L.A. is a film and TV town, in case you hadn’t noticed, but there’s also a healthy, if under-respected, theatre scene here. It’s partly just a function of how many actors are here, looking for a place to do their art—and, yes, of course, be seen doing it. Mercedes Reuhl once told Back Stage West that she’d pounded the pavement for years in New York and was finally discovered in a hit Off-Broadway play, because, as she put it, “You have to be caught in the act of acting.” For L.A. actors who don’t have a lot of “tape” for their reel, that means getting up onstage, whether at a comedy club or a “legit” venue.

Writers, too, can send in all the unsolicited scripts they want to agents and executives, but there’s nothing as persuasive as seeing the work on its feet, being played by actors. That’s one reason we have a pilot season, rather than a “script-development” season; TV suits and advertisers need to see a sample of the product to believe in its chances.

This has also been the logic behind some of the more ambitious link-ups between film and theatre—a connection that would seem obvious but has been made all too rarely in this town. There was the long-lived HBO Workspace on Seward off Melrose, which was a sort of tryout house for the Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, and hence something of an artist-development program for other media. (HBO now simply holds an annual open call to vet local talent for Aspen.) And there have been a variety of deals over the years between entities with common interests: the Groundlings and NBC, for instance (it may be “live from New York,” but most of SNL’s stars cut their teeth in L.A. and Chicago).

The latest partnership is between New York’s Naked Angels Theatre Company and FOX-TV for a series called, catchily, “Naked TV.” In a four-week run at Santa Monica’s resplendent Edgemar Center for the Arts (where acting guru Larry Moss teaches and produces the occasional play), FOX-TV’s newly formed “Creative Writer Development Division” will present 8-10 short plays by up-and-coming writers with an eye to develop them into pilots. They’ve also announced that they’ll sponsor small-scale digital film productions—pilot presentations, it sounds like—as part of the program.

A press release this week made the following dream-come-true promise: “In the audience for the April 23 performance will be FOX executives hoping to identify talented new sources for the network’s pilot scripts.”

Bad news, aspiring writers: The scripts have already been chosen and are being cast this week, for an April 16 opening. I imagine, though, that the presence of FOX execs will make actors especially interested in the gig, despite its non-paying Equity 99-Seat status. Casting directors are Kara Lipson and Peter Pappas.

Also promising the chance of on-camera work after a live staging is Mars Callahan’s new project What Love Is, a 16-character play he’s developing at Elephant Stageworks in Hollywood for a possible summer opening, followed by a planned feature film version. Casting director Jed Herold, who with partner Chris Game casts commercials from the Elephant’s actual stages, said that he’s looking specifically for actors who will work both on the play and the subsequent film.

“That’s definitely [Callahan’s] intention,” said Herold. “We’re casting with the idea that it would be for both [the play and the film].” That doesn’t mean Herold and Game have been given the directive, common in indie film casting, to find a few saleable names to get the film rolling; for Callahan’s first film, the festival hit Poolhall Junkies, the participation of Chazz Paliminteri, Rick Schroder, and Christopher Walken was instrumental in getting it made.

“At this point, he’s not really thinking about that,” said Herold. “He just wants to get working on it. He’s in love with actors, and it’s the first thing he’s written for the theatre. He wants to workshop it, do some work on it, then put it up here at the Elephant—and then translate that into a film.”

Like Poohall Junkies, What Love Is is a single-set, dialogue-heavy piece which Herold compared to Hurlyburly and Glengarry Glen Ross. “The script has about four stage directions in it, and the rest is dialogue,” said Herold. (Note to imbd searches: Callahan is often credited as Gregory Martin.)

Herold and Game are accustomed to auditioning theatre actors: They cast their commercials out of the Elephant Theatre, a five-stage complex on the corner of Santa Monica Blvd. and Lillian. Herold said they have the run of the place most weekdays, with the majority of theatre rehearsals and performances occurring in the evenings—though occasionally a film shoot or acting class will rent one of the stages in the daylight hours. No problem, Herold said: Actors appreciate that they get to audition on a stage rather than in an office, and if they hear a little noise from the next room, it’s all part of the creative atmosphere. “It’s all people working on acting,” said Herold of the Elephant’s buzz of activity.

Also in the works at Chris & Jed Casting, as it’s called, is a reality-fiction hybrid pilot called The Sum of Us, in which actors will play married couples in semi-improvised “sessions” with a real-life marriage counselor. Although the couples and their conflicts may not be real, the Breakdown says that the producers would “love to audition real couples.” And save the jokes: The show is looking for marital issues that are “dramatic and real as possible.” As it’s intended for cable, we can assume that the gloves—and the censor’s bleeps—are off.

Conscious of Pilots

Like Naked Angels, Ensemble Studio Theatre originated on the East Coast, and now has a West Coast wing, naturally called Ensemble Studio Theatre-L.A.

E.S.T.-L.A. is also staging an anthology, three one-acts under a “marathon” headline, to open April 22. Casting director Jennifre Dumont has her hands full, she admitted—and not just because she’s casting a dozen roles for three separate directors.

“Casting a play during pilot season—it’s a joy,” Dumont deadpanned. “I just had a baby, too, so I’m insane right now.”

E.S.T.-L.A.’s established membership, much of it originating from New York and over 30, is a formidable talent pool, but these three plays require the troupe to look outside; one of the plays, Deborah Grimberg’s The Honey Makers, has a pair of roles for East Indian/Pakistani actors (I guess most people wouldn’t quite understand the catch-all designation “South Asian”). There are also a number of younger roles in the play, and Dumont brought in, she said, because “I specialize in young talent, and in comedy—I’ve done pilots for the WB and Fox for the past 3 years.”

