How Actors Are Like Enron Employees

Let's see, she's acted with Vanessa Redgrave and Lainie Kazan; played a Russian metalhead named Yitzak in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"; has a series of comic detective novels in the works; used to front an alternative rock band called Wench. Oh, and she recurred on "Star Trek: Voyager" as the first crew member to give birth in space.

Juilliard-trained Nancy Hower has a quirky resume indeed, and she's just added another hat to the mix: Director of the improv-created mockumentary "Memron," just announced as a Slamdance selection next January. She and producer Evie Peck, who also appears in the film, shot it on digital video in what Peck called "total guerrilla" style -- i.e., Peck would line up locations, and casting would often be done on the fly: "Why don't you call so-and-so?" is how Peck recalled. Then, Hower said, they would add, "Bring someone you love. Actors are the best casting directors you can find -- I was amazed by the talent that showed up."

Her sketch of an idea -- about how the former employees of now-bankrupt corporation not unlike Enron must put their lives back together -- was fleshed out scene by scene by a cast of seasoned improv actors, who worked sans script and often took the film in surprising directions. According to Peck, one day of shooting in a residential home ended with a screaming-match scene so realistic that a neighbor called 911. The arriving ambulances and fire trucks, unfortunately, weren't worked into the film.

The film, which portrays Memron's CEO keeping tabs on his former minions from behind the walls of a blue-collar prison, is less about the corporate scandals of recent than about, strangely enough, the lives of actors.

"Actors lead the lives of these Memron people to begin with," said Hower. "Every morning they wake up gong, What's my next job going to be? Where's the money going to come from? Where am I going to live?"

In Hower's case, it seems, the question has become: Which job to choose as my next?