Party Animals

Two golden girls in a Hummer rolled up to the Academy of Arts and Sciences Theater in Beverly Hills last weekend for the premiere of TAG Entertainment and Animal Planet Network’s “The Retrievers,” to benefit L.A.’s Best After School Enrichment Program.

Actress Betty White, who appears in the film, was behind the wheel, and her co-star, Ajax, a golden retriever, was in the front seat. “Betty did a phenomenal job,” said co-producer Jonathan Bogner, with an audible sigh of relief. “She only hit the curb once.”

The stylish arrival was a tantara for the television feature-length film about a workaholic advertising exec (played by Robert Hays), who abandons the big-city rat race to move his family to a small town, where they are adopted by a stray expectant dog that soon gives birth. The pups are given away to an assortment of takers. Dad suffers a creative block, gets fired, has the requisite epiphany and decides life is a pain without the pooches. Led by the pups’ mother, they set out to retrieve them and thereby rediscover what it means to be a family.

After the show, cast members Alana Austin, Taylor Emerson and Jerry Katell, board chair of L.A.’s Best (he has a cameo role as the postman in the film), were on hand to join the guests for photo-ops, punch and fire-hydrant-shaped cookies in the lobby. Hays was among those watching Ajax and his trainer, Jeanine Aines, delight the small fry in the crowd. Said Hays, a veteran of “Homeward Bound” and “HB II”: “This is the third time I’ve played opposite a kid and dog; it’s really just a lot of fun.”

Steve Austin, executive producer of “The Retrievers,” which aired last Monday on Animal Planet, reports that the show achieved the network’s highest ratings ever.

*

Information for Social Circuits can be directed to Patt Diroll in Los Angeles or Ann Conway in Orange County. Diroll is at pattdiroll@earthlink.net; Conway at (714) 966-5952 or, by fax, (714) 966-7790.