They’re Not Watching TV, They Want to Be <i> on</i> TV

Scene: The Mall.

Client: “Sentara Medicare Choice.”

Cast: Evelyn, Gwen and Bea.

Evelyn: So where is she this morning, bungee jumping?

Gwen: Aerobics, I told you--Mondays and Wednesdays is aerobics.

Evelyn: What happened to water ballet?

Gwen: That’s Tuesdays and Fridays.

Evelyn: Know what I heard? She’s been seeing some younger man regularly . . . a doctor!

Gwen: Oooh . . . bet she misses us.

Bea: Bet she doesn’t.

Cut to “director” Adrienne Omansky: “We don’t keep the script in front of our faces. . . . You’re moving through the mall. I want to see emotion, I want to see excitement. . . . There wasn’t enough energy with you girls. I want it overboard. . . .”

We’re at Claude Pepper Senior Center on South La Cienega, where 40 aspiring actors, most of Medicare age and then some, are being put through their paces in Omansky’s commercial acting class.

The mall skit is an exercise in script-reading and a metaphor for what’s going on here. These older men and women aren’t at home snoozing in front of the TV. They’re here trying to get on TV.

At eight sites from Gardena to Westchester, 400 seniors are in the classes, which are under the auspices of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s adult education division--and free to anyone 55 and older.

Some, like Fred Crane, a dapper white-goateed 77-year-old, are no strangers to show biz. He made film history 56 years ago by speaking the opening lines in “Gone With the Wind.”

You may remember: At the barbecue at Twelve Oaks, Scarlett O’Hara is flirting with the Tarleton twins. Crane, as Brent Tarleton, is saying, “What do we care if we’re expelled from college, Miss Scarlett? The war’s going to start soon now.”

As Crane tells it to fellow students in Omansky’s class, he was newly arrived from New Orleans and had gone to auditions with an actress cousin who hoped to be cast as Suellen. “I wasn’t looking for a job. I’d never read the book,” he says. Before he could say “Civil War,” he was reading with Vivien Leigh.

Crane never made another film, but he was a longtime host on KFAC radio and did numerous TV shows. He’s in class because “you’re never too old to learn something.” And, he adds, “I’ve never had the chutzpah to go out on the cattle calls.”

Also here to hone her skills is Donna Stevenson, 64. She and her twin, Diana, were the Westinghouse Twins in TV commercials of the early ‘50s. “She was Linda Laundromat. I was Dora Dryer,” Stevenson says. They also did a 1948 Clifton Webb-Shirley Temple film, “Mr. Belvedere Goes to College.” But, Donna says, “I’ve been on leave of absence [from show business] for 40 years” while raising a family.

Omansky, 47, whose credits as a child actor included “Playhouse 90,” brought the idea for this unique class to the district two years ago and was given the go-ahead, staff help and a budget of $35 a year.

She knew seniors doing commercials was an idea whose time had come when her mother, Celia Kushner, then 80, was tapped by a client while tagging along when Omansky took her teen-aged daughter on an interview.

Paula Sorenson of Coast to Coast Talent, which represents about 25 seniors in the classes, says sponsors “want them from newborn all the way up to 100. A lot of times we get requests for as old as we can possibly get them. They want old and lined and weathered as well as those upscale, well-preserved socialite people.” They prefer character over beauty, Sorenson says, and definitely don’t want dyed hair, face lifts, makeup and jewelry.

Pride sometimes has to go by the wayside. “They’ve got to be willing to do whatever it takes,” Sorenson says. “Sometimes they’re asked to take their false teeth out.” But hitting it big can be lucrative: A national commercial might earn an actor anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000.

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At 82, Kushner is living her childhood dream of acting. She has done commercials for Michelob and McDonald’s, and just filmed a national Milky Way spot. “I just keep getting one after the other,” she shrugs. The secret? “Do it like you know what you’re doing and who you are. . . . If you want something, you’ve gotta go for it.”

Clairol and diet Coke have used students. Appearing soon as Mr. and Mrs. Peanut for Planters will be Vicky and Vince Cenicola, 64 and 80. She describes the plot of the spot: “They’re asking him why he wears a monocle and he says, ‘To see the ladies better,’ and I jab him.”

They got the job six months after joining the class but, Vicky says, “If nothing else comes out of this class, it’s a great soul lifter.”

“Some of these people will never work a day,” Omansky says. “It doesn’t matter. People who will never be in a commercial can act out their commercial fantasies.”

Leo Costanza, 74, is something of an icon in these circles. Spotted playing bingo at the Westchester Senior Center, he wound up in a conga line--”I really hammed it up”--on a Little Caesars commercial that ran from 1991-’94 and won a Clio. Later, he was instrumental in starting the class in Westchester, taught by actress/gerontologist Linda Jacobsen.

Students learn the lingo, what to wear on an interview and how to read a script. Through improv exercises, they practice selling products--and themselves.

Omansky is honest with them: “Agents tend not to have patience with clients, especially senior citizens.

“Don’t tell the casting people your life story and don’t talk about your disabilities.”

Some students are stage parents who have decided it’s their turn. (The mother of the “Look, Mom, no cavities!” kid is in class.) More than half of the students now have agents and, Omansky estimates, 40% of those have landed paid work.

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Seniors are in demand for commercials for home-care and health-care products, HMOs, food and fast foods, she says. But not for clothing, department stores, beer and cars.

Shannon Brennan, 60, who was a cover girl in New York in the ‘60s, is here because “you get very rusty and you lose your self-confidence. You know, after you get a certain age, and you’re used to being Mommy and being a wife. . . .”

Harry Kaye, 76, says class is so much fun that “you shouldn’t care whether you get a part.” With his British accent and rubber face, he quickly won a movie role--but turned it down to take a long-planned trip to Russia.

Jackie Hargrave, 75, who has done a string of commercials and TV shows, jokes that her memory is not what it once was, and on interviews, “I tell them I want five lines or less.”

For septuagenarian Hedy Stephens, the biggest lark was doing a Pepsi commercial of a softball game. “Running the bases at this age! I had a cane. Another lady had a walker.”

Now, about those cameos and old lace. A while back, Omansky had a call from a client asking if anyone was willing to do bungee jumping.

* This weekly column chronicles the people and small moments that define life in Southern California. Reader suggestions are welcome.