Old films didn’t list the casting person in the main titles, like they do today. Presumably, that was part of the director’s job. What was the first movie to list a dedicated casting person?
Just a WAG, but my guess is that it happened right after the studio system collapsed in the mid-1960’s. Before that, casting must have been much easier - the producers (probably not the director) would go over the list of actors “owned” by the studios, and pick a guy who’d just made 6 other films for them in the past 12 months. No need to go over tens of thousands of headshots like they do today.
I have no idea who was the first, though.
The casting of the lead roles has always been the job of either the studio staff (back in the days when the studio system still ruled), the producer, or the director himself. The casting director only casts roles below the lead roles. Back in the studio days, the movie script would come to the director with the lead roles already chosen most times, either by the studio heads or by someone just below them with that job. Sometimes the director would be allowed to cast some lead roles himself among the studio players. Sometimes he would even be allowed to try to get another studio to rent out an actor he really wanted. In the studio days, presumably sometimes the director would be allowed to pick lesser roles and sometimes those roles would already be chosen by the studio staff. In the studio days, credits were very sparing. Nearly all the people employed in the making of the film were permanent employees of the studio and didn’t need to advertise their credits to get somebody to hire them for the next film.
Wendell Wagner posted pretty much what I was going to post. Even the caterer gets listed on the end credits these days.
Old films didn’t list the caterer, either. Again, blame the collapse of the Studio System and the rise of the Unions, who have demanded that every single person even remotely related to the film get a screen credit.
“2nd Assistant Shoeshine Boy for Mr. Clooney”
silenus writes:
> Again, blame the collapse of the Studio System and the rise of the Unions, who
> have demanded that every single person even remotely related to the film get
> a screen credit.
All those people in the credits are freelancers now. They have to make sure everyone knows their credits, since they have to hustle for every job they get. In some cases, they aren’t freelancers themselves, but they work for a company that is freelancing, in effect. For instance, most of the special effects people work for a special effects company. That company isn’t part of a studio. It gets hired to do the special effects based on previous jobs, so it has to hustle for every job it gets. Probably some of the people working for it have dreams of forming their own special effects company someday, so they want their names in the credits too.
Ever remember a name just by the sheer repetition of seeing it?
I think Lynn Stalmaster, Mike Fenton or Mali Finn casted every movie ever made in the last 30 years.
I always thought that this was the case… but then again, wouldn’t that depend on the actual film being the “official” recording of who worked on/did what for a film? That is, if I was, say, the chief nipple polisher for Ms. Jolie on one of her films, and wanted to put that down on my resume, would the Big Cheese reviewing said resume have to pop in a DVD of that film in order to check? Or is there some other form of employment records held by the studio/production company/etc.? I would imagine that for all but the main credits, no one watching a film would see a name up on the screen and think to hire that person (i.e., not “wow, that was a fantastic film. Not a single actor was was limping – no one could possibly have tripped over an errant cable! I gotta get me that key grip!”)
Any thoughts?
I think the credits are the final record. That’s why there is such a fight every now and then over who actually gets the screen credit.
The Internet Movie Database would be a good place to start.
No it wouldn’t. The way it is edited and maintained can hardly be called “archival.”
I don’t see how that could be given “uncredited” roles, Alan Smithee-type conventions, and just plain mistakes/misspellings. I also seriously doubt that the company insuring the shoot relies on the credits to determine if an injured party had any business being on the set.
I’m not saying that there is some super secret “official” movie archives, but certainly vouchers & paystubs would be a good place to check to see if someone ever worked on a particular project.
British films began to credit casting directors regularly in the early 1950s. American films followed suit by the mid-1950s.
According to The Guinness Book of Movie Facts & Feats (Guinness Publishing 1988): ‘The making of The Cotton Club (US 1985) involved so much litigation that the credits even included one for the law firm representing the successful litigants.’
To lay down a marker here, if these credits for Judgement at Nuremberg are to be believed then Lynn Stalmaster gets a casting credit for this 1961 movie, as does the Lister Company. Doubtless there are earlier examples.
Stalmaster appears to have an earlier casting credit for I Want To Live (1958).
I can take you back six years earlier than Judgement at Nuremberg. Best Picture Oscar winner Marty (1955) has an on-screen casting director credit, as does its successor Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).
If you had ever spent as much time on sets as I used to, you wouldn’t diss the caterer. 
As for confirmation of jobs, I suspect the various unions have good records. SAG certainly does for actors.
Casting directors aren’t unionized in Hollywood. There is a professional association, the Casting Society of America, but it is relatively young (1982), and is not a union.
I have had, in the last six weeks, an unholy amount of contact with many television and movie studios concerning a person who claimed to have worked on their productions for which I could find no records. This includes Regency Enterprises, the SciFi Channel, and MGM Studios in addition to other smaller firms.
All of them, without exception, claimed they start the process of checking credits, even for their own productions with IMDB and would later go into their pay records and such.
Weird, but true.