John Bankston - Emma Stone

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Emma Stone was 15 years old when she moved to Los Angeles, California. She wanted to be a professional actress. Less than three months after arriving, she booked her first job. Unfortunately, it wasn't on a TV show or in a movie. It was making dog biscuits. "They were made with human quality ingredients," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, "but they were still disgusting."

Emma left Arizona in January of 2004. She joined hundreds of other unknown actors hoping to find work during "pilot season." This is when dozens of new television shows film a single test episode. Few ever air. Casting for pilot season happens in the beginning of the year. For actors like Emma, it meant more than just the chance to be discovered. It also meant a decent paycheck.

When she'd asked her parents to support the move, she told them, "We're going to be there through pilot season, not forever." As she explained to Rolling Stone magazine in 2016, things didn't go the way she'd planned. "I auditioned for three months pretty steadily, got absolutely nothing, and then they stopped sending me out." Still, she had the job at the bakery for dogs. "I was, like, 'Now I'm working, see? I'm not getting auditions, but I gotta stay here.'"

Emma was in her ninth grade history class when she realized she didn't want to wait. "It's the last period of the day, and I had a revelation that I needed to move to Los Angeles as soon as possible because that's where I needed to go," she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017. Actors usually wait until adulthood to work professionally. Still, every year hundreds of children and young adults try to break into "the business." Most settle in New York or Los Angeles. They arrive from all over the country, usually with a parent or guardian in tow. Emma knew she'd need more than her parent's permission. She'd also have to convince her mother to make the trip, leaving behind their Scottsdale home along with her brother and father.

Emma made a Powerpoint presentation. Entitled "Project Hollywood," it set out her goals and how she needed to go to L.A. to achieve them. "Yeah, all about why I should be an actor. I never wanted to do anything else, from seven on. It wasn't a flight of fancy" she told The New York Times in 2015. "I make presentations because when I feel strongly about something, I cry I learned early on to be more logical and make presentations."

She gathered her parents in her bedroom and made her pitch. They agreed, so long as she got an agent first. Agents submit actors for auditions. Without them, it can be hard to find work. It is also very hard for a new actor to get an agent. Emma was prepared. Her Arizona acting coach had connections in Los Angeles. Soon after her presentation, she flew with her mother to L.A. She met with several agents, performing a comedic and a dramatic monologue. One agent agreed to represent her.

In Arizona, she was warned against living in an apartment complex swarming with hyper-competitive child actors. Instead, her mother rented a unit in Park La Brea, near the famous tar pits. Not long after arriving, Emma started working across the street at Three Dog Bakery. "I think three people called my specific cookies inedible to their dogs," she told Vanity Fair in 2011. "I'm not a super-talented dog baker."

For a while, she worried she was not a talented actress either. After pilot season ended, her agents didn't send her on many auditions. The ones she got didn't lead to work. Then one day her mother was watching TV and an ad came on for a new reality show. It was called In Search of the Partridge Family. Based on the popular 1970s TV show about a family of traveling musicians, it was seeking contestants.

"It was totally, 100 percent a reality show," Emma told Newsweek in 2012. "My mom had never pushed me to audition for anything, but she said, 'You look like Susan Dey a little, and just dyed your hair brown ... Why don't you give this a shot? I have a weird feeling.'" Dey had played Laurie Partridge, the lead female in the original.

Emma wasn't sure. Like well-known music competitions including American Idol and The Voice, In Search of the Partridge Family would cast from an open call. That meant hundreds of people showing up hoping to get on the show. Actors with agents usually avoid open calls. Still, Emma wasn't getting many auditions from her agents. She decided to take a chance.

Competing on stage and covering songs was a lot like her experiences in Arizona theater. "I recall seven weeks of living in a hotel, and thinking that I didn't really care if I won," she told the Internet Movie Database, "and then by the end thinking that, 'I don't know what I'm going to do if I don't win this thing.' I understood what the contestants on The Bachelor feel like. Because you think you're fine and then you get so driven."

Her mother got it right. Emma landed the part of Laurie Partridge.

During the competition, Emma also met a manager. Managers have fewer clients than agents and get more involved with their careers. After signing her as a client, Doug Wald advised her to wear less make-up and jewelry to auditions. He also started looking for places where she could use her background in comedy and improv. As she told Backstage magazine in 2016, "Doug told me, 'Hey, I want you to always remember: If someone doesn't get you, that's not on you, that's on them. If they don't get you, they're not your people.' My parents were like that, too: 'Just keep trucking as you are and eventually it will come together.'I mean, I guess that's a great life lesson."

Like most pilots, In Search of the Partridge Family was never turned into a series. It did air as a TV movie called The New Partridge Family in 2005. Emma's next big job was only slightly more successful. She starred as one half of a father-daughter team in a show about a cross-country road race called Drive. Although it was well-reviewed, it was cancelled after airing just four episodes in the fall of 2007. By then, however, Emma had the job that changed her life.

After a year in Los Angeles, Emma was finally getting work. She appeared on Malcolm in the Middle and The Suite Life of Zach and Cody. For much of her time in Los Angeles, besides her family, her agent and her manager, Emma had at least one other important person in her corner. It was casting director Allison Jones.

Casting directors see most of the actors auditioning for parts. Only a select few move on to auditioning for the producers, directors and other decision makers connected to a film. Casting directors often remember actors who have auditioned for them and encourage the best ones to try out for different parts. Jones is known for casting James Franco, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen early in their careers.

"I auditioned for Allison for three years," Emma told Rolling Stone in 2016. "She would bring me in for things and they'd never work, but then one Friday evening she called me and said, 'Hey, my office isn't even open tomorrow, but I want to put you on tape for something.'"