What the Casting Couch Looks Like in the Digital Age
One of Hollywood’s most pernicious tropes hasn’t died. It has merely expanded.
“The days of the casting couch—if they ever existed—are over.”
That was the Hollywood casting director Marvin Paige, to the celebrity columnist Dick Kleiner in 1965. Kleiner had noticed that Paige’s office lacked that most metaphorically laden of furniture items—a couch—and Paige had explained its absence in decidedly optimistic terms. Paige, in his pronouncement, may have been willfully ignorant; he may have been simply naive. Either way, he was wrong. The casting couch, as a metonym for sexual exploitation in the entertainment industry, lives on because the exploitation itself lives on. Today, though, it has become broader than an object, and something more than a metaphor: It’s become digitized.
