QUAID TAKES COMMAND IN PORTRAYING A TV ‘L.B.J.’

The setting was the rotunda inside Los Angeles City Hall, doubling as the Capitol in Washington, circa 1956. Director Peter Werner and his film crew were quietly going about their business, setting up the next shot with about three dozen extras made up to look like U.S. Senators and their aides.

“What the hell are you all standing around looking at?” a voice suddenly boomed.

Heads whipped around. The big hallway immediately grew quiet.

On the outskirts of the crowd was a tall, imposing figure who looked astonishingly like the late Lyndon B. Johnson. He smiled sheepishly. “Just rehearsing,” Randy Quaid said.

Everyone murmured and went back to work. It really was his next line.

That he had the command to deliver it authoritatively--the way a Senate majority leader might--had been made abundantly clear.

Not that the producers had any doubts.

“From the moment he put on the makeup for his screen test, he was Lyndon Johnson,” said John Brice, co-producer of “LBJ,” the three-hour movie for NBC in which Quaid is starring. “The moment we saw the first frame, we knew he was our man.”

Indeed, production of the film was delayed for four months to wait for Quaid to finish his season’s work on “Saturday Night Live,” the late-night comedy show on which he often appeared in satirical sketches as the current chief executive.

Quaid was thrilled to get the role. “This was one of the parts I’d always wanted to play,” he said during a break in filming. “If I hadn’t gotten it, I think I would have slit my wrists.”

Why he felt so strongly he isn’t sure.

“I don’t know exactly,” Quaid said. “We’re both tall; we’re both from Texas. I’d always wanted to find out more about him. I just had the feeling there was a lot more there than met the eye. I mean, Shakespeare would write this character. He was a wild man, but there was a tender side of him. He would give you a chewing out and then 15 minutes later give you a gift.”

The movie traces L.B.J.’s life from 1934, when he was a 26-year-old congressional aide, through Nov. 22, 1963, the fateful day that President John F. Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas and Vice President Johnson was sworn in aboard Air Force One as the 36th President of the United States.

Written by Ken Tervey, Guerdon Trueblood and executive producer Louis Rudolph, the film covers both Johnson’s political career and the evolution of his marriage to Lady Bird, portrayed in the movie by Patti LuPone, a feisty New York stage actress best known for her Tony Award-winning performance as another First Lady in the Broadway musical “Evita.”

Quaid, now 35, was still a Houston teen-ager when Johnson was in office. He remembers thinking of L.B.J. mainly as “this stiff persona who got up and gave dull speeches” and, later, as the President who got caught in the morass of the Vietnam War.

“That’s why this is important,” he said of the NBC drama, which will air sometime next season. “It does give the earlier side of his career.”

In doing research for his role, Quaid said, he discovered much to admire about Johnson. “He was a classical character, a very theatrical person. Anything he did was an act to get something that he wanted,” the actor said. “One-to-one, he could really move you. He was always touching people, getting right next to them. And what he did as President that is not talked about is all the legislation he passed. He passed more legislation than any other President.”

Moving from “Saturday Night Live” to a biographical film about a former President would be a major leap for most actors, but not for Quaid. He’d already established himself as a first-rate dramatic actor in such films as “The Last Detail” and “Bound for Glory” and in new TV productions of “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Of Mice and Men.”

The big jump for him was moving to “Saturday Night Live” last fall.

Friendly and unpretentious, Quaid conceded that becoming a regular on the NBC comedy series “might have been detrimental to my image as a serious actor,” but he said that he was willing to take the risk for the opportunities it offered: to hone his comedic skills, to work steadily for nine months, to develop new fans and to perform in front of an audience for live television. “I loved hearing the laughs,” he said.

Unfortunately, there weren’t enough of them. The show was assaulted by the critics and came close to being canceled after 11 seasons. Quaid shared some of their complaints.

“I was a little disappointed in some of the writing and some of the sketches,” he said, adding that part of the blame belongs to NBC’s censors, who “gave us a hard time. There were things that ‘Saturday Night Live’ did 10 years ago that we couldn’t do.”

He was equally hard on himself. “I wasn’t as loose as I might have been,” he said. “It was like I was having an affair with a mistress and didn’t want to get caught. I wasn’t 100% confident doing it.

“But there were moments,” he continued, “when I thought, ‘I could do this for the rest of my life.’ ”

These ambivalent feelings about the experience have left him undecided on whether to return to “Saturday Night Live” in the fall.

He has no regrets about the season he did. “I did learn a hell of a lot about comedy. It’s going to help me all the way down the line,” he said--even in playing Johnson, whom he wants to portray as “a very funny, colorful man.”

He was also grateful for having gotten an opportunity to direct a short film for “Saturday Night Live,” for directing is the creative endeavor he currently is pursuing. He said that he is trying to raise money to direct a play by Horton Foote in New York.

“Acting is just one facet, but with directing, you can really make a statement, really show life as you see it,” he explained.

He’s not giving up acting, though. Asked about the roles he might like to do in the future, Quaid talks about playing Big Daddy in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” about tackling Eugene O’Neill--and about portraying L.B.J. again in a sequel dealing with the presidential years.