Son, who should star in my film? It’s all about whose kids you know

They were words on which a young man’s fate would soon hinge: “Dad, you should check this out.”

Focus Features chief executive James Schamus was doing homework with his then-15-year-old daughter, Nona, one evening in 2007. As was their habit, when it came time for a break, the two began perusing YouTube videos. In particular, Nona wanted her father -- who heads the specialty studio known for making high-minded art-house fare such as “Atonement,” “Lost in Translation” and “Brokeback Mountain” -- to watch a clip featuring a stand-up comedian Schamus had never heard of: Demetri Martin. Nerdily dressed, strumming a guitar and delivering deadpan one-liners, he performed a routine called “Jokes With Guitar” in the three-minute video. “I loved how gentle and observant and smart Demetri’s voice was,” Schamus recalled.

At Focus, Schamus has strenuously avoided what’s known in Hollywood jargon as “taking generals.” That is, scheduling general meetings: informal, getting-to-know-you sessions between a filmmaker and an actor. But he made an exception for Martin, 36. “I called up Demetri’s agent and said, ‘I have no movie to pitch. I’d just like to meet him,’ ” Schamus recalled. “The meeting was completely awkward and totally stilted. But it gave me about three minutes of street cred at home.”

Half a year later, however, Schamus’ frequent collaborator, Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, presented him the memoir he wanted Schamus to adapt for his next project: “Taking Woodstock.” And as Schamus read the material, he found himself hearing Martin’s voice in his head. “I realized I wanted a gentle but really funny kind of humor as the tone for the film,” Schamus said. “And I really thought Ang should meet Demetri.”

Fast forward to now. Martin stars as the central character in Ang Lee’s Summer of Love-set dramedy “Taking Woodstock” (written and produced by Schamus), which reached theaters Aug. 28. The character, a closeted gay artist who shelves his ambitions to help his Jewish parents run their Catskills motel -- and incidentally enables an epochal rockfest -- is a breakthrough part for Martin.

To be sure, the gig came about precisely because of the pop-cultural discernment and tastemaker status of a certain teenage member of the Schamus household. “Of course, I’m going to do everything she tells me from now on in my career!” the studio boss joked.

Martin’s casting exists as an Information Age counterpoint to Lana Turner’s legendary “discovery” at the soda counter of a Hollywood drugstore. But the comedian is hardly the only up-and-comer plucked from obscurity by some clued-in child of a high-profile filmmaker, studio head or actor. These days, the scions of moviedom’s elite have increasing sway; they are taken seriously by members of the establishment as sophisticated culture consumers with a keen eye for star power.

In Hollywood, where youth reigns supreme and the adage “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” is gospel, the “my kid discovered you” phenomenon is hardly new. Joanna Colbert, co-founder of Colbert/Mento Casting who functioned as head of casting at Universal Pictures from 1994 to 2001, worked with studio executives who would regularly base important casting decisions on their children’s recommendations. “I rolled my eyes at that,” she said. “The insidious aspect of this business, the incestuousness of it, is that these kids go to private schools and get cast because of who their friends are.”

But that was before Colbert had a child of her own. She admitted the influence of her 8-year-old son has changed her outlook. “He watches a show called ‘iCarly’ that I never would have heard of,” Colbert said. “Do I watch it with a casting director’s eye? Yes. Jerry Trainor from the show is adorable, and I had never seen him before. I brought him in to read for a movie.”

The phenomenon can be seen as a pay-it-forward version of Hollywood’s prevailing nepotism, reflecting an era in which an “audition” can take on myriad forms.

Sarcastic open-mike

Before he became a de facto muse to Judd Apatow and go-to guy on the comedy mogul’s actor roster -- starring in 2007’s Apatow-produced “Superbad” and appearing in such Apatow-anointed movies as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and the upcoming “Get Him to the Greek” -- Jonah Hill was known as Jonah Hill Goldstein. Growing up in Los Angeles’ Westside suburb Cheviot Hills, the future funnyman never had any childhood ambition to perform. And unlike so many of his classmates at his famously networking-crazy, enter- tainment-industry-connected prep school, Crossroads, the cherubic teenager never used his connections to try to get a leg up in Hollywood.

Instead, he moved to New York to study writing at the New School university. In his off hours, Hill frequented the Black and White, an East Village bar he describes as his “Cheers.” Never mind that he was all of 18 at the time.

As Hill’s discovery myth goes, the bar had an open-mike night: a soapbox for bleeding hearts, dominated by misery monologues about depression, madness and heartache. Finding an ineluctable wackiness to it all, Hill was inspired to write a spoof monologue, intending to perform the piece straight-faced with only his friends in on the irony. When he did, about half the audience was appalled while the gag killed with the other 50%.

