Connie, Carla and Michael

Some directors wear a baseball cap on the set of their films. Michael Lembeck wore a tiara. Three, actually. “I rotated,” he says.

The assorted headgear were gifts from the cast (and one drag club) during the shoot of “Connie and Carla,” a romantic comedy from Universal Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment about two women who disguise themselves as drag queens to hide out from a killer. Budgeted at about $27 million, the film opened Friday and made $3.3 million in 1,014 theaters over the weekend. It features an abundance of singing and dancing from its stars, Nia Vardalos and Toni Collette, in addition to some seriously wigged-out drag ensembles.

For a family man in his 50s with an impressive episodic TV career under his belt, this job fit like a pair of long satin gloves.

“When I first read this, I said to Adriana [Alberghetti, his agent], ‘You have to get me in the game here, this is who I am, this is my job,’ ” Lembeck says. With a background in theater, television and film and a lifelong love of musicals, he felt uniquely suited to direct the movie. “It’s right in the wheelhouse,” he adds. “I wear my heart on my sleeve. I love the emotional content of this movie.”

The son of renowned stage and screen character actor Harvey Lembeck, Michael started seeing Broadway plays as a young child, and he remembers his home always being alive with the sound of musicals. Harvey moved the family to Los Angeles at the end of the ‘60s, to follow the work. Michael was soon performing in theater productions, and television followed. A veteran of more than 200 episodes of half-hour TV, Lembeck’s best-known acting stint is probably his five years playing Max, Mackenzie Phillips’ husband on “One Day at a Time.” Even then, he knew he would make the move to directing movies someday. He thought directing half-hour television would be the perfect bridge from theater to film, because the format was similar to shooting a one-act play.

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One call started it all

In 1988, after returning home from performing in a New York musical, he mentioned to his wife that he was ready to start directing. Seconds later, the phone rang; it was Barry Kemp, the writer-creator of such shows as “Newhart” and “Taxi,” offering him a directing job. Lembeck worked on four episodes of the short-lived CBS series “Coming of Age,” and then a few more for the ABC show “Coach.” “Coach” became a hit, and his directing career was launched. Hundreds of episodes later, he won an Emmy for best direction for “Friends,” one of three Emmy nods for his work on that show.

But all that counted for nothing when it came to moving on to films. As Lembeck recalls, nobody at Disney had any interest in him for “The Santa Clause 2,” the first feature film he directed. They only agreed to meet him to get his agent to stop calling.

After a marathon conference call with 13 executives, he was flown out to meet star Tim Allen, who had director approval. “I spent two hours at Tim’s house -- he spoke for an hour and 50,” Lembeck says. “I laughed so hard I thought I was going to have to go to the hospital.” After another song-and-dance routine for yet more execs, he was hired the next day.

“Talk about a smash cut,” Lembeck says, directing the scenario as he speaks, “from ‘no no no no no no no’ to ‘you’re hired.’ ”

He waxes directorial when recounting another meeting, this one his fourth in a series to win the job on “Connie and Carla.” He was sitting in a room with producers Jonathan Glickman, Roger Birnbaum (both from Spyglass) and Vardalos. “If you were shooting it, it would look like this: four people in the room. The two on the couch are the Spyglass boys, Nia on that chair, I’m on this chair. We begin to talk about musical theater, all the lights go down, the boys disappear, there’s just a light from above on the two of us.”

Vardalos, who also wrote “Connie and Carla,” remembers the scene similarly: “The only person I could see in the room was Michael, and I thought, this is the guy. And we were saying things like ‘Yes, at first the girls can do the box step, but then later on they actually use their shoulders -- they become better women when they’re dressed as men, dressed as women!’ ” Lembeck won the job.

The actress had another reason to be delighted with him at the helm. Years before her breakout as writer and star of “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” when she had a small guest-starring role on a television show, Lembeck was her director. “Most directors on TV shows just treat the actors doing the guest stars as kind of props who eat,” she says. But Lembeck was different. “He had a table set up on the soundstage, the whole cast and guest stars ate lunch together. He was so welcoming to us. It was so opposite to any experience I’d ever had before, where the director would look right through me.”

She never forgot it, recounting it to friends as her one good experience with a TV director.

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‘Fun’ collaboration

And what of the possible conflicts of directing a star in a movie she wrote? According to Lembeck and Vardalos, there weren’t any. They worked on the script extensively before shooting began. Lembeck calls the collaboration “maybe the most fun I’ve had with any writer, and I’ve done 300 episodes of television, that’s a lot of writers.”

They had an agreement not to discuss writing in front of the other actors, instead doing rewrite work privately. And unlike many films, where the writer is not allowed on the set, let alone welcome, Lembeck liked having access. “It’s like doing a new play,” he says, his theatrical roots showing. “The fact you can go to the author and discuss the author’s intent is a luxury a director rarely gets nowadays in film.” (Case in point: “The Santa Clause 2” had nine writers on it, with five taking credit.)

For her part, Vardalos says: “I never had a moment of feeling that this isn’t reflective of what I would like to say.”

The film’s shooting schedule was an arduous 44 days. The average film has about six to 12 camera set-ups a day; this one often necessitated 50 a day, including complicated song-and-dance numbers. That didn’t mean Lembeck didn’t have fun.

“I know he was jealous that he wasn’t up there in a boa,” Vardalos says, “because when we were dancing and singing, I would look out beside the camera and Michael was mouthing the words and dancing out the steps.”

His enthusiasm for film directing is palpable. “It’s so, so creatively satisfying,” he says. And unlike TV, with film he gets to create his own vision. “What’s more exciting than that?”

Clearly, he’s forgotten the tiaras.

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Lisa Rosen can be contacted at calendar@latimes.com.