Multiple Submissions to the Same Casting Office

Bonnie –

I wanted to drop a quick note to say thank you. The information in your articles — and your overall positive nature on Twitter — is so refreshing and inspiring. I truly thank you for all that you do.

I was hoping you would be able to answer a silly question that has me confused as to the proper etiquette: If the same office is casting two projects, do I make two separate submissions though it is the same associate? Or, do I specify the projects in my brief cover letter? Or, is there something I’m missing?

Thanks kindly for your time. I wish you all the best for the Holidays and the New Year!

Merry Christmas!
James Blackhurst

Ah, thank you, James, for the kind words. I’m glad you enjoy my columns and my tweets! 🙂 Very much appreciate the feedback.

This is going to be one of those “it depends” answers, and it’s one of the reasons I’m such a fan of Your Show Bible and other methods of tracking who likes what, what works and what doesn’t, and where your choices have led to results.

Because, if you ask this sort of question of the casting associate herself, you then know — right from the horse’s mouth — what’s preferred in that particular office. And then, when you add that information to Your Show Bible, you know that’s good intel.

Of course, if you can’t track that information via an in-person encounter, an interview out on the web somewhere, or a database of information from other actors who have been there before you (like through collectives like The Actors’ Network or Hollywood Happy Hour), the safe choice is to send one submission per show.

But! That assumes you’ve done your research and know that you’re a good fit for those shows and you’re targeting with the specificity that makes your submission more likely to be happily received. If you’re just doing general submissions to everything that’s casting and that means you’re reaching out to the same office multiple times, I’d suggest you re-strategize before wasting money on a spaghetti-slinging submission plan, and then you may not even NEED to hit that same office multiple times.

Assuming you’ve already done the research and you know that both these shows are good targets for your brand and level of ability, then go with one submission per show, as — in most offices busy enough to cast multiple TV shows simultaneously — there are bins “per show” (and sometimes “per role, per show”) and the interns on the team will go through the submissions as the needs for those shows dictate (meaning, if there’s a rewrite and the role whose bin your headshot landed in gets 86’d from the script, the whole bin may be dumped out, which means your headshot being in that second bin could be essential to being seen at all). Of course, so few mailed-by-actors submissions yield auditions, this is pretty dang over-thinky, I’d say.

Ah… it’s crazymaking, isn’t it? I call it Actor Mind Taffy. Focus your efforts on relationship building and staying on the radar — organically — of those who are your primary targets. And when that means doing a mailing, do it! As many times as feels right to you. 🙂


Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!


Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001436.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.

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