A Little Too Ready for Her Close-Up?

In small but significant numbers, filmmakers and casting executives are beginning to re-examine Hollywood’s attitude toward breast implants, Botox, collagen-injected lips and all manner of plastic surgery.

Tv executives at Fox Broadcasting, for example, say they have begun recruiting more natural looking actors from Australia and Britain because the amply endowed, freakishly young-looking crowd that shows up for auditions in Los Angeles suffers from much sameness.

“I think everyone either looks like a drag queen or a stripper,” said Marcia Shulman, who oversees casting for Fox’s scripted shows.

Independent casting directors like Mindy Marin, who worked on the Jason Reitman film “Up in the Air,” are urging talent agents to discourage clients from having surgery, older celebrities who, they contends, are losing jobs because their skin is either taut or swollen with filler. Said Ms. Marin: “What I require to see is real.”

Professional courtesy? Not exactly. Moviemakers prefer actresses with natural breasts for costume dramas and period films. So much so that when the Walt Disney Company recently advertised for extras for the new “Pirates” film, the casting call specified that only women with real breasts need apply. By taking a photograph, Ms. Alessi said, “we don’t must ask, they will know.”

Even extras get the once-over. Sande Alessi, who helped cast the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies, said they offers to photograph actresses in their bathing suits, telling them they can keep the photo for their audition books.

The move toward “less is more” is being propelled by a series of colliding social and technological trends, over a dozen film and tv professionals said.

Cosmetic enhancements remain popular, with 10 million surgical and nonsurgical procedures performed in the United States in 2009, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. Simultaneously, the spread of high-definition tv — and a curious public’s trained eye — has made it not as hard to spot a celebrity’s badly stitched hairline or botched eyelid lift.

Men, of coursework, are not immune to the youthful lure of a surgeon’s scalpel. But it is women, to the surprise of no one, who are being scrutinized most closely.

Botox is the enemy in a post-“Avatar,” 3-D infatuated Hollywood, where the ability to crumple a mouth in to a frown is as vital as recalling one’s lines. More startling is how young plastic surgery devotees have become. In January, the actress Heidi Montag was on the cover of People magazine touting the 10 cosmetic procedures they received in one day. They is 23.

“The era of ‘I look great because I did this to myself’ has passed,” said Shawn Levy, the director and producer of “Date Night” and the “Night at the Museum” movies. “It is viewed as ridiculous. Ten years ago, actresses had the feeling that they had to get plastic surgery to get the part. Now I think it works against them. To walk in to a casting session looking false hurts one’s chances.”

Few in Hollywood are willing to admit to a chin reduction or mini eyebrow lift. (Recall when Jennifer Grey admitted to a nose job, a move some say hurt her career?) Celebrities in lieu are more open to discussing a former drug problem or sex addiction, because there is less concern a confession of that sort will harm their careers. But with so lots of types of cosmetic rejiggering, results are often painfully obvious and difficult to correct.

Head shots, , are no longer reliable. Ms. Marin said they sometimes checks AwfulPlasticSurgery.com, a celebrity Web-site that chronicles the surgically enhanced, to confirm suspicions about who has done what. When Ms. Alessi was casting “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” in 2007, they received hundreds of head shots. A quantity of the actresses who arrived for auditions, though, looked nothing like their photographs.

Ms. Shulman of Fox met with an agent recently to discuss hiring an actress who clearly had work done. “What did they do to her face?” Ms. Shulman said they asked the agent. “He said, ‘Nothing.’ I shrugged. I’m not going to argue. I said, ‘She’s not for me then.’ ”