Goodbye, Plastic Surgery?

[genuinegirly]

An interesting trend - casting directors seem to be more interested in the natural look. It started off with films based in historical settings, and has started spreading.
Hollywood to Actors - No Surgery, Please - NYTimes.com

A Little Too Ready for Her Close-Up?
By LAURA M. HOLSON
It took years for Hollywood to create the perfect woman. Now it wants the old one back.

In small but significant numbers, filmmakers and casting executives are beginning to re-examine Hollywood’s attitude toward breast implants, Botox, collagen-injected lips and all manner of plastic surgery.

Television executives at Fox Broadcasting, for example, say they have begun recruiting more natural looking actors from Australia and Britain because the amply endowed, freakishly young-looking crowd that shows up for auditions in Los Angeles suffers from too much sameness.

“I think everyone either looks like a drag queen or a stripper,” said Marcia Shulman, who oversees casting for Fox’s scripted shows.

Independent casting directors like Mindy Marin, who worked on the Jason Reitman film “Up in the Air,” are urging talent agents to discourage clients from having surgery, particularly older celebrities who, she contends, are losing jobs because their skin is either too taut or swollen with filler. Said Ms. Marin: “What I want to see is real.”

Even extras get the once-over. Sande Alessi, who helped cast the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, said she offers to photograph actresses in their bathing suits, telling them they can keep the photo for their audition books.

Professional courtesy? Not exactly. Moviemakers prefer actresses with natural breasts for costume dramas and period films. So much so that when the Walt Disney Company recently advertised for extras for the new “Pirates” film, the casting call specified that only women with real breasts need apply. By taking a photograph, Ms. Alessi said, “we don’t have to ask, we will know.”

The move toward “less is more” is being propelled by a series of colliding social and technological trends, more than a dozen film and television professionals said.

Cosmetic enhancements remain popular, with 10 million surgical and nonsurgical procedures performed in the United States in 2009, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. At the same time, the spread of high-definition television — as well as a curious public’s trained eye — has made it easier to spot a celebrity’s badly stitched hairline or botched eyelid lift.

Men, of course, are not immune to the youthful lure of a surgeon’s scalpel. But it is women, to the surprise of no one, who are being scrutinized most closely.

Botox is the enemy in a post-“Avatar,” 3-D infatuated Hollywood, where the ability to crumple a mouth into a frown is as vital as remembering one’s lines. More startling is how young plastic surgery devotees have become. In January, the actress Heidi Montag was on the cover of People magazine touting the 10 cosmetic procedures she received in one day. She is 23.

“The era of ‘I look great because I did this to myself’ has passed,” said Shawn Levy, the director and producer of “Date Night” and the “Night at the Museum” movies. “It is viewed as ridiculous. Ten years ago, actresses had the feeling that they had to get plastic surgery to get the part. Now I think it works against them. To walk into a casting session looking false hurts one’s chances.”

Few in Hollywood are willing to admit to a chin reduction or mini eyebrow lift. (Remember when Jennifer Grey admitted to a nose job, a move some say hurt her career?) Celebrities instead are more open to discussing a former drug problem or sex addiction, because there is less concern a confession of that sort will harm their careers. But with so many types of cosmetic rejiggering, results are often painfully obvious and difficult to correct.

Ms. Shulman of Fox met with an agent recently to discuss hiring an actress who clearly had work done. “What did she do to her face?” Ms. Shulman said she asked the agent. “He said, ‘Nothing.’ I shrugged. I’m just not going to argue. I said, ‘She’s not for me then.’ ”

Head shots, too, are no longer reliable. Ms. Marin said she sometimes checks AwfulPlasticSurgery.com, a celebrity Web site that chronicles the surgically enhanced, to confirm suspicions about who has done what. When Ms. Alessi was casting “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in 2007, she received hundreds of head shots. Some of the actresses who arrived for auditions, though, looked nothing like their photographs.

“They would have these huge puffy lips and frozen foreheads,” she said. “You said to yourself, ‘Oh, I can’t use you.’ I don’t mind if they do a tiny bit of something, but it can’t be obvious.”

An actor can even lose a role if a director suspects surgery, whether it was performed or not. John Papsidera, a casting director for the “Batman” movies, said he and a director (he declined to say which one) recently debated whether to hire an actress in her early 20s to play a teenager falling in love. The actress was talented and naturally pretty. But what stopped the director was his suspicion that, at such a young age, she already had breast implants.

“We looked at film where she was topless and it was like, ‘Maybe,’ ” Mr. Papsidera said. It wasn’t a period film, so authenticity was not an issue. Instead, the possibility of implants became “a point of reference,” he said. “It was more of, ‘Where is that person coming from as an actor?’ ” She did not get the part.


“Behind the scenes, you have so many conversations,” said Mr. Levy, the director, referring to his discussions with studio executives about leading ladies. “Why did she do that to herself? She was beautiful. She was great. But now we can’t cast her.”

Rarely, though, do studio executives share their concerns with actors, he added, citing politeness as a reason.

