Wicked Little Town

Bobby Hill, World's Greatest Mom

Pamela S. Adlon won an Emmy last year, but not enough people seem to know it. Even some folks at the Television Academy appear to be in the dark about it.

"They never sent me my nameplate," said Adlon recently as her three young daughters rustled in the background. A friend offered to make her a 1970s hand-punch label for the nameless trophy that sits in her house and might as well say "World's Best Mom." (For the folks at home: Awardees at the major shows take home a blank statuette.)

But then Adlon (formerly Pamela Segall) is used to not being recognized for her work: She's in animation voiceover, and she's called in mostly "whenever they want somebody who can be a really natural boy." Adlon's Emmy came for her performance as one of the most natural, if loveably peculiar, boys on TV: scratchy-voiced dreamer Bobby Hill on the unassuming Fox mainstay "King of the Hill."

"When I got into voiceover 14 years ago, it hadn't exploded at that point -- it was the bastard stepchild of acting," she recalled. "It was assumed that if you did voiceover your face was too fucked up to be on camera." Now, she joked, "We are the gods -- we have achieved the quan," but there's still a divide between on-camera and voiceover talent. "When 'Will & Grace' did a 100th episode, they all got Porsches. When we did a 100th episode, we got AstroTurf coasters."

The second-class treatment also surfaces when producers of a successful animated show face contract talks with the talent -- as when cast members on Fox's other animated hit asked for more and the producers started holding auditions for replacements.

"When they renegotiated 'The Simpsons,' I told my agent, 'Don't even call me,' " said Adlon of this hardball tactic, which was also used with the cast of "The Powerpuff Girls" and the lead voice on "Babe 2." "I would never, ever undermine another actor who's established and created a character. That's like crossing the [picket] line at the supermarket. It's just not OK."

A character Adlon created onstage will get a new lease with next month's New York backer's audition reading of "Heartbreak Help," a play by L.A. scribe Justin Tanner that she starred in back in 1996. She'll fly on her own dime to join co-stars Laurel Green, Ellen Ratner, and Carol Ann Susi because she believes Tanner "deserves his due in New York. I love the show. We had the best time. It's a fun show. It's just giddy."

She'll fit the play reading into a hiatus on "Hill" tapings, which start up again in January for the show's 9th season next fall. For Adlon, the show's glow hasn't worn off.

"I'm stunned by the level of the scripts," she said. "They let all these natural moments happen -- there's actual silence on a TV show. It feels like classic television, like we're working on something that will last."

Don't tell the Academy, but that just might be worth even more than an Emmy.

Untimely Exit for Stage Fave

You'd have to go back to the sudden death of "Rent"'s young composer/lyricist Jonathan Larson in 1996, on the eve of the work's Off-Broadway premiere, to find a theatrical tragedy as untimely and bewildering as Kellie Waymire's death, apparently from natural causes, last week.

A small, sweet-faced actress with serious theatre chops and some resemblance to Renee Zellweger, Waymire had returned from a TV shoot on Thursday evening, in time to go onstage that weekend for her critically acclaimed run in "Kate Crackernuts" at the 24th Street Theater. It was her boyfriend, scenic designer Gary Smoot, who found her on the kitchen floor at 1:30 Friday morning, according to sources involved with the show.

Friday night's performance was cancelled, and the cast and crew gathered at the theater, shaken, to sort out their feelings. They thought of how insistent Kellie, a busy TV actress, had been that she appear in as many performances of the play as she could. Her understudy had gone on a few times, but Kellie made a point of scheduling her TV commitments around the play's run as much as she could.

There was no contest, then, said director Jessica Kubzansky: The best way to honor Kellie's commitment to show was to go on with the remaining three performances, last Saturday and this coming weekend.

Eerily, one of Kellie's co-stars told Wicked Little Town that at a post-performance gathering the week before, the cast had been trading stories about their worst fears. Kellie's was that she would die in her home and not be discovered for days.

That her significant other found her so relatively quickly after death is very small comfort. But we take comfort where we can when confronted by such a senseless loss.

Mapa the World, Ma

Some actors just don't fit into Hollywood's cookie-cutter roles. But if they stick around long enough and keep doing their thing, they can eventually be embraced for their originality, and get a chance to reshape the roles they get to fit their outsized personalities.

Take Alec Mapa, for example. A short, impish, epicene Filipino now in his 30s but still looking Peter Pan-ishly ageless, he's best known for playing the original "M. Butterfly" and for a series of solo shows about the ups and downs of his career and his life (two of them, presented earlier this year under the grouped title "Mapa Mia," are nominated separately for Ovation Awards -- yes, Mapa is competing with himself).

"People are starting to incorporate my creativity now that they know what I do," said Mapa, who turned a receptionist part on UPN's "Half and Half" into a recurring role by basing his nonchalant demeanor on his own temping days of yore. "And as long as you're working, it attracts other people who are interested in what you do."

