I finally got The Criterion Channel again. Watched a short documentary of sorts about the search by director Luchino Visconti for a really good-looking kid to play Tadzio in Death in Venice. In the novel by Thomas Mann, the kid was twelve and was blond and blue-eyed, and they weren't going to find him in Italy.
The character was part of a family of Polish aristocrats. They went to Poland, but it was Communist and the kids there were proletarian, which is a good thing.
They went to Scandinavia. I don't know what it says about "social democracy" that they had such plausibly aristocratic children. Because the director was Italian, they couldn't communicate in their native languages.
"What?" Visconti said. "He's FORTY? That's incredible! He looks great for forty!----Oh. Fourteen."
The character only had a couple of lines in the script. They were casting strictly for looks.
They finally auditioned Bjorn Andresen who was too old and too tall for the part, but he was a very nice-looking young man. He seemed bemused by the whole thing. That may just be the way good-looking people react to things. The less attractive kids were apprehensive.
They made Bjorn smile at the camera and mince around the room and asked him to take off his turtleneck.
The whole thing turned out to be a bad experience for the kid which shouldn't be much of a surprise.
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