Perhaps they should discuss it. After all, the executives and producers who criticize others for having too much plastic surgery often feel the same pressure to look young and attractive. Their judgments about others, then, are not only subjective, but deeply personal. (Several studio executives did not return calls or declined to comment on their views on cosmetic procedures.)

Carrie Audino, a casting director on “Mad Men,” said: “I do think there are times when you sit in a casting session and listen to what someone thinks is beautiful or handsome, and there is this very skewed outlook based on their own insecurities. Because they have issues, they have an issue with someone else.”

Last week Sharon Osbourne told Matt Lauer on the “Today” show that she was going to have her breast implants removed this summer and give them to her husband as paperweights. Lisa Kudrow, in a recent interview with New York magazine, seemed happy to own up to the fact that the face viewers saw on an episode of “Cougar Town” was hers, age lines and all.

“Look, time marches on,” she said. “You still want to look good, but there’s a line between looking like yourself and looking like a character from a Batman movie.”

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My response: FINALLY!!!
I am not a fan of fake.

[Tully Mars]

About time.

[MexicanOnABike]

are they going to spend millions retouching them in post production then?
I'm all for it if it improves the movies. apart from that, I don't care what they do to their bodies.

[Jove]

Good news. Now if we can only get out of this 3-D mood.

[Plan9]

Interesting read, GG. I hope it's more than 1% and that it spills into the mainstream sometime.

When I turn on my car radio, I get about half a dozen ads a day from local plastic surgery places for average folk.

They offer laser hair removal, Botox, laser lipo, "mommy makeovers" (a la carte Frankenstein packages), etc.

I don't see cosmetic surgery going away anytime soon. Among middle class white people? I think it's going up.

One of my buddies went on a date with a girl that lived in a shitbox apartment but had breast implants.

His thoughts about the matter? "Hah, not the kinda priorities you wanna move in with."

[Salem]

I agree, it's about flipping time! I'm so, so sick of the plastic surgery craze! If there's a reason for needing the surgery, by all means get your deviated septum fixed, or circumsize your penis or get a breast reduction if you suffer from giantomastisis or whatever. But really, just becuase you're "only" a B cup, and your lips don't look like Angies and you've got some laugh lines, that does not warrent cosmetic surgery.

I'm sick, to death, of the blond haired girl with the large fake tits and the tiny waist with an ovbious nose job, tummy tuck/lipo, cheek bone reshaping, ect, ect, ect. I'm sick as HELL of all this. I don't find it attractive, I've always thought they looked like whores, strippers, porn stars. The intrigue and desire for porn stars and strippers is they arn't walking on the streets all day everyday just like one of us. It's all gone to shit now that everytime you turn around there's some girl looking just like Jenna Jameson. It's kind of disgusting, and I'm sick of it. I really to hope this whole, natural look, catches back on. In my mind there's nothing sexier than NATURAL people. People who have come to terms with the fact that they have one breast larger than the other, or that their hair is a color in between blond and brown and refuse to dye it either way just to fit in, wear little or no makeup and are just confident with themselves.

I'm a bit of a hippie, I dont wear makeup, refuse to get any cosmetic surgery, don't even own makeup, but still shave. And I'm attracted to similar people. I don't find the over-use of make up, or cosmetic surgery attractive. I just don't. And I'm glad that Hollywood is starting to realize what they're pushed on society by starting the plastic surgery craze, and trying to reverse that. Sad for all the poor girls who felt they needed to get plastic surgery to fit in and are noe being rejected, but good for everyone else.

It's about time.

[Charlatan]

I think this trend is going to get worse before it gets better.

I am thinking that if the big money in plastic surgery dries up (i.e. Hollywood, etc.) they will find a way to maintain their business by making it cheaper. I suspect you will see discount plastic surgeries opening up next to your local WalMart.

They will make up the losses by switching to volume.

[Baraka_Guru]

Originally Posted by Charlatan

They will make up the losses by switching to volume.

They already have switched to volume. There's a "plastic surgery institute" down the street from me. It's in one of those old houses converted to commercial, and so it's pretty much in a residential area.

The two largest sections in the Yellow Pages are "Lawyers" and "Plastic Surgeons." I'm not sure if the two are connected, but there you have it.

A search on Google Maps for "plastic surgery" in Toronto turns up 1,424 results.

Hollywood has been known to lead trends, but I'm not sure they can stop people from wanting to look like celebrities, whether they're natural or not.

I think there will now always be a market for nipping and tucking. Neurotoxic injections alone should keep the market going strongly.

[Charlatan]

Well there you have it.

I don't think Hollywood will have an impact on anything but the worst case scenarios. Nobody wants to be The Catwoman or Joan Rivers. They all want to be Sandra Bullock, just enough. Sadly, just enough always turns into, Holy Fuck.

[amonkie]

This article makes me wonder exactly how many people we are talking about that consider themselves "talent" and have had plastic surgery or give off the appearance of having done so. I think this would make this a much more significant discussion in terms of how radically this shift is changing Hollywood.