When you think about the work that goes into making a movie, you might think of the director, or the actors, or even the set designer or composer. But you probably don’t immediately think of one of the people who has a pretty important role to play – the casting director.
“I think we were for many years, the most unknown part of the industry,” said Shay Bentley Griffin, CEO of Chez Studios and a longtime casting director here in Georgia who has played an integral role in the state’s film industry over the years.
Not only has Griffin helped launch the careers of regional talent like Walton Goggins and Kyle Chandler, she helped found the Georgia Production Partnership and was one part of the committee that helped create the entertainment tax incentive program that’s brought so much film and television production to Georgia.
At this year’s Rome International Film Festival, Griffin was honored with a new award called “The Shay.” The award will be presented to all future Best Actor winners at the festival starting in 2024.
“It was very meaningful,” Griffin said about the honor. “I hope that it can be something that can help to identify other really great talent that pass through our market.”
Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with Griffin about her career. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
To get started, I would love to hear about the beginning of your career and how you got started in the industry.
Shay Bentley Griffin: I started out as a talent agent and did that for a number of years and helped to launch some amount of careers out of Atlanta, as well as trying to get as many booked as possible on shows that were coming into Atlanta, at the time. In the very beginning, when we began to have more work here – not anything to compare with today, but nevertheless, we didn’t know it could be different, so we were very happy with what we had at that time.
After doing that for a while, I realized that just just being the agent didn’t always enable me to have the opportunity to push more and to try to convince the producers and the directors that we could do more, and that we had talent here that could carry entire – not entire, but we could carry a much, much greater amount of the roles that were in a film. As I changed over and decided that what I should be doing was working as a casting director, then I began to realize that I had a greater opportunity to talk more directly to the people who would make the decisions. We were able at that point to really get people considered for more and more roles that were coming in with films that gave us a greater opportunity. That is really how it all started. I just really kept pursuing the opportunities for them to give us a chance, at least, of being considered for some of the bigger roles. Eventually, they did. Eventually, we began to have a greater opportunity to at least be considered.
I was reading some interviews with you, and you just mentioned this, about how you were trying to persuade productions to use local actors. What did those conversations early on look like? How did you persuade studio execs or producers or whoever to use local talent?
Griffin: It’s very interesting, because I often laugh about the fact that I used to make trips out to Los Angeles and try to talk to the producers and the directors before they got here. In the very, very beginning, I think they just sort of looked at me like – she really doesn’t understand what this is, nor does she get the fact that we don’t expect to find that kind of talent in Georgia. But what changed it for me was once I was talking to a director or producer, and I said, “Well, I think I could save you money.” The minute I said that, it was almost like the producer especially looked at me and said, “Well how? How could you do that?” I said, “Well if you’ve got a cast of say, 15 people in your project, what if I could put even 10 actors into that? And you didn’t have to fly them here, and you didn’t have to put them in hotels, and per diem and all. If you figure all of that up, don’t you think that would save you money?”
That suddenly started to make them think and finally I had a film that said alright – show us. See what you can do. And we could do that. Of a 15-role [project], we might easily take eight or nine, maybe 10 of those roles, given a real opportunity to be considered. After that, it started to change. They would really give me a chance to see what we could do. Every [project] always has a certain way they break down the roles in the film. Well, we went from being at the very end – where they would say these roles you’re gonna cast, here – to [them] finally saying to me, why don’t you see what you think, and then tell us what you think we’ll need to bring? We began to be able to show them that we could make a huge difference in their films. And not just for the money’s sake alone. These were really good actors. The directors were very pleased with them.
Yeah, I was going to say – to get them to take a closer look at the talent, you had to talk money first.
Griffin: You know, I probably felt exactly like you do in thinking that. You would think, gee wouldn’t just that they were talented be enough? But no, because they didn’t believe that. They didn’t believe that you could compare the actors in the region to the actors that were in L.A. In many cases, they didn’t realize that of course, the actors in L.A., many of them came from the regional markets. It’s not as if they were just all born in L.A.
They had never thought about it. So when they would see these actors and watch them in the auditions – and in those days, we really did audition – they would see that, my goodness, I think this actor would be great for this. We could use this particular actor. But you’re right. The thing that had to turn it was money. A producer hearing that you could cut their budget would encourage the directors to at least give it a shot, see what we could do. It made a big difference.
