Casting Director Focus Session #6 with Fern Champion

1:00-2:00pm -- 9th Floor, Room #C951
Get advice from the Legendary Casting Director of classics like "Saturday Night Fever," "Naked Gun," "The Mask," and the upcoming star-studded miniseries "The Hatfields and McCoys."

Casting director Fern Champion leads a one-hour workshop and discusses how he/she auditions actors, audition advice, and takes questions.

Speaker

-- Fern Champion, Casting Director

SPEAKER BIO

Fern Champion
Fern Champion is a veteran casting director of numerous wide-ranging and eclectic feature films and television series. Her professional journey began in New York casting "Saturday Night Fever," and her love of comedy led her to cast the "Naked Gun" and "Police Academy" series of films.

She has worked on movies featuring the likes of Carol Burnett, Gilda Radner, Rodney Dangerfield, Dan Aykroyd, and Cheech and Chong. Highly regarded as a comedic casting director, she had the privilege of casting legendary director Billy Wilder's final film, with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, titled "Buddy Buddy."

While casting "The Mask," starring Jim Carrey, Champion discovered Cameron Diaz. Other discoveries include such diverse talents as Mickey Rourke, Danny Glover, Kim Cattrall, Kelly Preston, Pee-wee Herman, and Sharon Stone, whom she cast in the epic miniseries "War and Remembrance." To date, it is the longest and most expensive miniseries in television history.

Champion ventured into the action-horror genre with several "Friday the 13th" movies, "Pet Sematary," and "Mortal Kombat." During the '90s, her focus shifted to series television, working with producer Aaron Spelling for six years on such series as "Beverly Hills, 90210."

Other hit series in her repertoire include "The Highlander" and "Babylon 5." Today Champion is enjoying success casting independent features. This past year she finished shooting the psychological thriller "Beyond," with Jon Voight, and the children's comedy "Opposite Day," with Pauly Shore and many of television's hottest young stars, including Ariel Winter and Rico Rodriguez from "Modern Family" and Atticus Shaffer from "The Middle."

Recently, she's had the honor of bringing Kevin Costner to television in the epic six-hour miniseries "The Hatfields and McCoys," directed by Kevin Reynolds, for the History Channel.

The cast is an extraordinary group of legendary actors such as Bill Paxton, Tom Berenger, Mare Winningham, and Powers Boothe, along with some of the brightest talent from the younger generation, such as Jena Malone, Lindsay Pulsipher, Matt Barr, Noel Fischer, and Boyd Holbrook. The miniseries is set to air May 2012.

Champion also recently had the pleasure of casting a big-screen version of the American classic "Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn," starring Joel Courtney ("Super 8") and Jake T. Austin ("Wizards of Waverly Place").

She also put together the ensemble cast for the independent comedy "Sleeping Around," starring Michael McKean, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Bryan Callen, and Jesse Bradford.