Stage Reviews : Filmmaking Satire Fails as a Theater Piece

“Self Storage” is a satire of the losers and jerks who try to make movies from dubious material. Gee, do you think it might make a movie?

Yes, there’s an irony here. Patchett Kaufman Entertainment’s stage productions, presumably including this one, exist primarily as tests of potential screen properties, according to preseason remarks by Dan Lauria, executive producer and director of “Self Storage.”

Yet “Self Storage” itself, by Shem Bitterman and Tony Spiridakis, questions the mania that makes people attempt to turn everything into a movie.

Actually, “Self Storage” (in a rented space at the Odyssey Theatre) seems more appropriate as a potential sketch on “Saturday Night Live” than as a movie.

We have too much time to think about the improbabilities. Why would anyone, even two Hollywood hustlers (Joe Pantoliano and co-author Spiridakis) down to their last few bucks, enter into a contract with a psychotic killer (Ron Perlman) to write his life story--while he’s still on the loose and still killing? Having spotted him one night on the street, how do they find him again, when the police have presumably failed? Having found him, couldn’t they make more money by turning him in for a reward than they’ll make from their cockamamie script?

They not only go into business with “The Westwood Strangler,” but they let him stay in their abode, a ramshackle self-storage unit. In one stupefying scene, the murderer falls asleep with his hands around the neck of the would-be screenwriter, both of them in a standing position. Although the screenwriter decides to call it quits the next morning, it takes only a couple minutes of palaver from his partner to persuade him to stick around.

In short, these characters are idiotic--as well as reprehensible--on a subhuman scale. Their antics are ridiculous rather than funny or penetrating. At least this play renews one’s appreciation of Howard Korder’s “Search and Destroy,” an all-too-credible and resonant examination of a superficially similar character, staged at South Coast Repertory earlier this year.

Lauria’s staging isn’t much help. Perlman has a few goony moments that arouse mild amusement, especially in the second act, but Pantoliano and Spiridakis wear out their welcome in the first scene. Richard Zavaglia plays a manager to whom they pitch their ideas; his hyped-up style is too close to Pantoliano’s to provide anything distinctive.

At 2055 S. Sepulveda Blvd., Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., through May 27. $15-$17.50; (213) 477-2055.