A Shopping Mall of Services for Would-Be Actors : Under Single Roof, Actors Center Provides for the Hollywood Hopeful

On the ground floor of the Actors Center, past the counters of businesses that print up performers’ head shots or put their photos and resumes in a computer system, the red lights are on outside three studios, indicating that acting classes are in progress. The sounds of singing, shouting and laughter come from one of the rooms.

On the second floor, several dozen Latino men gather to audition for the role of a Mexican cowboy in a beer commercial. Many have shown up in full regalia--cowboy boots, bandannas and bullets in bandoleers across the chest. But one man, wearing a business suit, sits uneasily in the waiting room.

“Well, I’m not exactly dressed for the part,” he says, muttering something about his agent.

One flight up, a young actress finishes another audition, walks down to the lobby and sprawls out on the bench of grand piano, exhausted.

A few feet away, the bulletin board announces that two “cold reading” workshops are scheduled for the evening. For $18, actors can perform a short scene for a casting agent or TV director--Hollywood insiders who can give them a few tips and, perhaps, consider them for a job.

Shopping Mall for Actors

Thus goes another day at the closest thing in Los Angeles to a shopping mall for actors.

When Michael McCabe and Sam Christensen mortgaged their houses to open the Actors Center in Studio City near the end of 1986, it was only the latest of many entrants in an extraordinarily competitive business.

A recent issue of Drama-Logue, the weekly tabloid performers buy for its listings of auditions, contains no less than 102 advertisements for various academies, classes and one-on-one acting coaches around Los Angeles. They range from traditional continuing “scene study” workshops to commercial classes for teen-agers, dialect training, stand-up comedy and “showcases” that, it is touted, will be “seen by top studio and network executives.”

In little over a year, however, the Actors Center has become the city’s busiest concentration of such classes and, in the process, established itself as the San Fernando Valley’s leading gathering point for Hollywood hopefuls.

The 6-year-old Professional Artists Group, 20 minutes down the road on Highland Avenue, previously offered the most extensive buffet of workshops and seminars, with a catalogue of three dozen courses presented in a 6,000-square-foot facility. The Actors Center offers about twice as many in a three-story, 15,000-square-foot building.

1,500 Associates

By all accounts, there is no shortage of customers. The center has more than 1,500 “associates,” who pay $150 a year to be eligible for discounts on classes, at its bookstore and on just about every enterprise yet invented to help in their sometimes desperate efforts to be noticed.

For instance, the center houses a printer to duplicate resumes, a mail room to send them out to agents and an answering service that will capture the message if--hope against hope--someone calls back.

“It seems to be working,” is how McCabe puts it. Indeed, he and Christensen, 30, are talking about opening similar facilities around the country and getting into producing and directing. Three small Equity-waiver theaters will open in the center soon, and they’re planning a cable television talk show on performing.

In addition, they have guaranteed a steady influx of working actors by leasing some of their space to casting agents, who use it to conduct daily auditions for commercials or TV episodes.

An actor himself with a wholesome, boy-next-door look, McCabe, 29, is an unabashed entrepreneur who recalls how he’s been a salesman since he was 15, starting with carpet cleaning and, later, real estate.

In the Actors Center, he has created an environment that bears little resemblance to the look-like-you’re-struggling milieu of most acting schools, where the paint is likely to be peeling, the bathroom shared by all and a rat just might fall from the rafters in the middle of a scene. Here, floors are carpeted, prospective students are brought into an office decorated like a living room, where they soon will be able to watch samplings of course offerings on videotape, and bills can be paid by credit card.

Traditional Courses

This approach draws its share of disdain from the purist acting schools, which expect years of enrollment in ongoing scene-study and sensory exercise workshops that can, at times, resemble group therapy. There are traditional “method” courses at the Actors Center, as well, but a large percentage of the classes are of the practical, how-to-get-a-job variety: how to break into commercials, audition technique, camera technique and night after night of cold reading workshops.

Such workshops have provoked considerable debate within the profession. Critics include a Screen Actors Guild official who questioned the ethics of asking aspiring performers to pay for workshops “in order to be seen” by someone who might give them work.

“I still don’t know what the critics have in mind,” retorts Christensen, who was a casting director for “MASH” and other TV shows before he joined forces with McCabe. He defends the workshops, calling them “flight simulators” for “these kids who haven’t worked or have worked a little bit. . . . They need to know what it’s like before they’re actually out in the workplace.”

The Actors Center’s monthly list of the workshops now acknowledges the critics, however, with a “Special Note to Actors: This system is intended to help actors with their auditions and to give them specific information about how each casting director works. If your intention is to get a job directly from these workshops, please do not sign up. However, if you happen to get an audition or job out of it, consider it icing on the cake!”

Of course, the reminder that the instructor may have hiring power can be more than a little appealing to actors in an area where 56% of the 32,000 members of the Screen Actor’s Guild get no work at all in a year.

‘Whole Huge Gallery’

Two walls in the lobby of the Actors Center contain rows of photographs further reminding the hopefuls what they might aspire to. “These are all actors who have gotten work from the workshops,” McCabe says. “We’re going to have a whole huge gallery.”

Underneath the 8-by-11s are stickers listing the rewards for all to see: “Days of Our Lives,” “Simon & Simon,” “Knot’s Landing,” “Divorce Court.” And so on.

The photos are displayed outside Chez Fred, the hole-in-the-wall snack shop that serves as the unofficial meeting point at the center.

Fred, who gives no last name, may be the only person in the building who is not an actor.

“Different people than I’m used to,” he says of his customers. “Everyone claims they’re on a diet, but cookies, candy and potato chips are the best sellers.”

