Film Villain Wings It as a Novice Director

The directing credit for the wicked comedy “F.M.” at the new Alliance Theatre in Burbank catches your attention immediately.

Wings Hauser?

Hauser was the crazed cop in Norman Mailer’s “Tough Guys Don’t Dance,” the grinning coke dealer in Richard Pryor’s “Jo Jo Dancer,” a military bigot in Norman Jewison’s “A Soldier’s Story.” He’s starred or co-starred in 18 films in the last seven years, and he’s hot in Europe.

So why is he staging a play in a little theater?

Hauser, who got the name Wings from his football days as a wingback at Thousand Oaks High School and the Northridge Military Academy, grins at the question. Hauser will not tell you he’s doing it for the art. And forget that Hauser’s wife, actress Nancy Locke, is a member of the Alliance Repertory Company and stars in Hauser’s production.

Hauser’s momentary shift to theater, he said, begins with the gut: “If you’re an actor, the greatest thing about directing is that you don’t have to hold your stomach in. You can show up in your pajamas.”

Actually, the ruggedly handsome actor shows no signs of a beer belly. What the first-time director does evidence in “F.M.” is a spare, crisp directorial style. The play, written by Romulus Linney, satirizes a creative writing class populated by three self-absorbed students. Locke portrays the teacher, who is sensitive to the single talent in the classroom. (“F.M.,” on a double bill of one-act plays entitled “The Author’s Voice,” runs through May 7.)

Hauser, 47, who recently co-starred with G. Gordon Liddy in a violent Los Angeles crime picture, “Street Asylum” (which has yet to find a distributor), actually grew up in a theater, a reconverted dairy barn in Thousand Oaks that his late father, Dwight Hauser, turned into a home for a theater company called the Conejo Players. As a child, Hauser swept the place out and starred in plays there under his father’s direction.

“Me and my dad were closer than nails,” he said.

The younger Hauser learned about adversity at an early age. His father, at one time a writer for such popular radio mysteries as “The Whistler” and “Retribution,” fell victim to Hollywood’s infamous blacklist in the late ‘40s and ‘50s.

“I was being called a Commie by children in my neighborhood when I was 5 years old,” Hauser said.

But his trial by fire began in earnest after he divorced his first wife, who gave him custody of their 13-month old daughter. Leaving Death Valley, Hauser and the baby arrived down and out in L.A. in 1973.

“I had $30 in my pocket, a box of Pampers and a suitcase--that was it,” Hauser said.

“We moved into a garage in the MacArthur Park district. It had one couch and a VW. We lived there nine months. I worked in a liquor store on the corner of 9th and Alvarado and later worked the graveyard shift as a night watchman in a church at Westlake and Ninth. Bums in the neighborhood baby-sat my little girl (Bright Hauser, now 18 and a graduating senior at North Hollywood High).

“A parent couldn’t do that now, but you could then. I developed a kinship with the homeless.”

While working alone inside the church at night, he taught himself to play the guitar and practiced a folk-singing style that, with the assistance of veteran strings arranger David Campbell, he turned into a minor recording deal with RCA in 1974.

“It was that deal which saved me. It enabled me to put my daughter in a private school and move out of MacArthur Park.”

The music career faded, but not before Hauser made enough money to get off Poverty Row. He studied acting with renowned coach Milt Katselas in the mid-70s (his classmates included Tom Selleck, Catherine Bach, Cheryl Ladd and Robert Ulrich), he landed a role on “The Young and the Restless” in 1978 and suddenly he was earning $1,500 a day.

Hauser’s big movie break, establishing his often warped movie persona, was his scabrous role as a brutish pimp in producer Sandy Howard’s 1982 “Vice Squad.” Meanwhile, Hauser blossomed into something of a movie cult figure in Europe. But it hasn’t all been a giddy ride.

His lowest point as a film actor, he said, occurred last year while he was shooting an Australian-produced, Vietnam war drama outside Manila called “The Siege of Fire Base Glory” (never released here).

“They murdered animals making that film,” Hauser said. “I witnessed it. It was disgusting. They massacred about 10 dogs, also goats, chickens, pigeons.

“I flipped out and shouted my disgust to the director.”

It’s an idiosyncrasy of Hauser’s that he has never sat through any of his films, a few rushes maybe but never the complete movie. “When I work my feeling is to create an event, to get in the car and floorboard it. But I don’t watch myself. I see myself through my own aberrations, not as others see me.”