The American Game Audition Tapes

About a year after I got to LA, I started developing my first movie.  It was a war film about a group of enemy soldiers during the Civil War who stop fighting for a few days and play a series of baseball games.  The movie was first to be called Ball Hill but it was renamed The American Game.  I would wind up spending the majority of my "career" just trying to get it made.

In 2002 a producer named Alex Barder got involved.  Alex was a real character, and I mean that in every sense both positive and negative.  He was sort of the stereotypical producer: shallow, bull-headed, yet charming and determined.  He was obsessed with the script, and he wanted it worked on day and night.  He would sometimes call me late at night or early in the morning to work on a single line.  I would say this was inspiring, but the changes he wanted made typically involved dumbing it down for an audience he believed weren't smart enough to appreciate a thoughtful movie.  He liked to brag about how sophisticated he was because he liked the movie Amadeus.

Despite his drabacks, he did get it almost as far as it ever got in 2003 when he got a casting director involved named Alyssa Weisberg.  Alyssa had left the industry for a little while, and was looking to get back in.  She worked on American Game to sort of re-establish her contacts.  In contacting the agents and managers she knew, she found that they wouldn't send their well-known actors to a movie that didn't have any funding or attachments.  Martin Sheen stepped in to help, and lent me his name as attached to the project.  Suddenly, those agents responded to Alyssa, and sent their actors.

It helped that Alex was claiming that there was an investor.  It was a partial lie.  He had some investors in Florida who said they might invest once he had some names attached.  That's why we needed Alyssa.  The usual catch 22 had been keeping us from moving further because we needed the actors to get the money, but we needed the numbers to even see the actors.  Having Martin and that half truth got us past that wedge.

For two months we saw a long string of actors.  All we needed were a couple celebrities to get the funding, but the agents had required that we audition their other clients first, and Alyssa wanted to get more actors reading to build up her own portfolio.  I took whatever time I could away from work to go in.  We held the auditions on a meeting room in Alex's building, and met with the big names at a hotel in Santa Monica.

After weeks of this process, I started to get a bit confused.  Didn't we have the names we needed to take the next step?  Nothing happened.  And after a few months and we had finished seeing actors, still nothing was happening.  When Alex moved on to another film and came to me saying that Tom Sizemore was interested, I realized he had no plans to do anything with the actors we had seen.  Known to be abusive and on drugs, Sizemore had nowhere near the star power of others we had already seen.  And so I moved on from Alex.  The movie never got made.

Alyssa went on to great fame though.  Alex later told me the story of what happened.  She was approached by a production company that needed to see some actors quickly.  They didn't have time to go through the audition process, so they wanted to see actors who had auditioned for something else.  She showed them the tape from The American Game.  The producers picked the ones they liked and brought them in for further auditions.

The show was Lost.  Alyssa became the casting director for JJ Abrams, and many of his projects have been cast off of the audition tapes of The American Game.