This Week's Column...Plus EXTRAS!

The casting couch...Dave style!

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Ben Shapiro would paywall such things.

But also, Ben Shapiro won’t eat crabs.

Oh, he’ll GET crabs, but he won’t eat ‘em.

My point being, BUY ME A BEER!

So this week’s column is about my years in the casting biz. And I mention how every stunning white actress in the 1980s did coke. That’s a slight overstatement - not all of them. But most.

Now, my “game” back then was that I wasn’t just a casting director but also an editor with a full editing bay.

In 1987, you had to pay for editing. People didn’t carry video editing apps on their cellphones. There WERE no cellphones. Editing was a skill, and an expensive one at that. So when I’d encounter an attractive actress at a casting session, my “in,” my way to see her again outside work, was to offer to edit a demo reel for her. See, now she’ll have to come to my place after hours with her raw footage.

Cut me some fucking slack, Cletus. I was a teen. Surrounded by the most beautiful girls on earth. You expect me to NOT be randy? Plus, it wasn’t a con. I always edited the reels as promised, and quite well. I never charged a cent, and I never asked for or demanded anything extracurricular.

I mean, sometimes the extracurricular shit happened, but organically.

So I tell myself.

There was this one bim…let’s call her Chrissy. She was an heiress. I won’t say more than that because I’m not keen on embarrassing her, but let’s just say, you’d know the family name, and you’d know the fortune. And holy cannoli was she hot. Among the most stunning blondes I’d ever seen. You’ve heard the phrase “she could stop traffic?” One time when Chrissy was walking from her car to my house, she literally stopped traffic. Every dude stopped driving and stared.

For the record, there are two types of actress/models - those who dress down in their off hours because they don’t want to be gawked at, and those who do the converse. Chrissy always did the converse.

So I’d been editing Chrissy’s reels for a few years, and sometime around 1990 she was like “ERR MAH GERD, why don’t you ever CHERGE ME MERNY? I’m worth like a BILLION DERLLERS.”

And I told her that I don’t charge actors money, because I like actors and I enjoy editing.

And she was like, “Didn’t you hear me? I’m a BILLIONAIRE. I have merny cerming ert of my erse.”

So ol’ Dave’s Jew-mind starts racing. Here’s a billionaire heiress literally saying “take my money.” Well, I didn’t need $200 for a reel. But…

I says to her I says, “those direct-to-video horror films you do, they’re not very good. They’re not gonna propel you to the stardom you deserve. But you know, each of those films costs at most $40,000. Why don’t we make one ourselves that you can star in, and it can showcase your awesome unparalleled acting talent” (and at that exact moment I was damned to hell for telling the greatest lie ever).

And Chrissy exclaimed “ERR MAH GERRRRRD, let’s DERRERT! Let’s DERRERT NERR!” (translation: “Oh my God, let’s do it; let’s do it now”).

So now I’m a producer, knowing that I can bring in the film for $30,000, meaning I can pocket the extra $10,000, not a bad haul for a kid.

Except…because there’s always gonna be an “except”…like all 1980s blonde heiresses, Chrissy did a LOT of coke.

A LOT of coke.

So much coke that her septum had wasted away and she couldn’t control her snot.

A month later I was given free tickets to a pro-choice org’s banquet honoring John Landis. That’s not a gag; that really happened. An abortion rights group honored a guy who performed ex-post-facto abortions on two Asian kids using helicopter blades (costly, but effective). And as Chrissy and I were joined at the hip at the time, I asked her to come with me.

The event organizer, a friend of mine, was like “these seats aren’t selling at ALL. Damnedest thing - you decapitate three people and all of a sudden nobody wants to pay $300 to honor you. I gotta fill the room, so if you bring one of your blondes, you’ll get two seats for free.”

So I took Chrissy, who was like “Abershen? Is that good er bad?” and I didn’t even bother to answer her.

We’re at table 7 with a bunch of elderly leftist Jews. I knew Chrissy had done a few lines before we left my place but she kept getting up every ten minutes to go to the restroom to do more, and when she’d return the snot was pouring out of her nose (that’s what happens when you destroy your septum with a corrosive substance). My beautiful blonde was somewhat less so because goo was dripping everywhere and skilled as I am in the art of bimbo wrangling, I failed to find the correct verbiage to tell her “can you please stop shooting snot at everyone? You’re a five-foot-nine blonde booger cannon.”

I’ll never forget one elderly Jew at our table, during one of Chrissy’s bathroom breaks, looking at me, shaking his head, and saying “I know why you brought her…it isn’t working out, is it?”

Thanks, Schlempkin. Like I needed to hear that.

Anyway, because of Chrissy’s substance abuse issues, we never made the film and I didn’t get my ten grand.

It was the worst Holocaust ever.

BTW, I’ve never done coke - I don’t do drugs; I believe in hugs over drugs, if by “hugs” you mean holding tight a bottle of alcohol. But one time in 2011 my pole dancing friend Emilee (arguably my only actress bim who actually does talk like ERRMAHGERD - literally, my entire “bimbo voice” thing comes from her) took me to her friend’s house, and he laid out some lines of coke, and asked me if I’d like to partake. And I was like “no thank you,” but then I did something I’d always wanted to do - I put a little coke on my fingertip, rubbed it on my gums and said “primo!” like Miami Vice.

And for me, that was the day the 1980s ended.

In 2011.

Enjoy this week’s column.

https://www.takimag.com/article/casting-my-eyes/