At my day job, we recently had a brainstorming session. We had to come up with ideas for an industrial video to illustrate abstract psychological concepts, which is primarily what I write about for my company. It’s a niche living.
The videos are set in white-collar environments, and we try to make them as diverse as possible. This is why each vignette is so perfectly balanced in regards to gender, race, and ethnicity that viewers are forced to marvel at this workplace nirvana of cultural harmony.
Still, it has led to some borderline deceitful behavior. For example, our last Hispanic character was played by a very dark Jewish man. We simply couldn’t find a local Latino thespian.
In any case, we were discussing casting for the latest video when the Bitca informed us that we were running short on older, white male actors. It seems that we’ve used them all in previous videos.
I found this shocking. How can you run out of old white guys? Is there a shortage that I haven’t been informed of? Are they endangered within the general population?
We discussed having an open casting call, and this caused me to picture hordes of white men in business suits, hanging around parking lots, all of them just waiting for that truck to drive up and offer them acting gigs for the day. The men would jostle each other for the opportunity to be trabajadores, and they would climb into the back of the truck, where someone would hand them fake IDs and tell them the job was cash only, under the table. And then they would sweat under the hot lights of the set, avoiding the suspicious glares of the director and sound technicians and boom operators. Then they would do it all the next day.
Ultimately, it’s true: these guys are just taking the acting jobs that no one else will take.
