Roles, yes, but always stories

“AT 15, I won best actor in the state of Texas in the one-act play contest for ‘The Trojan Women.’ I played Talthybius -- I think I won because I was eye candy: I came out in a short skirt with armor, with a dead baby on my shield. You know the story? Talthybius is a Greek warrior -- he’s not there to kill women and children -- but it’s his job to throw this baby off the tower. And I still can remember the line that won me the award: ‘I am not the man to do this. Some other without pity, not I, ashamed to be the herald of messages such as this.’ ”

The effect is mesmerizing -- not just the latent emotion still coiled in a monologue learned 40 years ago, but because it emanates from a tall, balding (OK, bald), vaguely bird-like man whom the film industry has conspired to make seem as ridiculous as he is invisible.

Stephen Tobolowsky, character actor -- he’s forever dragging that epithet “character actor” behind his name like Jacob Marley’s chains or Richard III’s distended hump -- has appeared in roughly 175 screen and television roles since the mid-’80s, but you would be hard-pressed to name more than a handful of them. Not because he’s not memorable -- he’s often the most striking thing on display -- but rather, because in a celebrity-saturated culture driven by a ferocious publicity apparatus, where we know the minutest details of Tom Cruise’s nuptials or Brangelina’s baby, attention is rarely accorded the myriad working actors who provide continuity to the movies.

Yet think back on any era, the ‘70s, say, and it’s rarely the stars that come to define it -- Jane Fonda, Burt Reynolds, Barbra Streisand -- so much as the characters or contract players -- John Cazale, Warren Oates, Harry Dean Stanton. They are the glue and cement that connect background to foreground, one film to another and each generation to the next.

In Tobolowsky’s case, you may remember him as Ned Ryerson, the insurance agent in “Groundhog Day” who embodies Sartre’s notion that “hell is other people.” Or guileless Sammy Jankis in “Memento.” Or the head of the Ku Klux Klan in “Mississippi Burning.” Or for a different demographic, perhaps as Mr. Bates in “Freaky Friday” or Happy Chapman in “The Garfield Movie.” Most recently, his talents were on display as “the government man” in the second season of “Deadwood.” And yet whether playing goofy comedy or searing drama, he has mastered the character actor’s metier of sinking into the tapestry -- an affable, movable prop.

The reason he is reciting Euripides in the garden of the Studio City home he shares with his wife, actress Ann Hearn, demonstrating his actor’s prowess in such an unalloyed fashion, is not to show off but rather as the punch line to a story.

It is this secondary skill as a consummate storyteller that seems to underlie everything he does -- from playwright and screenwriter to much-sought-after improv teacher to part-time psychic. And why not, when it’s quite possible that the lost art of storytelling -- at least until “This American Life” -- may have been kept alive all these years in the form of talk show anecdotes, the actor’s staple.

Now with the DVD release of “Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party,” a feature-length collection of Tobolowsky’s favorite anecdotes told to friends and family on the occasion of his 53rd birthday two years ago -- which, after a year on the festival circuit, he recently celebrated with a Hollywood-style release party at club du jour Aqua in Beverly Hills on May 30, his birthday -- Tobolowsky has finally gotten what his career has failed to provide him: His first starring role.

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“My daughter was in “Deadwood” -- she plays Tess, one of my hookers. There was a scene with Stephen where he’s in a bubble bath, and she was there tending to him or whatever, and I walk in on them and say, ‘Go ahead ... and let’s get out of here.’ The last time he’d seen my daughter was in the hospital, the night she was born.”

-- Powers Boothe, actor, “Deadwood,” among others

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Tobolowsky was born in Texas in 1951 in Oak Cliff, a section of Dallas, the son of a Jewish doctor in a town where Jews were in short supply (the nearest synagogue was 22 miles away). His aunt, Hermine Tobolowsky, was a (frequently vilified) activist lawyer who was known as the mother of the Texas Equal Rights Amendment, and an uncle, Edwin Tobolowsky, produced films for Dallas-based no-budget horror legend Larry Buchanan, which he learned only long after he had moved to Los Angeles. (Disclosure: Buchanan was my uncle.) In fact, perhaps the only demographic more underrepresented in pre-Kennedy assassination Texas was actors -- a calling that Tobolowsky heard early.

“When I was 6, I wanted to be an actor, because I thought that meant I would have a chance of meeting Godzilla,” he says. “The way I looked at acting was ‘proximity to monsters’ -- that actors got to fight Godzilla or meet Frankenstein and Dracula. I thought, ‘This is the kind of life I want to lead -- I want to be close to monsters when I grow up.’ ” (Be careful what you wish for.)

After high school, he played in a rock ‘n’ roll band for just long enough to record a single called “New High” with an unknown 14-year-old blues guitarist named Stevie Ray Vaughan. And in fact, that record couldn’t have preordained their respective legacies any better: A round robin of solos during the break of a generic blues jump features a perfectly adequate eight-bar guitar solo -- especially from a teenage novelty player. Then on the tail end of it, the guitarist takes a second eight-bar solo -- one that blows the first solo, the song, the songwriting and the rest of the band out of the proverbial water. It’s a theatrical moment, scripted as perhaps their only defense against this tyro upstart, and yet no less enjoyable because of it. Tobolowsky soon entered Southern Methodist University’s theater program, leaving Vaughan to his own devices.

