Hollywood casting call for that "inbred" look

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (bolded italics are mine):

The announcement -- which was sent out in a news release and posted on the casting company's Web site -- asked for people with the following attributes:

"Extraordinarily tall or short. Unusual body shapes, even physical abnormalities as long as there is normal mobility. Unusual facial features, especially eyes."

The announcement requests "a 9-12-year-old Caucasian girl with an other-worldly look to her."

"Could be an albino or something along those lines -- she's someone who is visually different and therefore has a closer contact to the gods and to magic. 'Regular-looking' children should not attend this open call.'"

Asked if she felt the characterization might be offensive to West Virginians, [Donna] Belajac [of Donna Belajac Casting] said: "We tried to word it in a way that's not offensive. I hope it's not an offensive thing. It's not meant to be a generalization about everyone in West Virginia. That's why we put that it's in a 'holler' in the mountains."

....

"It's the way it was described in the script," Belajac said Monday. "Some of these 'holler' people -- because they are insular and clannish, and they don't leave their area -- there is literally inbreeding, and the people there often have a different kind of look. That's what we're trying to get."

Belajac said the announcement was not meant to stereotype people from West Virginia. But state officials and a history professor called it "unfortunate" that such unfair views of people are being repeated.

"They clearly are not trying to create the image of a quaint, homespun mountain family," said Kevin Barksdale, assistant history professor at Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. "Clearly, what they're trying to establish is this notion of the hillbilly monster."

The above casting call is for an upcoming horror film called "Shelter" starring Julianne Moore.

The following one is for a movie version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road starring (ATTN: Brownfemipower!) Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron:

It's set in a post-cataclysmic America. The few survivors who were not seared by an unspecified fiery disaster are divided into two classes -- barbaric cannibals or their prey.

Men and woman ages 18 to 50 are needed for eight speaking roles and 30 extras.

Producers are looking for people with minimal muscle tone, long stringy hair and a starved, ravaged appearance. They need men capable of growing a full beard.

Also needed: a thin man of any ethnicity who is missing one or both legs. No previous acting experience is needed for this role.

I have a deep, unnatural love for post-apocalyptic fiction, and I recently read McCarthy's Pulitzer-prize-winning novel and found it as riveting as anything I've ever read. I think McCarthy is the great American author living today, and at least one character in another novel of his has had provoking things to say about disability/deformity. (That excerpt from All The Pretty Horses was one of my 2006 blog posts.)

Regarding these casting calls for the unusual, extraordinary, irregular and inbred, I certainly don't have any problem with disabled actors being part of Hollywood. Bring them on, please. But give them roles with humanity and lives beyond their physical attributes.

The movie "Shelter" is clearly working on the theory that physical oddballs and country hicks are effective monsters that provoke horror for their film. When will we get over this? When will the insult of collecting unusual-looking people be seen as complicated and problematic in and of itself and not just because it might suggest insulting things about a geographical region or particular tribe of people?

Notice also, the odder the better, so long as you have no trouble with mobility. That's pretty specific. What's that about? My guess is they've fine-tuned their idea of the grotesque to mean physically strange, but they don't want any mobility aids distracting from the impact of that strangeness. Or maybe they need creepy people capable of chasing the star?

Thanks to Grace for providing the link to the news article.