I would guess that most of the folks posting projects here are aspiring filmmakers, which means tiny-to-nonexistent budgets, and a lack of access to many resources that experienced paid professionals are used to. I'd love to have, say, David Attenborough or Morgan Freeman narrate my film, but I could never afford to pay either and don't have the professional connections or the credibility to get such folks interested in my project.

Reminds me of The Joker's "If you're good at something, never do it for free." If I don't have the budget to pay professional actors (or professional anything else), I'll have to make do with what I can get for free. Which means the actors, like the filmmaker, will be mostly amateurs, students, and aspiring actors.

Most of us will never be a Steven Spielberg or a Martin Scorsese. Most of us aren't trying to be. There's different goals, different dreams.

I remember watching school plays as a kid and thought all of it was horrible. They can't act. They can't sing. The set sucks. The costumes are laughable. Why would I want to see a junior high school production of "The Wizard of Oz", when the MGM movie with Judy Garland does everything so much better?

It took a while for me to realize, I was looking at it all wrong and I was holding those school plays to impossible standards. Well of course the sets aren't as good as the tentpole movie. They don't have millions of dollars to work with. Of course the acting is bad; they're just kids taking a class to fulfill graduation requirements, and most don't even intend to ever act professionally. Just something that sounded better than taking algebra. Plus, they're students. Of course they're bad. They don't know how yet. That's what the school play is for, to learn about acting. To learn about building sets, about lighting, hair, makeup, costume, and all the rest of it.

My enjoyment of school plays was much higher once I let go of holding students to the acting standards of Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, and instead just focused on what was good about it, and on pulling the best possible performances out of everyone involved.

Good acting matters, hugely. Tough to find really good actors willing to do your project for free. And filmmaking is really complicated. Part of learning to be a good director is being able to spot talent when you see it. And you have to have good people skills and good team management skills, doubly so if you can't pay them.

And part of being able to make a good film on little or no budget is knowing how to make the best of what you have. Your film has a cop role? How about getting a real cop to volunteer? Or deliberately highlight how bad it is by going camp or comedy. But comedy too is a talent.

But I recall visiting Universal Studios Tours. They would have these "behind the scenes, making of" shows. They would pick out audience members to pretend to be actors in a recreation of some scenes from a famous movie or TV show. Invariably, these people couldn't act if their lives depended on it--but they used that, and made some fantastic parodies of that.

I particularly remember one as recreating the original, serious "Airport". They had a scene where people are supposed to be expert air traffic controllers, pointing out the location of the plane on a wall map. Except nobody knew where to point. So they were pointing everywhere except the correct spot on the map, and everyone looked so clueless, the entire audience was rolling in the aisles laughing.

That's a great way to use bad actors to make something actually good to watch.

Who knows, that might actually have been the origin of the Leslie Nielson parodies.