Life on Edge of Stardom

Screenland Drive lives up to its name.

It seems that almost everyone on the shady Burbank street is polishing a screenplay. Or learning lines for the next audition. Or trying to find funding for an independent film.

Living on Screenland means having a plan for fame and fortune--one that usually involves the rich and successful neighbor affectionately called WB, as in the Warner Bros. Studios Ranch.

Screenlanders live in the shadows of the Big Time. They are a colony of show business hopefuls, a hive of dreamers who gaze with longing at the tall, ivy-covered, barbed-wire-tipped walls of the ranch, imagining the day when they will make it to the other side.

Few will ever see that day, but its promise governs the street’s routines.

Screenlanders plot their rise to stardom in places like the Oaks and Toluca Terrace apartments, near Oak Street and Gate 9 of the Warner ranch. They sit on their balconies and peer beyond the chain-link studio fences that obscure the sound stages and sets used in films such as “American Beauty” and “Lethal Weapon” and TV’s “Friends.”

They flip on their televisions and watch scripted car chases that earlier unfolded on their street for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Dark Angel.”

“Folks here generally act unaffected, but it’s hard not to get excited walking down the street,” said Screenlander Tim Elliott, an aspiring film writer who moved from Washington, D.C., more than a year ago with his wife, a graduate student in USC’s screenwriting program.

The couple settled on the street because of its proximity to the studio life. They have been enchanted ever since. Celebrity parties and charity events at the WB ranch bring ranks of limousines past the Elliotts’ one-bedroom apartment.

“There’s a certain cachet, something akin to the Academy Awards,” said Elliott, who refused to disclose his age--a Screenland custom.

The street got its name in the 1920s, when movie makers used what was then a dusty, rural road to film westerns and comedies starring Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle and other silent screen stars.

Today’s Screenland is lined with oaks and palms, as well as sensible sedans with out-of-state license plates. Pastel mega-apartment buildings--with incense wafting out of the windows--dominate the 300 block, the section directly south of the ranch.

North of the ranch the street cuts through five miles of Burbank. The farther it ranges from the studio, the more prosaic it gets: single-family homes with rose gardens and picket fences, and here and there a ratty couch on the curb.

Near the WB ranch, Screenland is quiet except for the occasional mock gunfire and car explosions echoing from the studio.

Looking for ‘Contacts, Contacts, Contacts’

No good Screenlander would complain about the noise. Elliott, for one, covets a Warner Bros. flier that alerted neighbors to an upcoming explosion for a new TV series called “Dead Last.”

The flier lists the office and cell phone numbers for the show’s location manager.

“It might come in handy one day,” Elliott said. “This business is all about contacts, contacts, contacts.”

Some Screenlanders stage “chance” encounters with better-connected neighbors at the pool, by the mailboxes or in the 24-hour laundry rooms. They might practice for an audition in sight of a budding producer lounging on the patio, or discuss a screenplay within earshot of a writer who has actually sold something, however modest the payoff.

Screenlander etiquette decrees naked eagerness a faux pas. Serendipity is supposed to rule, even if choreographed. Which probably explains why the mixers planned at Toluca Terrace bombed.

“No one would come,” said Joan Howard, manager of the 113-unit complex, where verandas face the WB ranch. Toluca Terrace’s rents range from $950 to $1,600 a month. It has a rec room where residents rehearse for auditions, and the floor plans have names such as “The Bogart,” “The Monroe” and “The Valentino.”

Howard and other managers declined to identify their famous former residents, but Screenland lore lists Joyce DeWitt of “Three’s Company” fame, a daughter from “Roseanne” (though no one can remember which one), the fellow who played Peter on “The Brady Bunch” (though no one can pinpoint if he was in the movie or TV show) and a tour manager for the Monkees.

In other words, no one huge. But studio-area apartment managers said it’s difficult to keep tabs on up-and-coming tenants, because show business is so transitory.

“They either give up and go back home or they get a sitcom and buy a house in the hills,” said Mitch Hale, an assistant manager at Parc Pointe, a salmon-colored apartment building on neighboring Hollywood Way.