I later was able to take so much pride in when our actors would hand their resumes to the directors. They’d be looking at those, and at first they would almost question that the resumes could be real, you know? I got to where I realized I better always assure them that this is not just somebody who walked through a film. This was an actor. They had a real serious role and had dialogue to deliver. Then they became so amazed with the resumes that some of the actors have. Today, if you were to look at a certain number of actors in the regional market, their resumes are just astounding. They have done so much work. By comparison, for a period of time, I would say that the actors living in this region, at least, had far better resumes than some of a certain level of actors that were in Los Angeles. It was interesting for a while there, because our actors were having more opportunity to work on a more consistent basis.
When you think about talent agents and casting directors, there’s a sort of similarity there. How do you think your skills, or your time as a talent agent prepared you to be a casting director?
Griffin: The time I spent being a talent agent was invaluable to me at the time when I decided to become a casting director. As a matter of fact, I think that would have been the reason I would have made that choice, in that I began to really realize how good some of the actors we were representing were. I started going out to the Los Angeles market on a regular basis talking to people out there about the talent that we had here, beginning to realize that we were competitive. We could easily do some of the roles that were going to be in a script coming here.
As a talent agent, I began to realize I needed to be in a position to speak up early and be able to make certain that the production and the producers and all realized that. So my experience from working with talent as their representative really enabled me to know how better to, I guess, market that. I was able to speak from experience as to the value of those talent, and why they would take a look at them as opposed to just bringing all that talent in for it.
Jumping off of that, I know that you were pretty instrumental in helping get the tax incentive program started here. It seems to me you’ve spent a lot of time persuading people in other positions of power to bring production here. Can you talk about that process?
Griffin: I think that at the time, the market was changing, and it was changing all over. I mean, there was a point in time – when I speak of that first part of being able to get them to look at more of the talent when they were coming here – there was a period of time where we had projects coming in on a regular basis, which was great and exciting. Then all of a sudden, we didn’t.
In that particular time, I have to say that I believe that the powers that be in Los Angeles’s first decision always was – almost like what I said to them, I can save you money on talent. It became a bigger thing than that. They wanted to save money across the board. So many of them were starting to go, at that time, to Canada. We were losing so much work here. That went on for a period of time, and I was, at the time, president of an organization called Georgia Production Partnership. We all sat down and [said], let’s look at where our future is. If this doesn’t change, we’ll be the only ones who ever did any work of any amount in the film industry. We don’t have a film industry, and people will have to make the decision to move, and go where they work. And, you know, we didn’t want to move! We wanted to stay where we were. And yet many of us had learned so much about whichever area in the business that [we] were working in.
So with that effort, we put the group into a position to become much more, I guess, politically savvy. You know, we began to start talking to the people who were in the legislative group in the state to say – we’ve got to have some help, or we’re going to not have a film industry. That’s when the effort began about the tax credit. I served on Gov. [Sonny] Perdue’s film advisory, and he challenged us to find out what that might need to be. At the end of the day, there was not but one thing that we could really put an absolute value on doing that would make a difference for us, and that was to create the tax credit. I had been to L.A. enough to know that one of the first questions always was, what do you have that would make us come to you instead of going to Canada? What can you do to save us money? That’s the only thing that people in L.A. were really interested in talking about.
I served with Ed Spivia, who was our very first Film Commissioner, along with two others. I guess there were four of us, for the most part, that were on that committee. That was myself, Ed Spivia, Ric Reitz and Wilbur Fitzgerald. We spent a lot of hours, and we also had a great lobbyist. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how and what it would take to even up that figure that was needed to make them look at Georgia again. And that became the tax credit that is in place today. One of its key sales tools was that Georgia peach.
Yeah, you see it at the end of every movie.
Griffin: The peach was a great sales tool for the state of Georgia. It branded the film industry. We were able to show [Gov. Perdue] how it was a major marketing piece. We talked about how those films, once made and with the peach in the credits, would last forever, and go all over the world eventually, and how important that was a branding piece for the state of Georgia through the film industry.
