Our recent discussions of people casting only highly attractive young women reminded me of a friend who did that for a legitimate reason, but with some irony behind it.

When I lived in France, I had a friend who was a decent enough chap, but, being a sometime photographer, also known to meet women at parties and go "Hey, I should photograph you sometime. Give me your number."

Once I took him to a party that he found boring, even though we'd met one woman I thought was rather beautiful. As he left, saying there was no one there worth meeting, I asked, "What about her?" "She's nothing special," he said, and left.

My friend was not without self-awareness, however, and when, a year later, he made his first short, it was about a photographer whose camera keeps seducing women for him - only to turn them (literally) into cardboard cut-outs. In the film he meets the perfect woman, only to leave her alone with his camera and come back to find her transformed, like all the others, into two dimensions.

Imagine my surprise, when he finally showed us all his film, to see that the "perfect woman" was played by the very same woman he'd so casually dismissed at the party. I couldn't resist tweaking him about this, but all he said was, "I found her through a casting."

Some men, it seems, need a headshot and a resume before they'll be impressed.

Ha! Good story Jim.