For brushes with real celebrities and moguls, Screenlanders can walk just 15 minutes to the coffeehouses around Riverside Drive.

Daniel Wulkan prefers to drive his silver Mercedes-Benz C230 Kompressor (“image is everything in this town,” he says) from Screenland to Priscilla’s Gourmet Coffee, Tea and Gifts in Toluca Lake.

“This is where everyone goes,” Wulkan said, scanning the java joint for VIPs. Only nobodies were in sight.

Wulkan, a brown-haired 30-year-old, sat at a small table with fresh pink flowers and smiled as if he were auditioning for a toothpaste commercial. He aspires to become an Academy Award-winning producer, and he’s convinced it will happen.

“A lot of people don’t make it,” Wulkan said. “I see them coming and going all the time. Most people don’t know what it takes. What they don’t realize is that it doesn’t happen overnight.”

A native of Schenectady, N.Y., Wulkan said he moved to Screenland in 1994 to pursue filmmaking but pays his bills mostly by selling sports memorabilia on the Internet and at trade shows.

“I’m biding my time, as they say in the industry,” he said. “I’m doing it in a unique way. . . . I’m not just another waiter.”

He is even writing a screenplay about the collectible world, one that he would love to sell to Warner Bros., where he once toiled as a production assistant for the now-defunct sitcom “Step by Step,” starring Suzanne Somers.

“Warner Bros. is another name for heaven,” Wulkan said, flashing that smile.

WB and other studios tightened security after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when rumors swirled that they were possible targets. Despite the scare, most Screenlanders remained undaunted. They auditioned, waited tables and dawdled over their half-written screenplays--just as they usually do.

Besides, Screenlanders say they couldn’t make it in Hollywood ifthey lived in, say, Reseda or Riverside.

Don Davis, a TV camera operator and aspiring screenwriter, has lived on the street since 1989. “Everyone comes here with a big Hollywood dream,” he said while sipping coffee in his black-and-gray studio apartment. “But not everyone makes it.”

Davis recalled a young couple from North Carolina who had planned to live in the apartment below him. With boxes unloaded and partly unpacked, they left for lunch. When they returned, someone had stolen their belongings.

“I saw them in the parking lot looking dejected, with puffy eyes,” Davis said. “It just destroyed their dreams. The same day they got here, they turned around and went back home to North Carolina.”

Sisters Rachel and Lee Gott recently moved to Screenland from Atlanta and like it so much they think they’ll stay. The windows in their upstairs apartment face those of an apartment where photo shoots occur. “It’s like we’re on a set,” Rachel said with a laugh.

The sisters also regularly encounter film crews on the street and at the grocery store. Throw in beaming studio searchlights, a view of the famous Warner Bros. water tower, a neighborhood packed with production trailers, and the sisters can’t help feeling like their “life is a movie.”

“I guess [that film] would be about two Southern sisters trying to make it in L.A.,” said Rachel, an aspiring novelist and an editor with a post-production subtitle and closed-captioning company. “Maybe a ‘Designing Women’-type of thing.”

Lee Gott, the younger sister, works as a freelance interior designer with hopes of one day decorating Hollywood sets.

Like other Screenlanders, the Gotts have honed their eavesdropping skills. They listen for scoops on upcoming movies and TV shows--on the elevators to their apartment. In the laundry room. While shopping at the supermarket.

The sisters also enjoy spotting celebrities, such as Freddie Prinze Jr. at a local Irish pub, though they would never show that it was a big deal. “Where we live is where they work,” Lee said. “You have to respect that.”

Unfortunately, no stars live in their building. “I haven’t seen a whole lot of people who could be famous,” she said.

Just a lot of folks who are determined to be. “If I yelled ‘audition,’ I could clear the building,” said John Heffron, an actor and comedian who lives near the Gotts. “They’re all over the place.”

Of course, he said, most residents hope to eventually head for the Hollywood Hills. “If you make it big,” he said, laughing, “you’re no longer living on Screenland Drive.”