This Gofer Has Become a Definite Go-To Guy

When playwright Jon Robin Baitz was 20, he went to work for two charismatic, problem-plagued Hollywood producers. He answered their phones. He picked up their laundry and deli orders. And he took voracious notes.

The result was “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” Baitz’s tough but affectionate look at the fringes of movie-making. The play, first produced in a small theater near Melrose Avenue in 1985, won an LA Weekly Award and essentially launched the young playwright’s career. Revisited and revised in the late ‘90s, the play opens at the Geffen Playhouse on Wednesday starring Michael Lerner as Mizlansky and David Groh as Zilinsky.

As in Larry Gelbart’s musical “City of Angels” and John Patrick Shanley’s “Four Dogs and a Bone”--the latter of which inaugurated the Geffen--Baitz’s movie producers don’t fare too well. Davis Mizlansky and Sam Zilinsky, producers of such films as “Lover of Mink” and “Hitler’s Niece,” are now tax shelter mavens, stacking Kmart shelves with such children’s Bible story records as “Revelation Revealed” and “Sodom and Gomorrah: The True Story!!”

Besides creating a Baitz-like gofer named Paul Trecker, the Los Angeles-born Baitz also tosses in some offstage ex-wife voices and an actor whose resume includes being eaten by snakes in a film and playing Tintoretto, art detective, on TV. Also on hand is actor Wayne Rogers as a bigoted Oklahoman with a chunk of money in his pocket from his dentist investors.

“Doing this play in Los Angeles is very important to me,” says Baitz, now 38. “This is sort of a valentine to extinct outlaws, and to a city that I really love.”

A graduate of Beverly Hills High School, Baitz honed his craft not in college, which he did not attend, but rather at the now-defunct Padua Hills Playwrights’ Festival. He followed “Mizlansky/Zilinsky” with “The Film Society,” which drew on his experiences growing up in South Africa and traveled from the Los Angeles Theatre Center to London, New York and San Francisco. That play, wrote critic Charles Marowitz, was as “auspicious” a premiere as John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” or Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party.”

But as the Padua festival wound down, Baitz says, “theater was finally, unfortunately, occluded by the movie business. It didn’t make sense to be a playwright and live in Los Angeles.”

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Author of “Three Hotels,” “The Substance of Fire” and other plays, Baitz today lives in New York’s TriBeCa neighborhood, writing plays and movies in a nearby converted warehouse that is also home to actors Glenn Close, Fisher Stevens and Rob Morrow. But he frequently returns to Los Angeles and just last year adapted “Hedda Gabler” at the Geffen. It was at that time that Geffen producing director Gilbert Cates invited him back to reprise “Mizlansky/Zilinsky.”

Nicholas Martin, who is directing “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” calls the work “the funniest and most touching American play since ‘You Can’t Take It With You,’ ” and L.A. Theatre Works producing director Susan Loewenberg says the play’s promise was already apparent in the version she first produced in 1985. At that time, says Loewenberg, “we decided to produce ‘Mizlansky/Zilinsky’ after about five minutes. Even in its earliest incarnation, it had all the ingredients of a first-rate satire about Hollywood.”

Loewenberg later produced three other Baitz plays for radio broadcast and in the summer of 1997 called Baitz’s agent to ask about “Mizlansky/Zilinsky.” Baitz, who had tucked the play away in what he calls his “drawer of misery,” agreed to take another look and rewrite.

“Without thinking, I said yes,” Baitz recalls, “because what good do they do sitting in the drawer? And I’d just gotten over sudden, shocking open-heart surgery.” As he later wrote in the New York Times, he went back to “Mizlansky/Zilinsky” again feeling as if he were “administering a kind of literary CPR on myself.”

After the play was performed as a radio drama in Los Angeles, the Manhattan Theatre Club followed with a full production in February 1998. “It was a very affectionately received curiosity in New York,” says Baitz, whose longtime companion, Joe Mantello, directed the New York show. “Certain plays are meant for certain places. They don’t necessarily travel well. ‘Mizlansky/Zilinsky’ was done at Steppenwolf in Chicago last season, got rave reviews, but nobody came, and it closed two weeks early. I think it seemed as remote there as Peking Opera.”

Better to bring it home again, where at least they’ll recognize all those references to Ship’s restaurant and Trader Vic’s. “What’s also exceptional to me about the Los Angeles production,” Baitz says, “is that its cast has a meticulous sense of existing very much in the world of the play.

“Except for Will McCormack, who did the play in New York for a while, these are veteran Los Angeles actors, each and every one,” he adds. “They bring a real weight and weariness and knowing of what they speak to the story of these desperate cases. The life of an actor is not dissimilar to the lives of Mizlansky and Zilinsky in the play. If you’re not a star, so to speak, you’re waiting for the next thing to get you over the next hurdle.”

Rogers and Baitz had talked about the actor joining the New York production, but Rogers had a scheduling conflict. There was correspondence back and forth, says Baitz, and Rogers even talked at one point of producing it himself in Los Angeles.

Says actor Rogers: “Robbie really has an insight into these people.”

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That insight also attracted Lerner, nominated for an Oscar for his performance as the studio head in the film “Barton Fink.” “What really turned me on is the pathos,” says Lerner. “Mizlansky is simultaneously contradictory. On the one hand, he’s a ‘shtarker’--a tough guy--and he’s a child. Needy, needy, needy. There’s a sweetness and a sadness. It’s a very rounded character.”

Next for Baitz is “Ten Unknowns,” set to premiere at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater in January. Directed by Daniel Sullivan, the play focuses on what Baitz describes as “a reclusive, drunken octogenarian Abstract Expressionist living in self-imposed exile in Oaxaca, Mexico.” “Ten Unknowns,” he says, follows the artist’s brief rediscovery and his somewhat longer regeneration.

In the fall, Baitz will teach a seminar at Boston University “in how to pretend to be a writer.” He has taught playwriting at both Juilliard and Vassar, joking that “I find it comforting that I am able to have an East Coast college experience without having to pay off the loans.”

Meanwhile, Baitz is back to writing after a long period of writer’s block. “Wendy and the Lost Boys,” a screenplay written in 1999, is tentatively slated to begin production in the fall, and he is starting a screenplay of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”

He’s also finished a screenplay, triggered by what he calls “the silence of the liberal community” in New York to the funding controversy around the Brooklyn Museum of Art’s recent “Sensation” exhibition. “It began in a jag of insomnia and caffeine as I was watching some museum directors on TV dancing a pas de deux, admittedly afraid for their own funding future.”

The screenplay is “a dark comedy about publicity, power and what has become of traditional liberalism in New York, the rage between blacks and Jews, and how cultural events and political actions seem to consist entirely of photo ops,” he says.

Baitz just started work on a new play about crime and retribution. And also coming up is a possible film version of “Mizlansky/Zilinsky,” which he calls his most personal play.

“It’s my ‘400 Blows,’ ” says Baitz. “I’m trying to figure out [how to do it] in English and not in the dialect of three square blocks between Doheny and Beverly.”

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“MIZLANSKY/ZILINSKY,” Geffen Playhouse, 10886 Le Conte Ave. Dates: Opens Wednesday and runs Tuesdays-Thursdays, 7:30 p.m.; Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 4 and 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Through April 23.

Prices: $20-$42. Phone: (310) 208-5454 or (213) 365-3500.