Life is becoming more hectic day by day, as I knew it would, with the World Cup, the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival and preparations for our own movie shoot all occurring simultaneously. Another simultaneous development: I'm goddam tired all the time, which helps neither my ability to get everything done, not to feel good while doing it. Despite my own obstacles, however, we're making progress. The shooting script is on its third draft, we're developing a soundtrack with a composer, and the movie is fully cast.

This Saturday we held an afternoon of auditions. I hadn't anticipated that this would be quite so difficult. We'd arranged for about twenty-five people to stop by at various times in the afternoon and either read parts with us, or with other actors. As the Director, I supposed the actors would expect me to know exactly what to do. But I'd never held an audition before! Fortunately, Scott is an actor, and knew the general process, and Jim had auditioned people for his other movies, so we were able to conduct ourselves professionally. But I felt a little awkward about not being "bossy" enough as the director. I felt I should have been confidently announcing things like "Could you read that again, please, only play it as if you have a life-threatening disease."

Many of the people who auditioned (mostly women) were pretty good, but not all, by any means. One woman (who seemed breathtakingly sexy to my uninitiated, homosexual eyes) had a tiny little range as an actress. We'd ask her to play it mad, then happy and get exactly the same reading for both.

I'd been most looking forward to auditioning actors for the young male part of Nicky. He's supposed to be very goodlooking. In the end, though, we only had one person read for the role, and although he certainly looked the part, he didn't seem to quite cut it as an actor. I'd been skeptical about him prior to the audition because of the somewhat arrogant tone of his emails. In fact, he didn't even bother submitting his resume, which seemed to hint that he thought his headshot was enough to make the sale.

The day after the auditions, I emailed the actors for whom we'd not found a role, just to let them know, and I got back, a day or two later, an extremely rude, unprintable email from the guy who'd read for Nicky. I was tempted to write back to him "You'll never work in this town again!" but unfortunately, I don't have that kind of power. Yet. :)