Casting couch

The casting couch is a euphemism[1] for the practice of soliciting sexual favors from a job applicant in exchange for employment in the entertainment industry, primarily acting roles.[2] The practice is illegal in the United States. Predominantly male casting directors and film producers use the casting couch to extract sex from aspiring actors in Hollywood, Bollywood,[3][4] Broadway, and other segments of the industry.[9] The term casting couch originally referred to physical couches in the casting office, but is now a metonym for the phenomenon as a whole.

A physical casting couch on the film set of pornography website Backroom Casting Couch

Legality

The casting couch is illegal under United States and California law. In the United States, the majority of lawsuits related to the practice are settled, resulting in a lack of case law.[10]

Etymology

In The Atlantic, linguist Ben Zimmer described the casting couch as "a metonym for the skewed sexual politics of show business", which has been normalized into a cliché due to the prevalence of sexually aggressive men with positions of authority in Hollywood cinema and Broadway theatre.[11]

Economics

According to economists Thomas Borcherding and Darren Filson, the high risk and returns in Hollywood cinema encourage the casting couch phenomenon. The possibility of high returns incentivizes unestablished actors to accept minimal wages in exchange for roles. With the exception of a few extremely talented actors, producers are unable to evaluate the aptitude of the vast majority of qualified actors due to uncertainty. As a result, some actors give sexual favors to producers to obtain a perceived advantage in the casting; the casting couch functions as a counterpayment that effectively reduces their wages. This creates a conflict of interest in which corrupt producers substitute aptitude (an unquantifiable variable) with sexual activity in their decision-making.[10]

Actors who submit to the casting couch are not guaranteed roles, as there is an abundance of actors who partake in the practice. An actor's decision of whether to provide sex is comparable to the prisoner's dilemma, and results in a tragedy of the commons in which sex is needed to obtain film roles from producers who demand it, but fails to provide an advantage relative to other actors who offer sexual favors. If the provision of sex were voluntary and performed with the consent of all parties, the casting couch would be a quid pro quo exchange and a victimless crime. However, the practice is illegal in the United States and likely involves some degree of sexual exploitation or sexual harassment. Actors who do not participate in the casting couch are subject to externalities, including reduced employability.[10]

Borcherding and Filson argue that the casting couch became less prominent after the Hollywood studio system, which enforced long-term employment contracts for actors, was eliminated on antitrust grounds in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948). Long-term contracts gave producers stronger bargaining power, which was used by corrupt producers to extract sex from actors more effectively.[10]

Pornography
An actress and a casting director in The Casting Couch (c. 1924)

The Casting Couch (c. 1924), a classic title in the stag film genre,[12] was an early depiction of the casting couch as a pornographic trope that later became mundane as it grew in popularity.[13] In the ten-minute film, a casting director tells a young actress to wear a swimsuit during an audition, spies on her in a voyeuristic manner while she undresses in a different room, and enters the room to solicit sex from her. The actress initially rebuffs his advances with disgust, but returns to the director after taking advice from a book named How to Become a Movie Star. She performs fellatio and vaginal intercourse in exchange for a role in his film; the latter takes place on a couch. The Casting Couch concludes with an intertitle that states, "the only way to become a star is to get under a good director and work your way up".[12] Zimmer credited the film with popularizing the term casting couch.[11]

Pornography websites used the casting couch scenario, beginning with Backroom Casting Couch in 2007.[14] GirlsDoPorn produced casting couch pornography mostly featuring women aged 18–22 who had not otherwise appeared in pornography. In 2019, the two co-owners of the website and the male pornographic actor were charged with three counts of sex trafficking by force, fraud, and coercion. In 2020, twenty-two women were awarded a cumulative $12.75 million in damages as a result of a lawsuit which alleged that women who filmed for the website were lied to throughout the process.[15][16][17][18]

See also

References
  1. Fallon, Claire (18 October 2017). "The 'Casting Couch' Euphemism Lets Us Pretend Hollywood's All Right". HuffPost. Retrieved 17 November 2019.
  2. Adams, Thelma (2017). "Casting-Couch Tactics Plagued Hollywood Long Before Harvey Weinstein". Variety. Retrieved 17 November 2019.
  3. "Bollywood: The reality of sexual harassment". BBC. 28 April 2018. Retrieved 7 December 2019.
  4. Mohamed, Khalid (7 September 2018). "Why It Has Been Raining Boys on Bollywood's Casting Couch". The Quint. Retrieved 7 December 2019.
  5. Dessem, Matthew (13 October 2017). "In 1956, a Fan Magazine Published a Four-Part Casting Couch Exposé. It Didn't Go Well". Slate. Retrieved 19 November 2017.
  6. Morris, Regan; Bicker, Laura (14 October 2017). "Exploring the casting couch culture of LA". BBC. Retrieved 19 November 2017.
  7. Dutka, Elaine (15 October 1991). "Scenes From the Home of the Casting Couch: The Talk of the Country Has Hit a Nerve in the Industry That Creates the Images of Women in Popular Culture". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  8. Hutchinson, Pamela (19 October 2017). "Moguls and starlets: 100 years of Hollywood's corrosive, systemic sexism". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
  9. [2][5][6][7][8]
  10. Borcherding, Thomas E.; Filson, Darren (1 November 2001). "Conflicts of Interest in the Hollywood Film Industry: Coming to America - Tales from the Casting Couch, Gross and Net, in a Risky Business". In Davis, Michael; Stark, Andrew (eds.). Conflict of Interest in the Professions. Oxford University Press. pp. 268–274. ISBN 978-0-19-512863-5.
  11. Zimmer, Ben (16 October 2017). "'Casting Couch': The Origins of a Pernicious Hollywood Cliché". The Atlantic. Retrieved 17 November 2019.
  12. Williams, Linda (1999). "The Stag Film". Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", Expanded Edition. University of California Press. pp. 68–69. ISBN 9780520219434. Retrieved 17 November 2019.
  13. Hay, Mark (5 April 2018). "Porn from the 1920s Was More Wild and Hardcore Than You Could Imagine". Vice. Retrieved 17 November 2019.
  14. Cole, Samantha (9 October 2018). "Re-Examining 'Casting Couch' Porn in the Age of #MeToo". Vice. Retrieved 6 January 2020.
  15. Morrison, Donny (5 March 2020). "Begin Modeling". Eugene Weekly. Retrieved 21 March 2020.
  16. Hargrove, Dorian (4 January 2017). "San Diego's porn studios". San Diego Reader. Retrieved 20 March 2020.
  17. Cole, Samantha (28 June 2019). "Girls Do Porn Goes to Trial Over Allegations Women Were Tricked Into Videos". Vice. Retrieved 21 March 2020.
  18. Turner, Gustavo (17 October 2019). "Here's What You Need to Know About the GirlsDoPorn Case". XBIZ. Retrieved 21 March 2020.
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