Mapa wasn't even going to read for "Connie and Carla," Nia Vardalos' new movie about two women (Vardalos and Toni Collette) who go into hiding by disguising themselves as West Hollywood drag queens (for release next spring). "I so didn't need to be in drag again," quipped Mapa, who apart from "Butterfly" has been called upon to don the eyeliner on other occasions. The caliber of the cast -- and of his co-queen, Stephen Spinella -- convinced to try for a part that, he says, was "pretty thinly conceived." He went in and read the lines as his own Filipino grandmother might; he later found out from Vardalos that when she wants to do "ethnic," she conjures her inner grandmother, too.

Next up for Mapa is Bravo's improvised show about couples in therapy, "Significant Others," (not be confused with the short-lived 1998 drama featuring a current ABC star). Mapa plays the partner of Patrick Bristow -- a pairing that seemed obvious, Mapa said, when producers put the two together and "we wouldn't shut up."

And that's the lesson for today, kids: Just keep talking and eventually they'll hear you.

Understudy Up for 'Shaggs'

Understudying is among the most thankless jobs in the theater--until you get to go on.

"It's something I really enjoy," said Elizabeth Tobias, who's understudying all the women's roles in the new musical "The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World," about the best worst rock band in history. "You get the rush of opening-night adrenaline that you can rely on to get you through. Also you get to be the fabulous pinch hitter, and do one or two adrenaline-push performances, and everyone thanks you. You don't get that when you do the whole run of a show."

She was on for two performances this past weekend in the supporting role of the Shaggs' put-upon mother -- guaranteed stage time she knew was coming when she signed on, because Laura Lamson, who usually plays the part, had a prior commitment. Tobias said also she's preparing for the possibility that star Hedy Burress may get a film job she can't turn down. The three leads are "really committed to these parts and to this production," though, and she could see them missing performances only "if somone gets deathly ill or they get a phone call from Spielberg."

Tobias is a regular L.A. theatre actor and producer, but by day she runs a children's theatre company as well as the "classroom enrichment" programs for the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, where she's also worked as an actress (and an understudy). "Enrichment" doesn't refer to her bottom line. "The only thing that pays less than acting is teaching," she joked. "I made more money on a Siemens cell phone commercial I did last year that aired only in Britain than I did the whole year teaching."

But having a day job that's at least related to her performing is a plus -- and there may be some truth to the notion that the more work you do, the more comes to you. She's started to "cook" a little more, as she put it, with on-camera bookings for commercials and episodic roles.

They say you've got to be ready when opportunity knocks. Maybe this is why Tobias doesn't mind understudying: What better practice for the everyday life of the L.A. actor than to always be waiting for the call that offers the job that starts right away?

Rising Arizono

Mami Arizono turns up in the strangest places: as a performer with the theatre company Zoo District, as a strange multi-instrumentalist imp in the Sam Shepard deconstruction "Go True West," as the accordionist for Zooey Deschanel and Sam Shelton's retro swing band the Pretty Babies (that's Mami in the middle, though her face is blocked).

This past summer she turned up as a director in her native Japan at the Toga Summer Arts Festival. Lest you have a vision of a Roman-themed beerbust, Toga happens to be the name of the hometown of performance training pioneer Tadashi Suzuki, whose intensive techniques have been embraced and taught by many American companies.

Arizono directed a scene from a play well-known in Japan, Yukio Mishima's "My Friend Hitler." The scene called for just two actors, but she snuck in an extra two silent "movement" performers, one of them her boyfriend (and "Go True West" co-star), non-Japanese-speaking Ben Simonetti.

The reception was good enough, she said, that it's about "80 percent sure" that the hit "Go True West" will visit Japan next spring for a performance at Suzuki's own theater in Toga. Are Japanese audiences familiar with the original "True West," I wondered?

"I don’t think so," she said. (Actually a production was just up in Tokyo.) "But it's not a wordy show, it's a lot of movement, so it'll be good for Japanese people."

Accordion to Mami, at least.

Money Shots Net Dividends

The primetime soaper "Skin" may have been cut, but there are still a million stories in the naked city -- that is to say, our local porn industry. One day last year, when the writing team of Kirk Pynchon, James C. Leary, and Mike Meredith had reached a dead end on a feature script, Meredith started joking about a title he had for a film: "Stunt Cocks."

They couldn't stop riffing on the idea. Now, a year later, the 8-minute DV short "Stunt C*cks" -- starring Leary and Pynchon as Bill and Earl, two likeable lugs who provide the "money shots" when male stars can't finish their work--has been making film festival rounds and recently landed the writing trio literary representation at Metropolitan Talent for one of their feature scripts (not about porn but about rock 'n' roll).

