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Whew! That Was Quick. More Pilot News

Here are five more pilot/CD attachments. You heard it here first (probably):

ABC’s untitled Roland Emmerich pilot will be cast by John Papsidera at Automatic Sweat. Can’t really make sense of the log line: An astrophysics student finds out his father is implicated in an assassination attempt on the president. Somehow the ensuing chain of events leads to the student’s revelation that he should stop caring about space and fight evil. Yeah. No info on when this is to shoot, or why, if he quits being an astrophysicist, it matters that he was an astrophysicist in the first place.

ABC’s “Last Resort” pilot will be cast by Rebecca Mangieri and Wendy Weidman at Creative Casting. It’s scheduled to shoot in late February. This one is about the crew of a nuclear submarine who defy an order to deploy their payload and declare themselves a sovereign nation.

The CW’s “Cult” pilot will be cast by Elizabeth Barnes and Corbin Bronson and should get under way in March. I’m going to attempt to guess the plot of this show based on the network and the title: A high school girl moves to a new town with her family, but she finds adjusting to her surroundings is not easy owing to a clique of fashionable, acerbic, vampire-worshiping werewolf cheerleaders that rules the school. Okay, go look it up. How close was I?

Fox’s untitled Kevin Williamson serial killer project will be cast by Lesli Gelles-Raymond and Greg Orson of GO Casting; it’s also scheduled for a March start. Specifically, it’s about a social media–savvy serial killer. Be sure to like him on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter at @Dextersux.

Fox’s “Guilty” pilot will be cast by Gayle Pillsbury of Zane/Pillsbury. No shoot date yet. It centers on a defense attorney who is framed for fraud and disbarred, after which he uses his lawyering skills to take on cases outside the legal system and also exact revenge on the butthorns who framed him.

Keep checking back for more pilot info. As always, consult the production charts for comprehensive pilot, film, and series casting info.

Update re “Cult”: I was way off. Apologies to The CW, because this sounds cool and original and not at all related to rich high school kids: Two investigators work to uncover the connection between an underground TV show called “CULT” and the mysterious deaths of some of its viewers.

Casting News Returns, Having Broken All Its Resolutions Already

Hope everyone had a good holiday and a happy new year. Hope all your football teams won and your roast meats were moist and flavorful. Hope you found an excuse to leave the table before your crazy uncle started talking about politics. Hope 2012 has greeted you with a hearty handclasp and a promise of work.

Hollywood basically shuts down during the month of December, but December is over, January is half over (really? already? crud), and pilot season is upon us. The broadcast networks have started to dole out pickup orders, and the studio casting departments are hard at work finding casting directors for next year’s “Work It” and “Playboy Club”!

Just a note before I continue: Pilot season will get pretty hectic, and I will try to post more frequently, and less long-windedly. You might see posts announcing a single project, or austere lists in the place of paragraphs filled with mediocre jokes.

Okay, two new projects for Brett Greenstein and Collin Daniel: They’ll be casting the Fox pilot “Ben Fox [no relation—Ed.] Is My Manny,” about a career woman whose shiftless, layabout brother moves in with her to help take care of her child (you know “Raising Hope” is a big deal when even its own network is knocking it off), and TV Land’s newly picked-up “Hot in Cleveland” spinoff series starring Cedric the Entertainer and personal favorite Niecy Nash, now titled “Have Faith.” “Ben Fox” is shooting in March. No word when “Have Faith” will get under way.

This was confirmed last week, but in case you missed it, Alyssa Weisberg will be casting the “Carrie Diaries” pilot for the CW, which, considering it’s a prequel to “Sex and the City,” I’m going to go out on a huge, thick limb and say this one will get picked up to series. The shoot is scheduled for spring sometime. Nothing more definite yet.

Two more, real quick: (1) Cami Patton’s office will be doing the casting for FX’s drama pilot “The Americans,” which sounds like it could be very awesome. It’s about two Soviet spies who pose as a married couple in 1980s D.C. It’s supposed to shoot in March; location TBA. Hopefully this will be a period drama worth watching. (2) Gary Zuckerbrod will be staffing up TNT’s new medical drama “Chelsea General,” based on the book “Monday Mornings” by CNN medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. It will also shoot in March, most likely in Los Angeles.

Back Stage Reader Snags the EW.com Spotlight

This past April, Back Stage profiled the work of actor Maria Olsen in "Curtain," a short horror film, for our weekly "Who Got the Part" column. And it appears as though we weren't the only ones to take notice of this industrious performer's ever-growing presence on the splatter, ahem, silver screen. Entertainment Weekly's website has posted a wonderful first-person account of Olsen's time on the set of Paranormal Activity 3 as part of their year-end spotlight on the "unsung heroes of the year" in the world of entertainment. Click here for the EW.com story, and here for Maria's "Who Got the Part" column from April 2011. Here's wishing Ms. Olsen and all of our readers continued success in the upcoming year. We're sure it'll be a scream!

