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An Eye for Talent

Today, Jewish and non-Jewish actresses face a different problem: \"They are often considered grandmothers by the time they are 40,\" Isaacson laments. \"They have a shorter career span than athletes.\"
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April 27, 2000

Donna Isaacson, the highest-ranking casting executive in Hollywood, has long pondered how Jewish actresses are cast in the movies. “It’s been a major struggle for me,” says Isaacson, executive vice president for feature talent at 20th Century Fox. “If I’m casting a lead in a film, and a Jewish woman doesn’t get the part, the question I ask myself is, ‘Is it anti-Semitism, or is it a result of the many other decisive factors that go into casting a role?’ “

When Isaacson worked in New York, there was an old joke about the way Neil Simon and Woody Allen cast non-Jewish actresses as Jews. “We used to say, ‘It’s like casting white bread to play pumpernickel,'” recalls Isaacson, who will appear at a Jewish Federation-sponsored panel discussion and dinner, “Through the Looking Glass: Women Shaping Our Future,” at the Four Seasons Hotel May 2.

(The Business and Professional Women’s dinner of the Women’s Campaign, United Jewish Fund, will also feature author Amy Ephron, Jennifer Roth of Sothebys.com and screenwriter Andrea King, who will moderate the discussion.)

Today, Jewish and non-Jewish actresses face a different problem: “They are often considered grandmothers by the time they are 40,” Isaacson laments. “They have a shorter career span than athletes.”

That statement may seem surprising, coming from the executive who cast 29-year-old Catherine Zeta-Jones opposite 68-year-old Sean Connery in the 1999 caper film “Entrapment,” an age disparity that raised eyebrows. Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan labeled the film “Grampy kisses the girl;” the age difference, observed another reporter, was “the big white elephant in the room that no one [was] supposed to notice.”

Isaacson, for her part, agrees that the age gaps between leading men and women in films such as “Entrapment,” “A Perfect Murder” and “Six Days, Seven Nights” deserve some of the criticism they receive in the media. Nevertheless, she says, Fox was sensitive to the controversy, which had already broken by the time she cast “Entrapment.” Connery’s character alludes, in the movie, that he is old enough to be Zeta-Jones’ grandfather; and the talented Zeta-Jones, who went on in real life to marry a man exactly 25 years older than herself, more than held her own in the film.

“If I could have paired Sean Connery with an older woman and had the movie gross $100 million, it would have helped my case,” Isaacson says. “But that hasn’t happened in recent box office history. The public’s acceptance of older women is not as great as it needs to be. And studios look to the public for what it wants to see. It’s a societal thing: We’re told that men age well and that women get old.”

Isaacson’s journey to the casting field was a circuitous one. Growing up in a Conservative Jewish home in Queens, the daughter of a divorced mother, she first aspired to become an actress. But after earning a master’s degree in theater from New York University, she found that the road was not easy.

“I was hard to cast because I was not a typical ingenue,” she says. “I was considered ‘regional,’ which at the time I interpreted as a kinder way of saying I was ‘too Jewish.’ ”

After Isaacson was cast as a character with a Jewish surname in her first Broadway show, she found herself rummaging through her mother’s liquor cabinet. She believed that she needed to “Anglicize” her name, and the words on the liquor bottles seemed to offer ideas: Beam, Walker, Gibson. It was producer Arthur Cantor who set her straight. You’re going to play a character named Eunice Blaustein,” he noted, wryly. “What are you going to do, change your name to Mary Christ?”

The actress stuck with “Isaacson,” and when the show closed three weeks later, she waited tables and typed scripts to support herself. Then came the unexpected break that led her into the casting business.

Isaacson was working as an assistant to a writer and producer whose play wasn’t doing well on the road. “They had to blame somebody,” she says, “so almost every Saturday night, some poor actor would get fired.” Isaacson, for her part, was sent back to New York to organize auditions to replace the actor. A casting director was born.

By August 1980, Isaacson was in charge of casting at the renowned Manhattan Theatre Club, where she met “absolutely everybody” in the business, she says. “Everyone passed through those doors,” she recalls, and she cast them all: Holly Hunter, Glenn Close, John Goodman, James Woods and a very young, very talented Kevin Spacey, whom Isaacson cast in an Athol Fugard play.

Eventually, she formed a company with a partner and began to work with filmmakers, notably Philip Kaufman and Joel and Ethan Coen, who were in their 20’s when they hired her to cast “Raising Arizona” in the mid-1980s. The brothers had just completed “Blood Simple”; they were always meticulously prepared and terribly clever, Isaacson recalls.

In those days, she says, Joel did all the talking, while Ethan paced; both brothers chain-smoked. But they were surprisingly easygoing. On their first few films, they tended to write a character with a particular actor in mind, but that actor didn’t necessarily get the part. Sometimes the performer wasn’t available for a movie; sometimes the Coens simply changed their minds. In the end, it was Isaacson who introduced them to many of the actors they would later cast in film after film, including Steve Buscemi, John Goodman and John Turturro.

Isaacson went on to cast “Barton Fink,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “The Hudsucker Proxy” for the Coens before she was selected to create Fox’s casting department in 1993. For Fox, she cast a relative newcomer, Kate Winslet, in “Titanic,” and another relative newcomer, Cameron Diaz, in “A Life Less Ordinary” and “There’s Something About Mary.”

“Donna has a keen eye for young talent and has been instrumental in our breaking several new stars,” Fox Film Group President Tom Rothman told The Hollywood Reporter.

During a recent interview in her large, sunny office on the Fox lot, Isaacson offered a theory about why so many casting directors are women. “It’s a service-oriented, nurturing, ‘taking-care-of’ kind of job,” she explains, “and, sad to say, women tend to accept that role more easily.”

One myth about casting, Isaacson continues, is that actors always beat down your door to sign on to a movie; sometimes, the reverse is true.

A case in point is Cameron Diaz, who was dubious when Isaacson took her to lunch at Orso’s several years ago to pitch her on “There’s Something About Mary.” Diaz wasn’t familiar with the work of the Farrelly brothers, and she was aghast when Isaacson tried to explain the comedy’s over-the-top plot. How, after all, does one convey the merits of a scene in which a character appears at the door with sperm hanging from his ear? “Cameron responded with sheer horror,” Isaacson recalls. Only after meetings with the filmmakers and studio executives did she realize that the comedy was innovative and accepted the role.

Today, Isaacson believes, top female executives such as Amy Pascal, Sherry Lansing, Laura Ziskin and Elizabeth Gabler (all of whom happen to be Jewish) are helping to change the face of film. “If you look at ‘Erin Brockovich’ or ’28 Days,’ you see female characters at the center of a movie,” says Isaacson, who recently finished casting “Quills,” about the Marquis de Sade, for director Philip Kaufman. Of course, signing male actors for supporting roles in those films is another matter. “It’s hard, because men are so used to being the driving force in a movie,” she explains. “They’re not all that anxious to be supporting players, even when the roles are great.”

For information about the UJF dinner, call (310) 689-3680.


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