Another of the team's feature scripts is set in an early '80s skating rink. That last-days-of-disco era has been a regular source of inspiration for them: Meredith and Pynchon's silly breakdancing musical "Poppin' and Lockdown" played at the 2nd Stage Theater in 2000, and a sequel is slated as a late-night offering next spring at the Actors' Gang, where Pynchon is a member.

Actually, he would think twice before calling himself a "member"; since "Stunt C*cks," Pynchon confessed, everything he says sounds like a double entendre.

Runaway Jury Duty

"Why does the jury system pick on self-employed persons?" is one of the FAQs on the L.A. Superior Court's jury website. It goes on to assure readers that "jury selection is entirely random." But actor/writer Brad Slaight suspected he was somehow being singled out, because he'd received a jury summons only a year ago and received another one recently -- the minimum time allowed between summons under stiff new California regulations regarding jury duty.

Slaight's suspicion only sharpened when he got to the courthouse and faced the judge in the jury selection interviews. After watching several people get off the hook by saying their employers wouldn't pay for jury duty time, Brad's plea was dismissed out of hand.

"I said, 'Your honor, I'm an actor. I'm not working, but I need to be available,' " said Slaight. " 'One audition could mean a year's salary for me.' The judge didn't buy it."

Though he was later dismissed by the defense lawyer during jury pool selection, he wondered (via a popular actors' bulletin board) if this was a case of "profiling." Actor colleagues reported similar cases.

Slaight said he understood the logic of cracking down on L.A.'s once-porous jury system. But he still felt unfairly singled out, and said he would write a letter to his elected representative, perhaps stressing that with rampant runaway production, L.A. actors don't need yet another obstacle to pursuing their livelihood.

Maybe Slaight can take comfort in the opinion of one city attorney I spoke to, who said that from a prosecutor's perspective, he tries to eliminate actors and other creative types from his juries. Thespians make bad jurors for the prosecution, he said, because they're more likely to engage in "scenario writing" -- meaning that instead of accepting the simplest circumstantial version of events, which is often the prosecution's case, thespians will craft or imagine complicated alternative possibilities.

Especially actors who've appeared in "12 Angry Men."

No Rest in Bucharest

"Romania is the Tijuana of the Eastern bloc," said actor Christian Leffler. More specifically, he means Bucharest, where he spent three weeks last summer "kicking ass and chewing scenery" as a bad guy in the horror/thriller "Madhouse."

"There are lines painted on the street, but nobody pays attention to them," Leffler said. "You'll see some Mercedes and Eastern European cars we never see in the States, and then a horse-drawn cart." More like Tijuana is the sense that "everything is available, if you're willing to ask and willing to cross that line." The women, he said, "all dress like prostitutes -- they wear next to nothing."

And the Golden Arches are "a godsend, because the food there is so terrible." Leffler said the cast took to feeding its hotel-provided food ("meat and cheese that just didn't taste right") out the window to a pack of feral dogs and instead subsisting, in his case at least, on the relatively safe diet of beer and pasta.

He didn't sleep much for the first week and took to phoning castmate Jordan Ladd in the middle of the night to tell her he was watching a "Charlie's Angels" rerun and noticing the resemblance to her mom. Also in the cast was Leslie Jordan, like Leffler an L.A. theatre trouper, who would take off on a train for days to explore the country when he wasn't needed for shooting.

For his part, Leffler -- best known for his award-winning stage work at the Evidence Room and for playing Phil Spector in the Sonny & Cher TV movie--stuck around Bucharest, marvelling at the contrasts among Old World charm, "Blade Runner"-esque commercial architecture, and follies of the Ceacescu regime. He also tried to suss out everyday Romanian life: One local who worked on the film told him she made the equivalent of $170 a month--and paid $100 in rent.

Maybe she gets by on the McDonald's dollar menu.

Another Nick in the Wall

John Papsidera and Wendy O'Brien's casting office is singularly inviting -- original art on the walls, unassuming Ikea lighting fixtures. Is it maybe too inviting? Exhibit A: The wall of the room where they do readings, which has chunks and nicks taken out of it.

They were casting for a role in the HBO pilot "5.15," about stressed-out minimum-wage workers, when one "experienced, established actor" who shall remain nameless made what O'Brien diplomatically calls "an interesting choice." To be precise, for a scene in which one character's new truck has been dinged by an inopportunely placed dumpster, this actor came into his reading and got physical with the wall. He didn't just limit the damage to his own body blows -- he picked up a chair and started banging it on the wall.

O'Brien said he was immediately ashamed when the reading was over, but that he'd been "in the moment and just kept it going." She was all right with his outburst -- she understood it as nothing more than an acting choice that went too far, and though he didn't get the part, she said she would call him in again. She even joked with him about signing his "work" on the wall.