I haven’t even cast the young man yet, but I’m already calling him the Six-Thousand-Dollar Kid. He threw everything into overdrive with the need to make this a SAG film, hire a casting director, pepper the SAG rep assigned to my project with 100 different questions, shell out big bucks for workers comp insurance, apply for a permit to employ a minor and hire a studio teacher. (Failure to have a teacher on set could land me in jail. And you don’t a lot of cred in prison for a real wussy crime.)
You know, it’s not too late to chuck it all and go another way. Nothing in the rulebook says an orangutan can’t be Pope. (Cue Smashmouth’s “All Star.”)
I kid. There’s no Pope in my film. The orangutan will play an orthodontist. Bills, paperwork, bleeding ulcer eliminated.
