Wicked Little Town

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?

Keyes' Cruel Moment

"I make tiny moments special" is the catch phrase of big, scary-looking Irwin Keyes, who's often cast, in his words, as "monsters, cavemen, hitmen, many varieties of gangsters, thugs, bodyguards, doorkeepers, hunchbacks, Frankenstein."

In the Coen Brothers' new "Intolerable Cruelty," Keyes plays another hitman, but with the kind of twist that's already garnering raves as a woodchipper-worthy classic Coen moment. As "Wheezy Joe," an asthmatic hit man who's hired first by George Clooney's character, then by Catherine Zeta-Jones' character to kill Clooney, Keyes gets a climactic moment near film's end which, according to his manager, Phil Brock, makes "people sort of gasp, and then they start laughing."

Keyes said working with Coens was a little disorienting: "One Coen brother would walk up and say in one ear, 'Do this, don't do that,' and a couple minutes later the other brother would come up and whisper in the other ear, 'Don't do this, do that.' I had to process all that."

You better not take his word for it, though. Keyes learned not to believe showbiz rumors when, decades ago, he had a few lines opposite Woody Allen in "Stardust Memories." He'd heard that the Woodman cut anyone who looked him in the eye, so at first Keyes delivered his dialogue to the star's belly. Woody cut the scene and set him straight.

Bernard White, Reloaded

Just one mysterious slo-mo shot of his face in "The Matrix Reloaded" -- he exchanges a meaningful stare in a hallway with Keanu Reeve's blank Neo -- has fans buzzing about his significance, but it seems only natural that folks would be buzzing about tall, handsome Indian-American actor Bernard White. He told us he'll have a bigger part in this winter's "Matrix Revolutions" and all will be explained. He also mentioned that he's just been cast in Wim Wenders' new film, apparently Wenders' first digital project in a deal with InDigEnt Films.

And theatre? White is co-founder of Plymouth Theatre and frequent collaborator with Cornerstone Theater Company. He said he's working on a one-man project, but can't afford to take theatre jobs for the standard pay in L.A.: zero (or $7-15 a performance). Like many with the chops and the dues paid, White expects to make a living at his craft. He quoted David Mamet, who was quoting someone else (either Shaw or Wilde -- I can't locate the provenance) when we wrote, "Amateurs talk about art; artists talk about money." A little cynical, White admitted -- but then this isn't a business for the faint of heart.