Ryan Glorioso

Most of the movie-making in New Orleans remains rooted in Tinsel Town. However, productions rely on locals to provide a little something extra.

As the city’s cast-and-crew infrastructure continues to grow, more residents are signing up with local casting companies to find work as extras, stand-ins, and non-principal actors.

Two local casting directors, Ryan Glorioso and Liz Coulon, are trying to make things easier with their new database MyCastingFile.com, which allows aspiring background artists to register with multiple casting agencies at once, and allows those agencies to search for the perfect extra without having to sort through hundreds of headshots.

NoDef caught up with Glorioso at his Mid-City office space, where the offices of Glorioso Casting are directly across the hall from Coulon Casting. The setup reveals the unusual nature of the relationship between these two friends, business partners, and rivals.

“We are competitive,” said Glorioso of his relationship with Coulon, who was out of the country at the time, “but we help each other as well. It’s a friendly competition. If she’s too busy, she’ll pass a job to me, and if I’m too busy, I’ll pass a job to her, so it works.”

This friendly competition illustrates the nature of New Orleans’ film community, a community that scattered after the storm in 2005, but came together even stronger when productions returned to Louisiana. After evacuating for Katrina, Glorioso was in Houston when he got the call about a movie in Shreveport that was looking for help. That movie—Roadhouse 2: Last Call, a direct-to-video sequel to the 1989 Patrick Swayze classic—was the first movie filmed there after the storm, says Glorioso, and the experience galvanized the team that worked on it.

“Most of the crew that was working in New Orleans ended up in Shreveport,” said Glorioso. “They set us all up in an apartment complex there for about six months, free. We created a community.”

Glorioso and Coulon, who were both assisting with extras casting on Roadhouse 2, shared an apartment with local actor Robert Larriviere, and the initial ideas for MyCastingFile.com came from that experience.

“We started writing a list of what we wished we could have, as far as extras casting, to make the job easier,” said Glorioso.

At the time it was just a wish-list, but it was an idea that continued to develop alongside the rise of “Hollywood South.” Coulon pursued casting jobs in New Orleans, while Glorioso started his own company in Shreveport. Eventually the work brought Glorioso back down South, where he set up shop with Coulon, becoming rivals in the casting business but partners—along with Larriviere—in MyCastingFile.com.

“Two years ago we hired a web developer to build it,” said Glorioso, “and we’re using it now.”

Glorioso thinks of MyCastingFile.com as a sort of co-op for extras casting companies. In addition to Coulon Casting and Glorioso Casting, additional agencies from New Orleans, Austin, and Dallas joined the network. The site allows extras to register with the companies, setting up a profile that includes details about their appearance, experience, and special abilities. Casting companies can search for extras and check availability, and extras can manage their bookings with multiple agencies at once.

“We’re really trying to mainstream things,” said Glorioso. “I think all of the extras casting companies have had no real training as to ‘this is how the extras casting world works.’ We’ve all shown ourselves how to do this,” he explained.

So far, it seems to be working. Glorioso Casting continues to work on new projects, while past projects are popping up in theatres, like The Campaign, the locally shot comedy starring Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis that opens next month.

“That was a great experience here in New Orleans, and it’s going to be really funny,” said Glorioso. “We had probably 130 actors and I’d say 80% of those came from local talent, so you can see a lot of local people in there. And the extras, we probably had 8000 extras throughout the movie.”

The collaborative nature of MyCastingFile.com proves that New Orleans can be more than just another back lot for Hollywood. By finding ways to improve on the industry’s infrastructure and by providing an outlet for locals to get involved in the process, the city continues to carve out its role in the contemporary business of movie making.

“Our talent here,” said Glorioso, referring to the cast of New Orleans’ film community, “I would put them up against anyone in L.A. or New York.”