www.backstage.com: A planned auction of celebrity actor audition tapes scheduled to take place this week in Beverly Hills will not go forward. A representative for Jane Jenkins and Janet Hirshenson, the two casting directors who had planned to sell 54 VHS tapes of early-career auditions by actors such as Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock, confirmed to Backstage that the tapes have been withrawn from the auction and will instead be donated to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
3 comments:
The fact that these tapes were to be auctioned in the first place shocks me. Beyond the regulations around this, it seems that the casting directors would know how inherently wrong this is. Audition tapes are not meant to be published or sold, and it should remain that way. I was surprised that the article didn't mention reactions from the actors in the tapes; when I scrolled down to read some of the comments, one was by an actress in those tapes who was outraged about the whole ordeal.
While I think it's good that the tapes are not being sold, giving them to the Academy still means that something meant to be private will be available for viewing by anyone. I guess they chose the lesser of two evils, but it still doesn't seem like a very satisfactory solution to me.
It's so weird that someone would auction off audition tapes. Those should be kept private and not shared with anyone except those involved in casting. They shouldn't even be given to the academy. That seems like a basic invasion of privacy. N matter how good their audition was, nobody will want that distributed. I hope we don't have to start going as far as to make people sign something that says they don't want their materials distributed to other people or publicly. It seems silly that such a problem could have been avoided by people being less greedy and using some common sense.
As lovely as I think it is that they have decided to donate the tapes to The Academy is, because I generally support giving interesting things to places the public can see them, I don't feel like that solved the problem at all. In fact, I think that made things worse. The issue people were having was an issue with the breach of privacy and lack of consent. This was not solved by giving them to the Academy, as now anyone can go in and look at them. I fail to see why they couldn't have just canceled the audition, and then either given the tapes back to the actors, put them back into whichever box in storage they came from, or destroyed them.
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