Gov. Perdue saw that that was something really worth giving a shot at, and told us to see if we could get it through the session that year. Those of us who had never been politicians found ourselves down at the Capitol everyday through that session talking to people and explaining it to people, how it would bring work to Georgia, that we would put many Georgians to work with a larger more productive film industry. We got it through, finally. We couldn’t believe we did it, but we did. We figured it would take about a year to help us catch up and get the word out to L.A. and New York, wherever we needed it to be, and in about a year we’d start to see some difference. We didn’t. It took no time at all. As soon as that bill was signed into place, our world changed here. And has never gone any other way but up.
You were recently recognized at the Rome International Film Festival with a new award called The Shay to be given out to future Best Actor honorees at the festival. Walton Goggins sent in a video thanking you for helping jumpstart his career. What do you remember about him that stood out, and can you think of some other actors you’ve helped throughout the years?
Griffin: When I first met Walt, he just had the fire in him, as a person. He really wanted to be an actor. He wanted to have the opportunity to create those stories, be a storyteller in his work. I think it was just there was such an intensity in him that I couldn’t ignore. This is somebody I really want to help. I want to give him the opportunity to see what he can do. And right from the very beginning, he was just great. I mean, he had no particular training. It was all just very natural to him. He understood what it meant to create a character from a script. He knew how to bring that to life. I once said to somebody, he didn’t even need to have dialogue. Just his presence in a thing, you wouldn’t take your eyes off of him. He just managed to make everything seem so intense and so real.
He was very young when I first met him – 16, 17. And he had that, already. It was one of those – like, some people sing, some people play piano, or whatever. For Walt, the instrument for him was the ability to create a character in a story and make it so real. You believed him. You believed that he was, in fact, that character. He could do that. In anything that I ever saw him have a performance in, you just never took your eyes off of him when he was on screen. He had that magic. He had that, what I guess you can call that star magic. It was just absolutely there.
I hope this would not make Walt – I think I did say it to him at one point. He was like, you’re kidding, of course. He’s kind of like, to me, the Jack Nicholson of his generation. He can do anything. It doesn’t matter what it is. He is a leading man in whatever it is that he’s given the opportunity to bring to life, to create. He can just become that character.
He’s certainly got a similarly expressive face to Jack Nicholson, that’s for sure.
Griffin: Not all actors can do that. I mean, it’s just not always that common a part of a person’s talent. I mean, there are other actors that do really good work, and they can inhabit that persona of a character and make it excellent in what they’re doing. But the ability to play different characters, not become just a particular type of role, and that’s what you usually see them in. That’s not Walt. Walt can be for comedy – he’s very good at comedy. And in the other direction, he can absolutely scare you to death. That’s talent. I mean, in my opinion, that’s something that you’re born with just like some people are born to sing, or as I said, play an instrument or do anything. Their talent for it is just so real, you couldn’t imagine them not doing it.
There are others that came through. Gosh, we had so many great talents. People don’t always know Kyle Chandler.
Oh yeah. One of my favorites.
Griffin: I remember the first time I saw him. He came to my office, a friend brought him in for me to meet. I sat and I talked with him for a while, and I remember saying to the people in my office after he left, I said, “Remember his name, because he’s going to be a star.” Very different type of actor from Walt. He reminded me of the actors in the 40s and 50s, you know that whole group. The Gregory Pecks, the Gary Coopers. He had that kind of presence about him. I knew that as soon as we got him to Hollywood, that of course he was going to work, and that he would become a star.
Ray McKinnon is another one, more of a character actor, but just an amazing actor. Dan Byrd, who most people remember as a child actor here, who works all the time. We’ve just had a great number of talent actually do so well. I often laugh and say, and now we want them back. [Laughs] Alright, Hollywood send them back home, because we want them here now! I’m very proud of them all, because they went to challenge what was an extremely difficult market and they’ve done so very well.
How does it feel to be honored by the Rome International Film Festival with that award?
Griffin: It was amazing. It was amazing.They had been in touch with Walt, and he sent a wonderful, wonderful video talking about when we first met. He will always say how our meeting really changed his career for him, but he also always identifies that for many other actors. He will always say that the fact that I took that interest and cared, and then fought for it, made a difference. That makes you feel really good, to know that your work did make a difference.