P.S.

Click here to check out Ms. Olsen's impressive resume in the Back Stage Talent Database.

--Jesse Landberg

 

More Pilots and At Least One Show

Ready to forswear turkey sandwiches forever and get back to the gym? Good, because in the new year stuff is going to start filming, and you must be prepared. Tone those abs, touch up those roots, and make sure you have a full complement of Proactiv products, because it will be on, and you must make like Roxette and Look Sharp! Let’s take a look at some more of the choice projects that will get going in the upcoming leap year.

Hey dudes, remember Charlie Sheen? The gifted comic actor who did pretty much everything he could to be blackballed by Hollywood short of starting a dogfighting club, voting Republican, or being seen at a Clippers game, but he just couldn’t pull it off because his show made so much money? He’s back. All is forgiven. He has brought Hollywood a bouquet of roses in the form of new FX comedy “Anger Management,” and Hollywood has decided to not press charges. “Anger Management” is a show based on the 2003 film starring Jack Nicholson and Adam Sandler, about a guy assigned to court-ordered anger management classes only to find that his therapist isn’t exactly the most stoic monk at the monastery, either. It’s being cast by G. Charles Wright in anticipation of a March shoot. Wait—shhh! If you listen closely, you can hear the underwriters at whatever company wrote the policy on this production grinding their teeth.

Speaking of semiautobiographical shows about gifted comic actors, NBC has green-lighted a pilot for the super funny Sarah Silverman. It’s about a woman who’s newly single after a very long-term relationship with Jimmy Kimmel. Okay, not Jimmy Kimmel, just some guy, hence semiautobiographical. It’s being cast by Anya Colloff, with no start date set.

Pilots. Pie-lots. Lots of Pie. Lots of Pumpkin Pie. FOOTBALL!

 I already used up all my good Thanksgiving jokes in my last post, so let’s just get into a humorless post about pilots. Yawn.

Pilot season hasn’t started, per se, but some networks, most notably NBC, are feeling the holiday spirit and starting to issue orders at a steady clip. It’s the network equivalent of Starbucks rolling out the peppermint lattes in August, or whenever the hell they’re doing it these days. Pilot season creep. What once was March is now November. So it goes.

So far NBC has given orders to comedies “Save Me,” “Isabel,” the “Munsters” reboot (seriously?), and an untitled Sarah Silverman comedy, along with dramas “Blue Tilt” and “Beautiful People.” Possibly others as well, but not many people are in their offices right now to confirm, so I can’t say for sure. I would just head down to the Whole Foods on Santa Monica and Fairfax and start randomly asking people until I found an NBC development exec, but that would be annoying…for me. It’s not important anyhow, as all of those projects are still sans casting directors except for “Isabel,” which is being cast by Schiff/Audino ahead of a January start. It’s based on a Canadian series about a girl who visits a psychologist to vent about her crazy family. I have nothing bad to say about this premise and commend NBC for ordering a show that features no supernatural or extraterrestrial beings whatsoever. Bold.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for ABC’s untitled Don Fogelman pilot, a comedy about a family who moves into a condo and discovers that all of the neighbors are aliens. Sigh. I’m not saying that you can’t make a good show with an alien or two (see “ALF”), but I feel like humans have enough going on without having to deal with alien neighbors or full-moon-related lupine transformations or whatever is going on in “Grimm.” Anyhow, this one also shoots in January, and Susan Vash is doing the casting.

Over at Fox, another remake idea only slightly better than “The Munsters”: “In Living Color” is coming back! Fox has ordered two half-hour specials, with an option to pick it up to series. It’ll be just like the ’90s, except with a completely different cast and none of the characters you know and love. Look forward to fresh, new ideas like Fire Marshal Steve and Homey D. Magician! Okay, you know what? I’m being unfair. This idea is still way better than rebooting “The Munsters.” Julie Ashton is casting in anticipation of a March shoot.

Lots of other pilots gearing up to shoot early next year. As always, check out the L.A. production charts for a full list of tomorrow’s disappointing shows…today!

 

Casting Miscellany for You to Care About Briefly Before the Holidays

Did you know the day before Thanksgiving is the third-biggest drinking day of the year behind New Year’s Eve and Keith Richards’ birthday? It is. (It’s actually the second-biggest if you don’t count the amount that Keith Richards consumes personally on his birthday.) Everyone is off work the next day, and no one has to be anywhere until 4 p.m., when the only obligation is to stuff yourself with a meal tailor-made for a hangover, after which naps are practically encouraged. It’s great!