Among those that got it were the children of a Hollywood VIP. “One day, Dustin Hoffman’s kids, Jake and Becky, came and saw it and we became fast friends,” Hill recalled in a 2006 interview, “and they were like, ‘You should meet my dad.’ ”

Unaware of whom he was talking to, Hill responded in kind. “I didn’t know their dad was an actor or anything, so I was like, ‘Cool, you should meet my dad. He’s an accountant.’ ”

Hoffman eventually caught a performance and took a shine to Hill. “So we all started hanging out and he thought I was really funny and he introduced me to a director, David O. Russell, and I auditioned for his movie,” Hill said. “That was my first movie, ‘I ♥Huckabees.’ ”

His small part in that freewheeling dramedy -- as the excitable son of a family with a Sudanese exchange student -- led to him being cast on the TV show “Undeclared” and an even more fortuitous “discovery” by “Freaks & Geeks” writer-executive producer Apatow, who was preparing his debut feature as a director, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Apatow put the baby-faced actor in the movie. Hill has since appeared in every film Apatow has directed, including “Knocked Up” and last month’s “Funny People.”

On the wrong continent

Auditioning actors in Mumbai, India, for the central role in what would become his multiple-Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” British director Danny Boyle had run into a problem. Everyone who showed up at the production’s casting call in 2007 looked fundamentally wrong for the part -- too buffed up, well groomed and hunky to portray what the script describes as a skinny underdog.

“I had been looking at all these guys in Bollywood, where we had found the rest of the cast,” Boyle said last year. “There were some really good lads for the part, but they all had the wrong look for me. Bodybuilding is such a big thing for young men getting into the industry there. They have got to look like they can rip their shirts off and get under the waterfall in the Swiss Alps or wherever they are filming. I wanted a guy who didn’t look like a potential hero; I wanted him to earn that in the film.”

Little did the director know that the solution to his conundrum had been flipping channels in his living room all along. Boyle’s then-17-year-old daughter, Caitlin, was an avid fan of “Skins,” the cultishly popular U.K. television series that follows drug-taking, sex-obsessed teens -- a kind of British equivalent to “Gossip Girl.” She suggested one of the program’s stars, a gangly 17-year-old with soulful eyes named Dev Patel, for the part.

“While I hadn’t really thought about Dev, as soon as she said that, I thought, ‘Yeah,’ ” said Boyle.

Although it was only the second audition he had attended, Patel, the British-born son of parents of Indian descent, iced it. He went on to be nominated for a host of awards, including an MTV Movie Award, a BAFTA Award and an Image Award, and won several film critics’ awards for his breakthrough performance.

From a bat mitzvah

At age 14, Los Angeles native Alden Ehrenreich was enrolled in the theater program at Crossroads School. He loved watching movies and had begun making his own short films.

When it came time for a friend to celebrate her bat mitzvah, Ehrenreich shot and starred in a short film -- what he terms “a ridiculous, jokey thing” -- with two friends and screened it on a small television at the party with few expectations outside of making his buddies laugh.

“In it, I ran around as a skinny little punk, trying on girls’ clothes and eating dirt,” Ehrenreich recalled to New York magazine. “My mom was like, ‘I really don’t know if you want to present yourself that way. It’s not the best portrait, and there are a lot of people who will be watching this.’ To be honest, you go to a bat mitzvah in Los Angeles and you can count on a few industry people to be there. But it wasn’t like we thought of that.”

Mom was right about influential people seeing the film -- just wrong about the impression her son would make.

Steven Spielberg happened to be among those in attendance and soon Ehrenreich was hearing that he “really liked the movie.” Spielberg arranged to have executives from DreamWorks, the studio he co-founded, procure an agent for Ehrenreich. From there, by his own description, the actor went on “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds” of auditions, which led to a couple of TV spots.

He then caught the eye of Fred Roos, a longtime right-hand man of Francis Ford Coppola who was executive producing the “Godfather” auteur’s semiautobiographical indie feature “Tetro.”

Coppola was largely unaware of the Spielberg connection; he has said he was set on casting Ehrenreich after hearing him recite a passage from “The Catcher in the Rye.”

But to hedge his bets, the writer-director put Ehrenreich through six months of screen tests at his Napa vineyard before finally handing him the part: the youngest brother in an Italian-American family who travels to Argentina in search of his brother (Vincent Gallo).

“Tetro” barely caused a ripple at the box office upon its release in June, grossing just over $450,000. And while reviews were mixed, critics warmed to the actor’s performance; the Chicago Sun-Times’ Roger Ebert hailed him as “confident and charismatic,” noting that he “inspires such descriptions as ‘the new Leonardo DiCaprio.’ ”

Aging talent scouts

At a moment when cool dads and hipster moms seem to covet their children’s approval so much, it is perhaps unsurprising that such mini-cool hunters would make an impact in the movie industry.

Still, casting director Colbert said that input from the kids of Hollywood heavyweights hasn’t fundamentally altered the way she or the town operates. “It doesn’t affect the way I cast,” Colbert said. “It’s certainly not interfering. And it’s not that prevalent.”

Although Focus Features’ Schamus is quick to credit his daughter with pointing his attention toward Martin (who has landed his own Comedy Central show, “Important Things With Demetri Martin,” and lined up several projects as a writer-actor), Schamus scoffs at the notion that he’s using his children as some kind of “teenage focus group for my business. It’s not a calculated thing,” he said.

But the studio chief admits to apprehension about maintaining his cultural currency without his daughters’ help -- a bigger fear for him than empty nest syndrome. “Nona is 17 now, and my other daughter, Djuna, is 13,” Schamus said. “I’m starting to panic now about what I’m going to do when they go to college. I’m going to be completely out of it!”

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chris.lee@latimes.com