They all think they know Jack

When Erica Steele made a casting call last month for a “young Jack Nicholson-type” to star in her film “12 Hours,” the response, she says, was unbelievable.

“I had one guy that looks almost exactly like a young Billy Bob Thornton,” says Steele, a first-time director. “I had the ‘Dean Martin’ Jack Nicholson. I got an Asian Jack Nicholson, an African American, a Middle Eastern Jack Nicholson and a total punk rocker with all of his hair shooting straight up.

“I had another guy who looks like he belongs with the Mafia in New York. One guy was older and looks like Jack Nicholson in his late ‘40s. I also got a lot of California surfers with blond hair and blue eyes. One actress even applied. I was completely baffled.”

The film, which starts shooting in May, focuses on six people trapped in a TV network’s cafeteria after a bomb collapses the building. Steele, who’s worked on commercials and industrial films for several years, says she eventually found her young Jack Nicholson. “He has the intensity in the eyes, the smirk, the sarcasm.”

Next time she’ll put more description in her casting call, but Steele has no regrets. “It was fun. Every time you opened an e-mail with a submission, you were dying to see what they looked like.”

The only disappointment came when an aspiring actor -- who claimed he resembles Matthew Modine -- never sent his photo. “He had the whole Nicholson attitude,” Steele says. “He wrote that he decided to become an actor the week earlier, after a drunken affair at a strip club outside Santa Monica.”

-- Michael T. Jarvis