This pilot season, she’s casting a play—and she feels the difference. “I’ve gotten a better response than I thought, though I’ve had a lot of doors close on me. People wanna focus on pilots right now. People move out here to be movie stars, not actors.”

Even tougher is Funny Business, a musical about comics slated for the Coronet Theatre in late April. Dumont and co-casting director Caroline Liem (an associate with film CD Ronnie Yeskel) are seeking real-life standups who will incorporate some of their material into the scripted play (and who won’t have to sing—that’s done by other performers).

“I feel like a used car salesman with some of these calls,” Dumont confessed, imitating her pitch: “It’s at the Coronet! It’s on La Cienega! It’s across from Trashy Lingerie! There’s parking!”

The challenge with this show, as Caroline Liem pointed out, isn’t just pilot season: “Comics are booked out all the time, all year round.” And then there’s the recently concluded Aspen Comedy Fest, a comics’ magnet—an annual March event which, as Dumont lamented, is also a conflict with pilot season.

“It’s hard—they schedule Aspen in middle of pilot season. I’m a comedy casting director and I’ve never been to Aspen,” she said.

Even at the Mark Taper Forum, the Downtown theatre that boasts L.A.’s most lucrative Equity contracts, casting director Amy Lieberman has noticed a disturbing trend.

“It gets harder and harder and harder every year to cast a play during pilot season,” she said. “It’s worse than ever. The amount of actors who say ‘not interested,’ or ‘technically available but not interested,’ goes up every year. I talk to big casting directors in New York, and actors there are waiting by the phone for a pilot, too. It’s really a shame.”

She recently completed casting for The Talking Cure, Christopher Hampton’s new play about the rivalry between Freud and Jung, and is working on three-character Irish play Stones in His Pockets.

I remember Lieberman’s predecessor, the late Stanley Soble, telling me that agents would actually say to him, when he made an offer of a role at the Taper, “What if my client gets a job?”

“They still say that to this day,” said Lieberman. “You want to be really kind when you respond to that. Even at the Taper, we have to explain to some people that we’re not a showcase for TV and movies. That’s really hard to say after 37 years. There’s the certain percentage of agents who get it, who love it, and actors of the highest caliber that will take the time to do theatre—who do it for free in this town.”

Does she ever mention to her bosses at the Taper that perhaps the unique casting challenges of pilot season ought to be factored into their season plans?

“We in casting think it should,” Lieberman said. “I talk about that a lot here. They think I’m joking about it.”

Caroline Liem, though, has a different perspective. When I asked if it’s hard to cast a play during pilot season, she replied, “No more difficult than casting a play at any other time in L.A. How’s that for a quote?”

The Moving File

Casting directors move around a lot in this town, but not without a purpose. “New address” almost always means “new project,” which is why actors prick up their ears when they hear about these moves (if they hear about them). Here are a few in recent weeks:

Sheila Jaffe and Meredith Tucker are now in the Lantana building on West Olympic in Santa Monica, casting a half-hour episodic series for HBO called Entourage, about life in the Hollywood fast lane. Producers include Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Mark Wahlberg (not the rapper/actor) and Larry Charles.

Casting director Denise Chamian has opened up shop in Studio City, near CBS/Radford, but there’s no word on what she’s up to, unless she’s still working on the Gore Verbinksi-helmed feature Weather Man.

CD Susan Vash is on the CBS/Radford lot casting the Macauley Culkin pilot Foster Hall, about an adult brother and sister with a co-dependent relationship. Among the producers is Conan O’Brien.

Leah Daniels Butler has joined Monica Swann (All About the Andersons) in her Burbank-adjacent office to cast a Touchstone/ABC pilot called Earthquake, an African-American Mr. Mom scenario.

Ted Hann and Pamela Basker are now ensconced in the same office, not far from the Warners lot, to cast the half-hour CBS comedy pilot Aisha Tyler Project, in which the Friends recurrer deals with corporate culture shock when her small company is acquired by a big one. Lisa Kudrow, Dan Bucatinsky, Bill Martin, and Mike Schiff are the producers.

And the formerly partnered Lisa Mionie and Eileen Stringer are each working on pilots separately: Mionie on a UPN half-hour called Bad Girl’s Guide, which she’s casting on the Paramount lot, and Eileen Stringer, now partnered with Wendy Kurtzman, on a one-hour for ABC called The Secret Service, cast from an off-lot Disney office in Burbank.

You’re Hired, Sort Of

Indie film casting director Ferne Cassel will be offering more on-screen jobs, of a sort, than there are roles in Bernard Rose’s script for the film The Man With a Movie Camera, a movie-within-a-movie about a horror film director who decides to recreate on camera the real-life slaughter that claimed his wife.

A note on the Breakdown promises/warns: “ALL AUDITIONS WILL BE VIDEOTAPED FOR POSSIBLE INCLUSION IN THE FEATURE FILM.” I wondered if this was kosher—it’s a SAG film—and Cassel explained.

“The actors will get releases,” she said. “It looks like he’s making a movie, and he’ll show actors auditioning, and throughout the film you’re questioning, Is this really going on, or is it a movie?”

I had to wonder if the casting director herself would make an appearance in any of the “backstage” scenes.

“I’ve been asked a couple of times, and I always say no,” said Cassel. “I’m better behind the camera than in front of it.”