At SMU, Tobolowsky was part of a group that included a number of lasting talents -- Powers Boothe and Kathy Bates, Patricia Richardson (Tim Allen’s wife on “Home Improvement”) and, most notably (at least to Tobolowsky himself), playwright Beth Henley (“Crimes of the Heart”), with whom he lived for the next 17 years.

Tobolowsky claims he wrote other students’ thesis papers for spending money, as well as a musical about Mark Twain that wound up being performed on a riverboat. After relocating to L.A., he wrote a play that he later directed as a feature film, “Two Idiots in Hollywood,” which has the dubious distinction of presaging “Beavis and Butt-head.” Thanks to a chance encounter with director Jonathan Demme, for whom Tobolowsky and Henley had both played small parts in “Swing Shift,” just then on his way to screen his Talking Heads documentary, “Stop Making Sense,” at the Directors Guild, the pair wound up working with Talking Heads frontman David Byrne on the screenplay for his directorial debut, “True Stories.”

“The one contribution I’m most proud of is I told David stories of my psychic experiences, which he turned into the song ‘Radiohead,’ ” Tobolowsky says. “I told him how I used to hear tones in people’s heads, and I would tell them about their lives. But of course, some of the things I told people turned out to be true, and they weren’t pleasant -- like, ‘Have you been raped by your father?’ So I quit doing that stuff.” He claims to still use his power only to find his wife’s car keys. (According to various Internet sources, the band Radiohead took its name from the song.) Shortly afterward, he was cast as the racist everyman in “Mississippi Burning” and his acting career took off. Tobolowsky plans to direct his next film, “Love, Marriage and Marilyn Monroe,” from a script by Susan Baskin, in 2007, to star Jenna Elfman.

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“He doesn’t protect his image. He’s honest, and he tells us how he feels without worrying what he looks like. I admire him, but I don’t think in a lot of the same situations these things would have happened to me. Stephen is very, very open to what life offers.”

-- Robert Brinkmann, cinematographer of “The Rules of Attraction” and “The Cable Guy”

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POSSIBLY through the interplay of these various talents -- writing, acting, psychic reconnaissance -- Tobolowsky has perfected an improv regimen, loosely based on Stanislavsky’s levels of observation, by way of Freud’s “Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious,” which he teaches in workshops sponsored by the Kalmenson & Kalmenson casting agency. But it might as well be a science of storytelling.

“When people write stories in their journals,” he says, “what they always write about are boundaries -- something they saw that was on the edge to them of what seemed to be right or safe or sane. My Uncle Sylvan was a tax attorney for Jackie Gleason. He told me, ‘Stephen, there’s a difference between morals and ethics. Lawyers deal with ethics; in life, we struggle with morals.’ ”

It is this moral aspect that characterizes the stories in “Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party” (now with copious DVD extras). Directed by Brinkmann, the film had its genesis 20 years ago in “Two Idiots in Hollywood,” Brinkmann’s first professional job, when he observed Tobolowsky entertaining the guests at his birthday party and thought the stories should be preserved. The project languished until film technology could catch up with them and was shot over the course of a single day in 2004 at Tobolowsky’s home, with the exception of an opening story filmed on the beach at Malibu.

The stories move chronologically through Tobolowsky’s life -- working as Ronald McDonald in college, being held hostage at gunpoint in a supermarket in Dallas, the birth of his first child -- often with a bittersweet perspective provided by the passage of time. These weave together into a dramatic arc, imparting many life lessons along the way. The result is most readily compared to Spalding Gray’s “Swimming to Cambodia” (directed by Demme) and “My Dinner With Andre,” both of which began life as scripted plays.

But the film it most resembles is Martin Scorsese’s 1978 documentary “American Boy,” a literal record of the stories of Steven Prince (the gun salesman in “Taxi Driver”), told in a single sitting at a borrowed house in Laurel Canyon, that presents a cumulative and quasi-tragic portrait of its protagonist. (Many of these stories have worked their way into the culture -- most notably the adrenaline-to-the-heart scene in “Pulp Fiction,” re-created verbatim, and another set at a Mojave gas station recounted by an animated Prince in “Waking Life.”)

The film also takes on an odd Socratic cast, as many of the stories are delivered to a makeshift audience of young Hollywood party attendees -- most notably Mena Suvari, then married to Brinkmann, and an uncredited Amy Adams, Oscar-nominated last year for her supporting role in “Junebug” -- held rapt by his delivery.

“It’s universal because people recognize it,” says Tobolowsky in attempting to explain the film’s appeal. “In youth culture, the main thing is getting together and having sex. That’s what all the movies are about. But nothing is about what happens the next day, or the next year. A story about having a baby is a window into not only the next year, but the next 14 years. This may be one of the best home movies ever made. But at least it’s better than ‘Spider-Man 2.’ I don’t care about two guys fighting on the side of a building and falling. Or not falling.... It’s immaterial to me. A culture steeped in the fabulous is also one without content.

“What is it that makes a story compelling? It’s enough to grab our interest that something weird happens. But what we really want is to be transformed by what we hear. We want something wonderful to happen. A lot of people just stop at the weird and don’t quite know how to get to the wonderful. You read Shakespeare, he was always able to see what was wonderful in something little. Look at Juliet talking about Romeo: ‘And when he dies, I will take him and cut him out into little stars, and he shall make the face of heaven so fine that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun.’

“How wonderful is that?”

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