Comedian Bares His Soul on the Big Screen

Bill Kalmenson is multi-tasking at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City.

Like the Industry equivalent of an air-traffic controller, Kalmenson has restless eyes. They constantly scan the Valley Hollywood hangout, checking out any attractive women who wander in, and scouting for fellow comedians and other Industry contacts.

Kalmenson simultaneously polishes off a breakfast that is both heart-smart and ethnically resonant--egg whites scrambled with lox, tomatoes instead of home fries--and answers a reporter’s questions about “The Souler Opposite,” the largely autobiographical film he wrote, directed and is now distributing.

Kalmenson spots comedian Steve Landesberg at a nearby table, jumps up and invites him to the movie’s Valley premiere today at the United Artists Warner Center in Woodland Hills.

Landesberg played himself in the film, which chronicles the attempts of a cynical, self-involved stand-up comic named Barry Singer to get a personal and professional life. Landesberg’s scenes were filmed at the L.A. Cabaret, the venerable Encino comedy club where Kalmenson, now 42, often worked as an aspiring yukmeister.

That all changed in the early ‘90s when Kalmenson, a Taft High School alum who grew up in Tarzana, fell in love with an idealistic younger woman who ultimately dumped him to work for the only 1992 Presidential candidate ever compared to the fanatical monk Savonarola: Jerry Brown. Kalmenson recalls rushing to his computer to write the screenplay even as the real-world romance waxed and waned.

“My joke is: The movie’s all true except for the happy parts,” he says.

Kalmenson, who looks like James Taylor’s younger, less blissed-out brother, wrote the first draft of his movie in 1992. It took him until 1997 to complete the film, and he continues to work full-time at getting it the kind of distribution he and a number of critics believe the bittersweet romantic comedy deserves.

Although “The Souler Opposite” has the glossy look of a more expensive release, it was made for less than $1 million. And not on credit cards, says Kalmenson, who believes American Express and Visa finance far fewer independent films than their auteurs claim.

“What happened?” he is asked. “Someone dies and leaves you money?”

“Close,” he volleys back. “Somebody lives and leaves me money.”

With financial backing from someone he describes only as “a private person close to me,” Kalmenson began putting together a cast and crew. He knew exactly who he wanted for the lead--himself. “But,” he jokes, “I couldn’t afford me.”

In fact, he admits: “I couldn’t pull it off.”

The notion of Kalmenson starring in the film, as well as writing and directing it “violated everybody’s comfort zone,” he recalls.

Although he desperately wanted the part, he says, “I had to hold myself to the same standard as everybody else: What’s best for the movie? If it became about Bill, rather than about the movie, I would already have violated the trust of everyone who believed in me.”

Fortunately, he says, “I found a guy who does me better than me”--actor Christopher Meloni.

Janel Moloney got the part of Singer’s “Souler Opposite” (she, too, grew up in the Valley, in Woodland Hills, and went to El Camino Real High School). Cast as Singer’s dentist and best friend, TV’s “thirtysomething’s” Timothy Busfield added welcome star power.

Proud of the film he had made, Kalmenson submitted it to every film festival he could think of, including Sundance.

“It was rejected by just about all of them,” he recalls.

Instead of snapping into a fetal position, Kalmenson decided to get the movie noticed anyway. He realized that every studio official, distributor and other Industry power who could help his film was in Park City, Utah, for last year’s Sundance Film Festival (this year’s festival started yesterday and continues through Jan. 31). So he rented a conference room in a Park City hotel and declared it the site of the alternative Souldance Film Festival.

“It’s the most exclusive festival in Park City,” Kalmenson told anyone who would listen. “Only one movie got in!”

The press took notice.

After shamelessly stapling fliers for his film on every soft surface in Park City, Kalmenson asked a friend if he was going too far in promoting it. He was comforted when the friend assured him: “T.S. Eliot published his own poetry. Don’t worry.”

The movie premiered at the American Film Institute International Film Festival in the fall of 1997. It had a two-week run at the Laemmle Santa Monica last year and got enthusiastic reviews. Since then, it has been screened elsewhere in Southern California, in New York City and in foreign markets.

Following the 7 p.m. screening Saturday,, Kalmenson hopes to do, not Q-and-A sessions, but what he calls Q-and-J: “Questions and Jokes.”

“As the movie gets released, hopefully I’ll be released from the movie,” says Kalmenson. He hopes that the Valley release and one coming up in Santa Barbara will be successful, and hopes the film will have a future on cable and video. But, whatever happens, he feels he has been vindicated.

OK, his quirky film hasn’t taken off like “The Full Monty,” but Kalmenson made the movie he envisioned, and he got it into theaters.

“I have lived the dream,” he says, only half mocking himself. “I have been to the mountaintop.”

As to baring so much of his own soul on screen, not always flatteringly, Kalmenson says he didn’t hesitate to mine his own experience in “The Souler Opposite.”

“I had been exploiting myself for years as a comedian,” he says.

Writers have to come to terms with the fact that they are, in a sense, users, both of themselves and of others: “If you were in a relationship with me, you were raw timber going down the river and right into the mill,” Kalmenson says.

Indeed, all writers see the people around them as raw material to be cut to their own measure:

Bill Kalmenson is multi-tasking at Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City.

Like the Industry equivalent of an air-traffic controller, Kalmenson has restless eyes. They constantly scan the Valley Hollywood hangout, checking out any attractive women who wander in and scouting for fellow comedians and other Industry contacts . . . .