Andrea Eastman, who broke boundaries as a casting director at Paramount in the 1970s and as an agent at ICM, has died, Deadline has confirmed. She was 86.
Eastman’s output as a casting director is not extensive, but it is impressive. She had an uncanny penchant for identifying untested talent and placing them in breakout roles. That trend began in 1969 with Goodbye, Columbus. She found model Ali MacGraw and cast her as Brenda Patimkin, a nouveau riche Radcliffe student home for the summer.
Adapted from Philip Roth’s novella of the same name which examined the lives of young, middle-class Jewish Americans, some critics questioned the choice of MacGraw, who is not Jewish, and who, according to the New York Times’ Vincent Canby, had the more WASP-y image of “a long-legged, healthily tanned Coca-Cola girl come to life.” (Canby also said MacGraw had “exactly the right mixture of innocence and guile.”)
It seems he, and Eastman, were right.
Budgeted at under $2M, the film grossed over $10.5M. Paramount overlord Charles G. Bluhdorn bragged that signing MacGraw at just $20,000 was a steal, given the box office receipts. The coup helped endear Eastman to Bluhdorn.
As she later remembered, citing her fictional self in the Paramount+ series about the making of The Godfather, “If you watch The Offer, you will see that Charlie yelled at a lot of people. But he never yelled at me. We had an incredible relationship.”
The even greater success of Love Story the following year surely cemented that bond. The Paramount film paired MacGraw again with a TV actor whom the filmmakers only found after a dozen big names passed: Ryan O’Neal. (Tommy Lee Jones was also cast, making Love Story his film debut.)
Love Story went on to be an even bigger hit than Goodbye, Columbus, bringing in over $170M globally and being nominated for seven Oscars and three Grammys.
She next cast T.R. Baskin, a commercial and critical failure. But Eastman did conjure up a cast that included Candice Bergen, James Caan and a relatively unknown Peter Boyle.
Then came what she later called “the happiest time of my life” working on The Godfather in 1972. “I am most proud of being one on the team that cast The Godfather,” said Eastman.
Alongside producer Fred Roos and director Francis Ford Coppola, Eastman was an instrumental voice in shaping the film’s legendary lineup. Paramount brass resisted casting a relative unknown named Al Pacino, whose only previous starring film role was as a junkie in The Panic in Needle Park. The studio’s first choice, after the success of Love Story, was O’Neal. But Coppola was adamant, and Eastman used her leverage to help secure Pacino’s place.
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She also promoted James Caan for Sonny Corleone. “We all worked as a team, but I am responsible for Jimmy Caan getting the part of Sonny,” she recalled.
“Jimmy was amazing in his Godfather screen test for Sonny, but he was out of the movie. Francis Ford Coppola, the director, had initially promised the part to a big guy named Carmine Creedy he’d met at a party. Coppola made him an offer in a bar, but it turned out Creedy wasn’t quite right for the part. He was a big guy but not menacing. He was like a big Saint Bernard,” Eastman recalled. “Luckily, he’d never formally signed a deal, and Coppola trusted me. He was leaving for Sicily so he told me, ‘Just cast my f-ing movie!’”
After The Godfather, Eastman segued to the agency business. The move was brought on by a disagreement with onetime friend and then newly-minted president of Paramount, Frank Yablans.
“I just thought, ‘You know what? Screw you, Frank,’ remembered Eastman. “I called Paul Rosen.” Rosen, at International Famous Agency, “kept offering me a job,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Paul can we have lunch tomorrow?’ He doubled my salary.”
Her first clients were Richard Benjamin (with whom she had worked on Goodbye, Columbus) Paula Prentiss, Peter Boyle (from T.R. Baskin) and Catherine Ross.
She became a manager for a time after her friend Jane Oliver died and Oliver’s client, a white hot post-Rocky Sylvester Stallone called and asked her to work with him.
In 1983 Eastman joined ICM, where she represented the likes of Dustin Hoffman, Jamie Lee Curtis, Billy Crystal, Katie Couric, Burt Reynolds, Jaclyn Smith and Barbra Streisand. She rose to the rank of Senior Vice President before retiring in 2010.
Eastman is survived by her former husband Paul N. Lazarus III, her stepson Robert Lazarus and his wife Annie.