Diet Cokes, Chips

Fred, who is barely 5 feet tall and has a monk’s bald spot, sees a group approaching during a break in one workshop. “Ah, here comes another blonde class,” he says as two young women reach him. They order Diet Cokes and a bag of chips.

Behind them comes Robert Houston, a middle-aged man in lawyer’s garb--a gray pinstriped suit, silk tie, wing-tipped shoes--who walks briskly over to an actress he notices in the lobby.

“I have the videotape of our scene from the film class if you’d like a copy,” he says. “The lighting isn’t very good for me, but you look great.”

He suggests that she might use the tape to help find an agent, a process that frequently is a struggle.

Houston, an intense man with short, wavy dark hair, was a lawyer for 25 years before he decided he had made enough money to do what he’d really like. He enrolled at one of the long-established acting schools, but “the teacher was a screamer,” he says. “Here, if you don’t like it, you go on to something else.”

Changing Teachers

Indeed, he is completing one 8-week program and is moving over to another teacher. He takes two or three different courses at any one time, costing him a couple of thousand dollars a year.

He’s back in his old work garb because this evening’s class is “Defining Your Image,” he explains.

“We’re still working on mine, but they’ve decided I should be a powerful, authoritarian figure with a soft, schmoozy inside. I’m trying to get back into character.”

Thirty feet away, two young men looking like college students anywhere--each dressed in jeans, gym bags at their feet and notebooks in front of them--sit at a round table in the Actor’s Lounge.

They are preparing for the next Samurai/Early Show, which meets at 7 a.m. twice a week. It’s a class in how to market yourself, explains one of them, John Cann. “If anyone puts together a marketing plan, they’ll get what they want.”

Cann is a swarthy, athletic 24, although he could pass for a teen-ager. He says he earned almost $10,000 as a stunt man on nonunion films last year and is hoping to branch out into acting roles. Since starting the class, he’s quit his other job in a scuba shop.

‘Putting in 8 Hours’

“I realized I wasn’t even putting eight hours a week into my career. Now I’m putting in eight hours a day. I’m working on getting a theatrical agent.”

Cann’s friend, Kirk Prickett, is writing down his financial, personal, business and emotional goals, an exercise for the class.

Prickett, 31, who has a longish nose and negligible chin, says he specialized in “geeks and Woody Allen types” when he did commercials in San Diego. He too is looking for an agent here. Meanwhile, “I’m a medical assistant because I don’t know how to wait tables.”

Both say they have tried various acting programs around town and have had good experiences and bad--the latter including instructors who knew less than they did and showcases in which no one showed up to see them perform.

“There are so many people out for our money,” Prickett says. “What’s nice about this place is they don’t let any of the con artists in. If you screw anybody over, the whole building will know.”

Night Court Director

Alan Bergmann finishes up a drink from Chez Fred, tosses the cup in the trash and heads for Studio C. Twenty students have signed up for his cold reading class, for which he was advertised as “Director/Mr. Belvedere, Night Court.”

“I assume you all have pictures and resumes with your lies on them,” he says as he takes his seat on the raised stage of the small room, which is filled with 20 students, 16 of them women.

The gray-haired Bergmann, dressed in worn jeans and a cardigan sweater, has an angular face and strong chin that suggest he could have held his own as a leading man.

“I know you’re essentially trying to demonstrate your improvisational wares to me,” he tells his class, but he quickly cautions that they should not be so preoccupied with “how to get those five lines”--reference to a bit part in some TV show or movie, a job almost anyone in the room would sell their soul for.

Bergmann makes a pitch for serious acting, noting that, despite his current work on situation comedies, he has a background of Broadway theater and years of study in New York with “the leading teacher in the business,” Sanford Meisner.

Meisner Method

As he begins to examine the stack of resumes and photos, a competition of sorts develops. When he asks an actress about a play she was in before coming to Los Angeles, she notes, “I won an award for that, one of the 10 best actresses in Texas.” She also comments that she is in an ongoing workshop with an instructor who uses the Meisner method.

Soon after, a second actress explains that she had “taken from Meisner and Uta Hagen,” another guru in the field. Then the oldest member of the class, an actress about 50, tells how “I studied with Sandy when I was 16. Remember when he came out to 20th Century Fox?” Someone else mentions an award.

Although a couple of students look like they may never have been in a professional show, it’s hardly an amateur hour. One actress was in “Tender Mercies,” the Oscar-winning film. Another worked with Woody Allen and a third has done a series of soap operas. Another is the daughter of a famous English actor.

“You have to learn to lie better,” Bergmann jokes to one actress while looking over her credits. “For a couple of the movies, you put down ‘day player.’ Put down the name of a character. . . . Did you have any lines?”

“One.”

‘Who’s Jane?’

“Put down ‘Jane.’ Who is going to say, ‘Who’s Jane?’ ”

He pairs up class members and distributes excerpts from various TV scripts. They have 10 minutes to run through the lines.

The readings last for two hours. There are a couple from “Laverne and Shirley,” another from “Barney Miller.” The class is a receptive audience, although when one scene is being particularly well-received, one woman nudges her neighbor and says: “Don’t laugh too much.” The others must not look too good.

The last scene ends two hours later and Bergmann asks for questions. There is only one: “What are you directing right now and what might you be doing?”

In other words, will he have any jobs to hand out?

“I just got off ‘Mr. Belvedere.’ I’m not doing anything right now,” he says. “Like actors, I don’t want to say until I’m signed on.”

The auditions have long been completed and the bookstore closed by the time class members walk out the front door and onto Ventura Boulevard.

“I did OK. I didn’t embarrass myself,” one actress says.

“You did great,” another tells her. “You were right up there.”