I tell you this not because it has anything to do with casting, but to give you, dear actor, a glimpse at where my mind is on the cusp of this holiday break. I assume that you, likewise, are preoccupied with such thoughts as “Why did the inventors of the Turducken stop at three birds?,” “Why does anyone settle for canned cranberry sauce when using fresh cranberries is so easy?,” and “Who the hell gives someone a Lexus for Christmas?” But casting is happening. And so I must proceed.

The holiday humbug award goes to Barden/Schnee, which refuses to do the American thing, which is coast through the next month pretending to work. It is casting two projects gearing up to shoot in the next few weeks: “The Iceman,” a biopic of Richard Kuklinski, a hit man who kept his job secret from his wife and kids (and the cops, obvs) for years, starts shooting in Shreveport, La., in mid-December; “Lovelace,” a biopic of the first real porn star, Linda Lovelace, star of “Deep Throat,” goes before cameras in January, presumably in L.A., although it is a Nu Image film, so we can’t count out Bulgaria or Azerbaijan, or wherever the hell Avi Lerner is shooting these days. (This is not the same Lovelace biopic that originally had Lindsay Lohan attached. This one stars Lohan’s “Mean Girls” co-star Amanda Seyfried in the lead.) So not only is it working hard, but it’s working on films about mafia hit men and X-rated cinema? Paging Fox News: When you get done with those evil rainbow candy-cane makers, don’t forget to address this new insidious threat to Christmas.

Another cool project that’s going to start shooting in January is “Sleight of Hand,” an action comedy about a thief who steals a rare coin belonging to a French gangster—I would say “ruthless” French gangster, but I think that’s implied. I mean, the stereotype of French people being completely without mercy or compassion didn’t just conjure itself out of thin air. Anyhow, lots of big names attached: Mel Gibson, Kiefer Sutherland, Gérard Depardieu, Thomas Jane. Since its shoot date has already been pushed back a few times, the sweet stench of “postponed indefinitely” hangs about the project. But out of naive hope, I will say that Ricki Maslar is casting it ahead of a January start in New Orleans.

Might be back tomorrow with a post on pilots, but if not, happy Thanksgiving.

 

Okay, Some Los Angeles Stuff Too

I can’t quit you, Los Angeles readers, and there are just too many big movies gearing up for me to wait another week (or two, because let’s be honest, I’m kind of erratic with the posts).

Most exciting, they’re making a new “Die Hard,” a series that built up enough goodwill with the original trilogy that I hardly even cared about the fourth one being not that good. (Evidently, I know nothing of the “Die Hard” series and its goodness, as four has an 82 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, better than two [64 percent] and three [50 percent! What the—? At least Ebert gave it three stars].) It will be titled “A Good Day to Die Hard,” which, amazingly, is the best-named sequel in this series, easily topping the idiotic “Live Free or Die Hard” and the nonsensical “Die Hard: With a Vengeance” while slightly edging the delightfully campy “Die Harder.” In this installment Officer McClane travels to Moscow after his son runs afoul of the politsia. Obviously, he manages to piss off some bad guy(s), and it’s off to the races. Aquila/Wood is casting ahead of a February start.

Alyssa Weisberg and April Webster are casting the “Untitled HH Project,” which isn’t really the name of the project; the project has a name, but the producer-writer guy likes to have inscrutable code names for his projects. And even though anyone who matters knows exactly what the project is, people still go along with the charade because this guy’s projects make lots of money, they are generally pretty cool, and he has impeccable hair. So, “Untitled HH Project” it is. Get excited. It shoots next Secretember in Shoosh!ville.

New York Casting Odds and Ends

To this point these posts have been directed to L.A. actors, and pertaining to projects casting and occasionally shooting in Los Angeles. So I thought I’d throw New York actors a bone, for once. Don’t expect this too often, as I consider you fairly compensated for lack of casting news by the fact that you live in New York City, which is way awesomer than Los Angeles in every awesomeness-related metric but weather and Korean barbecue.

Anyhow, first, a few pilots. Shooting in December, an untitled pilot from Douglas McGrath (formerly titled “On We Go”) for USA Network that centers on a luckless New York actor who has to return to his Texas hometown to care for his ailing father, putting his Broadway dreams on hold. You see, said actor has had trouble landing roles because of his unfortunate resemblance to Broadway titan Nathan Lane. And get this: The lead will be played by … Nathan Lane! Now that’s a premise! Bonnie Finnegan and Steven Jacobs are casting.

