The Grayissance
Lonna Drewes
The industry is looking for women over fifty. Almost nobody has told them.
There is a casting happening this week where every woman in the waiting room is over fifty. Nobody is calling it brave. It is a Tuesday, there is bad coffee, and the client wants six of them at a rate considerably better than it would have been five years ago.
The industry did not decide to be kind. Kindness has never opened a single board in the history of this business. What happened is that somebody finally looked at where the money actually lives — and it was not where the campaigns were pointing.
Now agencies that never carried a Classic board are building one. Casting directors are making new lists and finding them too short. Rates are climbing.
You are not asking an industry to make room for you. You are arriving somewhere that is already looking for you and does not have enough people who know how to work.
This is the tour.
Sixty chapters on what this world actually looks like from the inside — written by someone who spent decades in it as a working model, an agency owner, and the owner of a photo production company.
Who is really behind the table at a casting, and which of them has the power. What clients are buying when they book this board, which is not what the articles say. What a shoot day actually feels like at hour eight. Which categories are quietly the best money and which glamorous ones pay almost nothing and are worth it anyway. What the good years look like in real numbers. And the things nobody warns you about — being discussed in the third person, the cold, and the people you love being strange about it.
Including:
Why the correction happened, and why you are early rather than late
The three roads in — starting fresh, coming back, or transitioning off the Women’s board
Why two women the same age get completely different results
What a booker actually does all day, and why the agency goes quiet
Every category this market books, and what each one pays
The four numbers hiding inside one quoted rate
The most expensive signature you will ever be asked for
The wisdom discount — being asked to work for less because you should be grateful
What the women still working at seventy did differently at fifty-two
Honest, specific, and occasionally rude about an industry that spent thirty years marketing to the wrong woman.
The pool of women who know how this works was tiny five years ago. It is bigger now. It will be crowded eventually.
It is not crowded yet.
The industry is looking for women over fifty. Almost nobody has told them.
There is a casting happening this week where every woman in the waiting room is over fifty. Nobody is calling it brave. It is a Tuesday, there is bad coffee, and the client wants six of them at a rate considerably better than it would have been five years ago.
The industry did not decide to be kind. Kindness has never opened a single board in the history of this business. What happened is that somebody finally looked at where the money actually lives — and it was not where the campaigns were pointing.
Now agencies that never carried a Classic board are building one. Casting directors are making new lists and finding them too short. Rates are climbing.
You are not asking an industry to make room for you. You are arriving somewhere that is already looking for you and does not have enough people who know how to work.
This is the tour.
Sixty chapters on what this world actually looks like from the inside — written by someone who spent decades in it as a working model, an agency owner, and the owner of a photo production company.
Who is really behind the table at a casting, and which of them has the power. What clients are buying when they book this board, which is not what the articles say. What a shoot day actually feels like at hour eight. Which categories are quietly the best money and which glamorous ones pay almost nothing and are worth it anyway. What the good years look like in real numbers. And the things nobody warns you about — being discussed in the third person, the cold, and the people you love being strange about it.
Including:
Why the correction happened, and why you are early rather than late
The three roads in — starting fresh, coming back, or transitioning off the Women’s board
Why two women the same age get completely different results
What a booker actually does all day, and why the agency goes quiet
Every category this market books, and what each one pays
The four numbers hiding inside one quoted rate
The most expensive signature you will ever be asked for
The wisdom discount — being asked to work for less because you should be grateful
What the women still working at seventy did differently at fifty-two
Honest, specific, and occasionally rude about an industry that spent thirty years marketing to the wrong woman.
The pool of women who know how this works was tiny five years ago. It is bigger now. It will be crowded eventually.
It is not crowded yet.