how many mike’s do we rip on the daily?…
It’s an interesting story how we found Mike Bash, the lead actor of our film. Tim and I were having our first official read through of a very early draft of the script in a conference room in his building in Glendale in 2017. We needed actors to read some roles so I put a post on some sort of hollywood filmmakers facebook group I was a member of. Within minutes I had a response from a guy named Mike. He seemed to fit the description of our lead character so I casted him to read for Mikey… Mark Webber attended to read as Bobby, and his wife Teresa Palmer showed up to read as well. Like a gangster, Teresa read every single female role in a slightly different American accent while holding her newest blond haired infant on her lap the entire time.
The read-thru was a success and I thought Bash was quite excellent as Mikey in a pinch. 4 years later and we couldn’t find anyone better to play the role. And believe us, we looked. We knew we probubly couldn’t afford to fly someone in from Hollywood for this. We briefly considered hiring a new york actor named Mike to play Mikey, but it didn’t work out because he really wanted to play Butchie and we had someone else in mind for that role. There was no way to fuck with destiny, Mike Bash was born to play the role of Mikey Ventriello.
Bash wasn’t the only Mike we wound up importing from toon town. A friend of mine named Willy Bravemen(who was a vine addict, like me), turned me on to a dude named Michael Gambino. My buddy was right, Gambino made some funny ass vines. Willy knew I lived in LA and he really wanted me to meet Mr. Gambino and give him some baseball hats he picked up for him. I never got it together to meet up with Mike but we came close several times… Tim and I both knew we had to find someone very special to play the part of Butchie, as he was meant to be a likeble scumbag, so he needed to be funny… So the actor playing him had to be carefully selected. I recollected the vibe of Gambino’s vines to be slightly guido-ish, so I asked him to submit an audition of the dinner scene in full on guido accent. He absolutly smashed it on his self tape. Tim and I agreed almost immediatly that he was our Butchie and that we were done searching.
Once we had a few Mike’s attached to this project, more Mike’s began rolling in. Mike Regalbuto fought hard to claim his position as our D.P.. The actor who was supposed to play Mario (the bar owner) decided to blow us off on the first day of filming. We were at a loss as to what to do. The movie was in grave danger. But we remembered that during a more recent zoom read thru, the actor playing the part of Charlie The Cop subbed for Mario (since the actor who was originally supposed to play Mario blew us off for that read as well). We thought he did an excellent job playing Mario so we asked him if he’d consider taking on the role and lucky for us he was available. His name, ofcourse, was Michael, Micheal McFadden to be exact.
Now all we needed to do was re-cast Charlie The Cop, and wouldn’t you know it, a talented gentleman named Mike Sutton came into play the role. Special thanks go out to Brandon E Brookes, our super duper casting producer.
-Frankie