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Entertainment

This "Screen Test” Will Scare You Out of Auditions

An ‘ER’-inspired short from 'Rachel Dratch’s Late Night Snack’ combines the magic of filmmaking with the awkwardness of cold reading.
Screencaps via

A comedic, ER-inspired short featured on truTV's Rachel Dratch's Late Night Snack perfectly captures the magic of filmmaking and intersperses it with the awkward quality of the audition process. Conceived, directed, written and produced by Edmond Hawkins (a graphic/VFX artist for SNL) and backed by a crew composed of minds from PFFR (The Heart, She Holler, Wonder ShowzenDelocated) and actors, directors, and writers that have worked on Archer, Jug Face, and Workaholics—Michael Cargill, Mack Williams, Lauren Ashley Carter, Bill Grandberg, and Scotty Landes certainly knocked it out of the park. The style brings to mind Tim and Eric’s Doug Lussenhop and Vic Berger’s style of editing—a frenzied mess brought together by absurd sound design, effects, and live direction, birthing a comedically unsettling narrative.

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Using only screen test footage from real actors—yes, REAL ACTORS that didn’t have a CLUE as to what was going on— The Screen Test: Love Triangle in The Emergency Room tears into the audition process and makes it not-as-hard to watch. “I was running my lines on the subway and really sweating it over this doctor role. There was all this medical jargon and I thought, 'Man, I am wasting their time.' But when I walked in the room they were like 'No, really ham it up.' I started making an ass of myself and everyone in the room was like, 'Yes. Perfect,'" says actor and comedian Ryan Bennett. He and the other actors were subject to a true-to-life audition process, including having to run lines in different accents and act solo with a crowd of people watching the whole way through. Unbeknownst to them, they were pawns in a production they could never have imagined, “When the big reveal happened in the end and I was told what was really going on, I couldn't help but just laugh. They got me. Oh man, they got me. I hope the people watching get the same sense of fun,” says actor and participant William Douglas Turner.

“The idea came from hearing how odd the audition process can be for actors and then finding a way to shine a light on that process,” says Hawkins. “From a casting director’s point of view, it makes sense how having them do a variety of performances would show an actor’s range; but of those requests actually made the final cut for a commercial, TV show, or movie that otherwise took itself seriously, felt like a unique way to approach comedy,” and it certainly is. With a diverse crew pouring all sorts of spins into the experience, they had more than enough footage to choose from. “Post-production was fun because we basically treated the edit and VFX as if it was a serious attempt at the short’s respective genre, so that the tonally bad direction would really stand out,” says Hawkins.

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Watch The Screen Test: Love Triangle in The Emergency Room below. Try not to require a defibrillator after:

Rachel Dratch's Late Night Snack is all-new this Thursday at 11/10 Central. Click here for more information, and check out more on Edmond Hawkins' website.

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