With The Rise Of Self-Taped Auditions, Actors Are Lighting And Filming Themselves. Should They Be Paid?

For actors, auditioning used to follow a formula: rehearse, go into a casting office, perform, and leave. Casting offices might have received a stray self-produced tape from an actor who was unable to make it in person. But since the pandemic, self-produced audition tapes have become the norm — meaning actors light and film themselves, as well as find someone to read the part with.

This model has its perks — actors can keep recording takes until they’re perfectly satisfied — but also its pitfalls. For one, the virtual format means a casting director can invite many more performers to audition for a part, significantly narrowing the chances of getting the job.

Some grassroots activists are now focused on revitalizing a little-known, largely unenforced clause that has been in Screen Actors Guild (SAG-AFTRA) contracts for decades: audition pay. The contract states that actors who are not given the job must be paid a half-day’s wages for their time and effort.

Even so, implementation is patchy, according to Thomas Ochoa, an actor and founding volunteer of Auditions Are Work, a grassroots organizing group of SAG-AFTRA members. Joining LAist-89.3's public affairs show AirTalk, Ochoa says actors must individually file a claim for their payment, and many are afraid that this will open them up to retaliation from producers.

That’s why SAG-AFTRA advocates for an automatic and enforced payment process, which Ochoa says is crucial amidst the increasing demands of the audition routine.

Valuable but unpaid labor

For decades, every change to the audition process has resulted in more labor being offloaded from producers onto actors and casting professionals, Ochoa says, and these self-produced tapes are no exception.

“They're fully lit. Multiple scenes. It's often many pages, separate takes of those many pages,” Ochoa says. “And performers are responsible for scheduling and acquiring their own [volunteer] readers to help them complete the auditions.”

While some liken auditions to job interviews, Ochoa says they’re more akin to commissioned work. They require more preparation, he says, and are specific to each artistic project. That’s why these auditions are valuable to the producers and studios. Each tape and each actor offers them a chance to reimagine their creative vision for the project.

“Because auditions are currently not being paid for, like our contract says they should be, there is an incentive for them to request as many as possible because those options are valuable to them,” Ochoa says. “But the result of that for the performer community is that the odds of booking any single role are astronomically [low], sometimes a fraction of a single percent.”

Casting a wide net

Actors aren’t the only ones feeling this pressure. Jessica Daniels, a casting director and member of the Casting Society of America, says that in addition to creating a lot more work, the self-produced tape system creates more room for no-shows, without the accountability of a scheduled in-person appointment. This uncertainty might drive casting offices to put out as many audition requests they can.

Daniels says a return to in-person auditions would be ideal, but argues that requiring audition pay would “decimate” some production companies — particularly independent firms with small budgets.

“I don't see a world where studios agree to pay actors for auditions,” Daniels says. “I think it's a hard sell to the studios and major production companies to come up with money for audition pay when we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of actors.”

But Ochoa says this is not a new requirement, and that audition compensation has been codified in SAG-AFTRA contracts since 1947, along with other stipulations like meal breaks and payment for work over holidays.

“So it's not antiquated language. These were established in the time when we were establishing, as a union, lots of really important worker protections in the contracts,” Ochoa says. “It's not only because self-tapes are harder, it's because auditions are work and they're valuable. And it's already in the contract.”

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