentment all over the place, so I'm just leaving you with 6.
Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh in the upcoming bio-pic Hitchcock (2012). Dear Scarlett is not nearly as 'pointy' as Janet Leigh, and her voice is far too low. This is a good example of being-cast-for-your-rack-casting, I think this is an enormous misfire. No one is going to envision Janet Leigh with someone like Scar-Jo who shouldn't be doing ANY bio-pics.
Who Should Have Been Cast: Emma Stone. Not only does she look like Janet Leigh, I'm under the firm impression that Emma Stone can do anything.
Ben Affleck as George Reeves. This was just a hot mess in every direction. Hollywoodland (2006) was an awful film, mainly because Adrien Brody was in it, but Ben Affleck as the very first superman really crawled under my skin and planted a cancer in it.
If you could recast this today, this is basically an obvious choice, that is to hired Armie Hammer who is not only versatile and interesting, he also basically looks a lot like George Reeves, and he's reminiscent of 50's movie stardom much more than Ben Affleck who sadly is stagnant to his own time.
James Franco as James Dean. This was a misfire and a half. Rather than get to the iconic hypersexualized states of Dean, Franco (of course) sought out to bring about the intellectual 'serious actor' side of Dean, and lets face it, none of us were interested in that. The movie flopped, predictably.
Who should be recast today? Aaron Taylor Johnson. I know that no one is interested in any more takes on James Dean, but I think this would be an interesting choice. They are about the same age, and let's face it, Aaron knows how to brood.
Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick. This never made sense to me and no one is a bigger Edie fan than I am. Aside from the film being poorly written and constructed, Miller was all wrong for the part. She was older, British, she didn't look anything like her or sound anything like her. You can only put pantyhose and thick black eye-liner on someone so much but it still looks like a cheap Halloween costume.
Ellen Page would have been perfect, she's definitely got that bulnerability factor, she's petite, and she looks a lot like Edie if you just tweek the hair and make up a bit. I think this would have been a far superior choice.
Just for shits and giggles lets do Sienna again in her role as Tippi Hedren in her performance in the new HBO film The Girl (2013) opposite Toby Jones as Alfred Hitchcock. Oy Vey. Again, what is the appeal here exactly, and has anyone ever seen Tippi Hedren? Seriously.
I think something as troubling as this HBO movie which is clearly riding the coattails of that other Hitchcock film I was telling you about would be vastly improved by the casting of Maggie Grace (you might remember her as that whiny bitch Shannon from the TV juggernaut Lost (2004-2010). But she could definitely encapsulate that icy-blonde persona of Tippi and really bring it full circle.
And let's cap this off with the casting decision that deeply affected all of us for the rest of our lives. The studio executives were clearly smoking something when they decided casting Lindsay Lohen, la trainwreck terrible as cinematic icon Elizabeth Taylor, and judging by the promo photos that have been coming out and that new ridiculous trailer for Liz and Dick (2012) it seems like it will indeed be a barf fest.
Who should have been cast instead? Isn't it obvious? Not only does Lilly Collins look almost identical to a young Elizabeth Taylor, she's right about the correct age. I mean Lindsay is the right age too but because of all the cocaine and drinking binges she looks about 45. Lilly aesthetically appeals as Elizabeth Taylor way more than anyone else, forget Lindsay for the moment, I mean she should be at the tippy top of the list. Hollywood execs seriously need to stop smoking crack. Period.
Every once in a while I like to get serious around here, and talk about something that is really important to me, don't stop reading, I promise to make it interesting. A while ago I saw a documentary that I have since shown to basically all of my film buff and non-film buff friends and every one has thought it to be very moving. It was a tiny film distributed by Red Envelope, directed by a first-timer who stumbled upon the story whilst researching his biography on Jean Harlow. It's called Girl 27 (2007) and it's about a young Hollywood extra named Patricia Douglas who was brutally assaulted and raped by an MGM salesman and whose case against said salesman and the studio that pays his salary was turned into a cruel media circus. She eventually lost, was disgraced, and spent the rest of her life in seclusion until David Stenn, the director, tracked her down for this film.
Here's some background. MGM like other big studios at the time (Columbia, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. etc.) ruled the movie business with an iron fist and controlled everything in the industry from a person's name to their shoe size, to put it in simplistic terms. Back then, if you were contracted to a studio like MGM it meant that you were owned body and soul and treated as a commodity. and no one had less say about that than the women in those days, particularly female extras ,who's daily routine consisted of dancing around half-naked in elaborately choreographed musical numbers amongst all-male crews. Many extras vouch that they were subjected to many sexist and demeaning processes when they initially auditioned for contracts, the studio executive would often make passes at them, come up and grab them from behind, and ask them to pull up their skirts and show their legs.
Patricia Douglas was one such woman, well it's unfair to call her that. She was a girl. She was 17 when a 'movie call' came in that asked for her to report to what was known back then as the Hal Roach Ranch (Hal Roach was one of the top producers at MGM at the time) the year was 1937. She was asked to report in costume to what turned out to be a drunken free-for-all party hosted by Louis B. Mayer as a thank you for his sales task force. So basically you have a bunch of underage girls serving booze and being paid to make nice with a sea of older belligerent men. In this sea, was a man named David Ross who savagely and without mercy attacked Patricia Douglas, beat her up, and raped her in the back of a Ford Model-T while the rest of the party went on.
Patricia Douglas faces her attacker
Here's the thing, that's not even the worst part. The worst part is what happened next. Brave enough to take her case to court, MGM put all of their money and muscle into silencing her. This is before rape shield laws, so nothing was out of bounds. They played her up to be a tramp and a drunkard, ruining her reputation, getting David Ross acquitted, and pretty much ensuring that the rest of her life would be miserable and painful.
It's an unforgettable and truly captivating story, the irony of which being that it wasn't a story anyone ever knew. Stenn talks about how he accidentally stumbled on it when trying to find newspaper archives regarding the sudden and shockingly early death of Jean Harlow at 26 years old, when he realized that something was 'pushing her off the front pages' and it was Patricia Douglas who took on the Goliathian MGM system at 17 armed with nothing but the truth.
During this documentary we find out what a painstaking process it was to find anything on her at all considering the studio had done everything possible to suppress the case and the identity of Patricia Douglas, successfully I might add, and she herself absolutely refused to talk about it completely until Stenn's begging finally paid off and she made a few on-camera interviews.
It's an incredibly heartbreaking and profound piece of work, not necessarily for the film making itself, but for the story it tells. It is shocking considering the corruption of the criminal justice system and the moral ineptitude of an entire infrastructure and is a black spot on the entire history of the movie business that had for a long time gone unnoticed. That is why I chose to write about it, and that is why I recommend everyone please see it. This is my contribution to its word-of-mouth trajectory. It had premiered at Sundance in 2007. I believe it is still streaming on Netflix, if not, you can find it online. Here is the trailer.
