CASTING & CAST

Thanks for the article on cold-reading “workshops” (“A Matter of Casting and Cash,” by Deborah Caulfield, March 8). It confirmed the bad taste in my mouth remaining after I left the last workshop I attended.

I was there for the same reason everyone else in the room was there--to meet a casting director our agents couldn’t or wouldn’t get us in to read for. So here were 14 hopefuls who had never met this C/D, whose work and capabilities were unknown to the C/D, reading parts for which they would never be considered. But that was all the material the C/D had with him.

Talk about wrong and lasting impressions. And what did the C/D teach? “I had a great time. You were all wonderful.” Take the money and run.

Unfortunately, it’s the actors who have allowed this to happen, and it’s only when actors decide it should stop that it will change. But actors are so afraid to offend for fear of losing work.

Will somebody please tell them that they are 95% unemployed; they have nothing to lose; that those who do have something to lose don’t go to the workshops because they are working and have no trouble meeting C/D’s.

Actors have nothing to lose. They have only their dignity to retain and their hard-earned money to save, which they can apply toward real classes.

STEVE PETERSON

Los Angeles