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We wanted to take a quick moment here in the midst of all this . . . crazyness to express our thanks and appreciation to all of those who have auditioned for The Diamond of Jeru. We are somewhat overwhelmed with all the wonderful people who have come in to audition for The Diamond of Jeru … the process of making our choices will certainly be daunting. Many different kinds of criteria for our choices will need to be used when the moment comes. Obviously, the first and foremost qualities are raw talent, professionalism (often a capable replacement for raw talent), and understanding of the roles. In many cases we have ended up with an embarrassment of riches in these categories so many of the decisions will be harder and based on other criteria. The next consideration is creating the proper mix of sounds. Once in a while there is a great actor who’s voice that goes beyond being interestingly different and is just not right in comparison to the way we want that character to be perceived … like someone the plot requires to be small in stature having a big, booming, voice. Then there is the issue of the era, we are trying to create a cast that naturally, without anyone trying to “do” a voice, has the sound of the 1950s. This means thinking back to old movies, news programs, and our memories of the voices of people from our childhoods, though well after the 1950s, who’s personalities seemed to have been formed in the decades leading up to that time. Then the various voices must be compared and contrasted to one an other for the best balance of sounds. Obviously, we can’t use two actors who sound too much alike because they could easily be mistaken for one and other and cause confusion for the listener but it goes beyond that, also including a vague “artistic” sense that we don’t entirely know how to explain … we know it when we hear it. Any of the above issues might cause us to make the painful decision to rule out a very talented performer. We’ll also be calling in some actors for the smaller parts. Everyone who auditioned, read for a major role but there were still many people that we really wanted to work with because of their talent and personalities. Whenever possible, and it won’t be always possible (there’s only a finite number of roles!) we try to use as many people from our auditions as we can. Many of our smaller roles have demanding aspects, bits that we have to get very quickly because of the scheduling of other scenes yet these are still very important pieces, sometimes requiring (because we have to get them fast, because there’s less to “get ahold of,”) an even more talented actor than the big parts. We value no one any more or less … anyone who saves us time in editing is our hero! The final consideration is scheduling and there may well be trade offs there too. No one who is called late in the process should ever feel that they were “second choice” in any important way. Our short list for each character is several actors long and still growing … decisions are going to be extremely difficult, we truly have so many good choices for some of the roles we don’t quite know what to do. If it was theater we’d consider doing the show with two separate casts! We hope that we’ll get a chance in coming years to work with many of you that we will not get a chance to work with this time around. Quite often we remarked about how someone might be good for this or that part of a dramatized or single-voice audio that we may yet produce. Though it is rare these days, since both Paul and Beau are heavily committed to the publishing business, we still do occasional film work and you can be assured that, given the chance, recommendations will be passed along when it seems appropriate. More than once in awhile we have the opportunity to recommend people for single voice books-on-tape and several members of the cast of Son of a Wanted Man were brought in to audition for the USA Network version of The Diamond of Jeru, though production in Australia (immigration limitations) precluded them from being used once our quota of Americans had been filled. No audition is ever wasted. Thank you so much for participating, Beau, Paul, Laurel
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