Meanwhile, Jodi Collins is casting Showtime pickup “Gurland on Gurland,” described as a “docu-comedy,” which in this case means a fictionalized account of real-life filmmaker Andrew Gurland’s career and family life (as opposed to a nonfiction show that happens to be funny, like “The Real Housewives of New Jersey”). So like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” except with some dude no one has ever heard of? I’m confused. It shoots in November, in case you’re not and want to submit.

Next: an A&E telefilm. “Coma,” from Scott Free Productions, about a doctor who uncovers an organ-harvesting ring when she looks into cases of seemingly healthy patients going into comas in her hospital. What they had in common: None were smokers, all had type-O blood, and their in-room televisions were tuned in to the premiere of “Charlie’s Angels” on ABC. Zing! Anyhow, Mark Saks is casting ahead of a November shoot in Atlanta.

Finally, some movies. Avy Kaufman is casting “The East,” about an FBI agent who infiltrates an eco-terrorist organization. It’s shooting in November in Atlanta. I wanted to get that one out of the way quickly because next is the project that Will Smith chose over “Django Unchained.” Before I tell you what it is, I want you to remove all sharp objects and corrosive liquids from your immediate vicinity. I’ll wait. Safety first. Okay, it’s called “After Earth” (aka “1000 A.E.”), and he plays a father who crash-lands on a desolate planet, where he and his estranged son must co-operate to survive. That’s not so bad, right?  Here’s the thing: His son is played by Jaden Smith, and it’s directed by M. Night Shyamalan. So, yeah, let’s see: Star in a Tarantino movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz, and Samuel L. Jackson or put your son’s “career” in the hands of the guy who just managed to offend the artistic sensibilities of 11-year-old boys the world over? Do you know how hard that is? Kids who consider Youtube crotch-shot montages fine cinema were like, “ ‘Avatar’? No, thanks. Billy saw it and told me ‘Don’t bother.’ ”  Anyhow, Douglas Aibel is casting whatever non-Smith roles there are in this movie, which shoots in February in New Orleans.

 

More Cable Pilots, Including One for You, the Classically Trained Talking Dog

(This is late because I was on vacation)

Let’s face it: The economy is being totally lame right now. With lack of demand forcing corporations to sit on their cash reserves instead of using them to hire workers—workers who could in turn use their wages to purchase goods and services, thus increasing demand, and spurring more hiring—America is mired in a jobless “recovery” that has little chance of dropping those quotation marks any time soon. As always, Cheech & Chong are right: Things are tough all over.

Even given that the plight of the average American has not received the requisite attention by our political and media elites these past few years, there is one demographic whose economic woes and dim job prospects have been downright ignored: talking dogs. Well, Disney Channel has decided to do something about it, green-lighting a pilot called “Dog With a Blog.” It centers on a couple of divorcées who get married, but their respective children aren’t getting along all that great. However, when the kids discover that their family dog has a secret (Spoiler Alert: The secret is he can talk; also, he has a blog), they find common cause in hiding this sensitive information from their parents. Prospective Buck Bundys and Brian Griffins can send their headshots and résumés to Carol Goldwasser, who’s casting in preparation for a November shoot.

Don’t worry, humans, plenty of pilots are interested in you as well. ABC Family has your interests in mind, having recently green-lighted four pilots, with nary a social-media-savvy canine in sight! All are scheduled to shoot in November, so let me just get that out of the way right now. Dan Shaner and Michael Testa will be handling “Intercept”; Megan Branman and Dylann Brander are doing “Village People”; Alyson Silverberg is casting “Baby Daddy”; and Jeanie Bacharach and Gillian O’Neill are doing “Bunheads.” You can check the production charts for plot deets (in the case of “Baby Daddy,” you can also just read the plot synopsis of “Raising Hope”).

'The Glee Project' is Casting Season 2

                                The finalists of "The Glee Project" Season 1.

"The Glee Project" has started casting season two.

Season one, which concluded in August, awarded four contenders with guest starring roles on the third season of "Glee." Samuel Larson and Damian McGinty will appear in seven episode guest starring arcs, while runners-up Lindsay Pearce and Alex Newell will appear in two episodes each.

"You could be any size, shape, anything, and you were right for 'The Glee Project,' " "Glee" casting director Robert Ulrich told Back Stage about the deluge of "Glee" fans at the season one open calls.

Oxygen has opened up the casting site, and there are already 3168 video auditions on the site. You must be 18 or older and be able to convincingly play a high school student to try out.  You can submit a video online at www.thegleeprojectcasting.com or you can attend one of three open calls in New York, Chicago, or Nashville. Times and dates will be posted at www. thegleeprojectcasting.com.