Is the weather going backward? Last weekend Los Angeles got an early blast of summer, or at least a salutary dose of spring fever. But before we could get out our beach clothes and slather on our sunscreen, the clouds regrouped for a little winter flashback, some April Fool’s showers.

Pilot season this year didn’t seem to obey any meteorological signs, either. In fact, it seems to have both begun and ended earlier than usual this time around, according to Breakdown Services owner/founder Gary Marsh. A check of the archives confirms that pilot Breakdowns were coming out as early as last September, and then really started to roll in from mid-October through November. After a holiday break, January and February were busy, but March saw signs of an early fadeout.

Said Marsh, “We felt the pilots slowing down a little earlier than normal this year. Normally we don’t feel the drop-off until sort of the first week in April, but we saw the first signs of a drop-off about two weeks ago.”

The season’s ultimate death knell comes around Apr. 15, he said: “The town goes dead because everybody’s concentrating on their taxes.”

Marsh attributed the changing schedule of pilot season to programming innovations by FOX and other new networks, and of course cable, which have had success departing from the locked-in fall series premiere schedule. The old Big Three networks still do a crazily competitive dance of dueling test deals and “on holds,” but if trends continue as they have been for a few years now, pilot season will keep spreading out, or back, through the beginning of fall, as it did last year, rather than starting up cold each January. If that trends continues, maybe the race for talent among studios and casting directors won’t be so draining. I would think this would be a good trend for L.A.-based actors, as well—even the great majority who aren’t being chased for lead roles—because, at the very least, it gives them a competitive edge over the influx of East Coast and Chicago actors who breeze into the Oakwood Apartments for a few months each winter.

What’s not such good news for actors from anywhere is that reality TV has become an unkillable Hydra—the genre has such low overhead that it can survive even its ratings debacles, so that for every reality show that fizzles, it seems that 10 more spring up in its place. I compiled some sobering statistics: Breakdown Services released roles for 60 scripted pilots between October, 2003, and the end of March, 2004—and in that time it released Breakdowns for close to the same number of reality shows (my hand-counted tally was 61).

Now, admittedly, some of these “reality” shows—the majority of them, in fact—are what I would call “hybrids,” which means they sought people with some kind of performance skill, even if it was simply hosting. An encouraging number of these “hybrid” projects are, like such cable staples as Girls Behaving Badly, conceived to capitalize on the improv talents of real actors (see my Dec. 12, 2003 column for my first thoughts on this trend).

Two recent examples of “hybrids” were 3 Non-Blondes, based on a popular BBC hidden camera show. Mandy Kahn, who’s casting from Raleigh Studios in Hollywood, put out a Breakdown for female “comediennes/comic actresses,” pointing out that “unusual-looking is great,” and “women proud of their size of those with huge hair” would be welcome. Perhaps in keeping with the show’s title, submissions from Caucasians were not welcome.

Women and men of all races with sketch and/or standup background were called for by The Latest Show With Elon Gold, a “talk/sketch show” being cast by Tara Flanagan from Hollywood Center Studios. A stress on “celebrity impressions” was noted.

For performers, this growing trend-within-a-trend is pretty good news; at the very least, it seems to indicate that what American audiences relish in reality TV is unvarnished spontaneity, not necessarily the spectacle of boring “real” people doing stupid things. Whaddaya know—folks with performing chops, and/or bigger-than-life personalities, tend to be more fun to watch.

Still, said Marsh, “Reality pilots aren’t episodic television that’s going to pay the bills of the agents. So things get harder for everybody in terms of real jobs.”

For real.

April Fooling

April Fool’s Day doesn’t pass unnoticed at Breakdown Services. This year was no exception: The first Breakdown posted on Apr. 1 was for another spinoff of the forensic drama, CSI. Um, well, at least it looked like that’s what it was—for about a millisecond.

The casting director for CSI: Middle Earth was listed as “Gollum Smeagol” from “Hobbitswehatesthem Casting.” A note referred to some fantastical locations (“Toodor, Fordor, and Doggydor”) and admonished, “The tone of this project is fantastic, amazing and unbelievable—but at the same time urban, gritty and streetwise.”

The lead, a crime-fighting wizard named Lieutenant Don Dalf the Paisley, was described as “dressed like he staggered in from some low-rent Renaissance Pleasure Faire… but with a badge.” Prototypes for the role? “John Gielgud, Dennis Franz, or some wonderful combination of both.”

Other highilghts of the Breakdown included a note about the role of the dwarf detective, Dimli, Son of Dork: “PLEASE SUBMIT WELSH BODYBUILDERS ONLY; NO CORNISHMEN!!!” And the following note, for the villain “Snoreon”: “Please submit eyeshots only, no headshots will be needed.”

The April Fool’s Breakdown is a tradition, said Marsh, and Richard Heft, one of Breakdown Services’ longtime writers, is the usual suspect. Marsh said he particularly relished one of Heft’s concoctions from a previous year, Park Bench Proctologist. Some people inevitably don’t get the joke, though: This week, when electronic submissions actually started to come into Breakdown Services minutes after CSI: Middle Earth was posted, the staff changed the submission requirement note to “please submit telepathically.”

I called the offices of Ulrich/Dawson/Kritzer Casting, which casts the real CSI, to see if they heard anything from actors or agents. I was told that Marsh gave UDK a heads-up before the joke notice came out, but that still didn’t prevent “one confused phone call” from coming in.

Of course, most folks got the joke, we presume. Indeed, one mock submission from an agent said his client “may have a conflict because he is series reg. on CSI: Uranus."

Speaking of funny Breakdowns, commercial casting director Vicki Goggin apparently makes a point of including humor in hers. This week she released a series of unconventional Breakdowns for “filmed portraiture” that will be projected as part of Madonna’s upcoming “Reconstruction” world tour, though Goggin admits in a note: “During which songs or at what ‘poignant’ moments... who the heck knows.”

She goes on to warn that the work is “buyout” work by saying: “This video/film is the property of Madonna and her world tour… If someone decides to do a documentary of the tour or to do a live broadcast of one of the shows or to display a portion of or all of the tour in a retrospective format after we're all dead and gone, or to do a poster or promo in Finland during the tour (these are obviously just a few random scattered starting examples… meant to stimulate your brain and foresight) there is a logical chance that that which appears on the video may get seen. Thus… no matter how limited the exposure may or may not be on stage, the buyout for the footage itself will be… a one-time flat fee... And I wonder why people call me anal-retentive.”

The context or setting for the filmed portraiture is 1965 in the Deep South, with a distinctly civil rights context, and a number of parts for African-Americans of various ages who look the period (no “dreadlocks, braids and stuff,” she says).

Goggin’s disarmingly conversational tone extends to the Breakdowns themselves—the description of a part called “Very Old Man” begins, “A man in his last moments. OK, I'll say it.... on his death bed”—and to the rate quote: “$650 plus 10% agency. You might prefer to call it $715 including agency fee or $600 plus 19% or… okay, I'll stop.”

I called Goggin to ask about this, and she said, as if I should know: “My Breakdowns are always funny.” She couldn’t say much more, though—as light-hearted as her Breakdown was, she meant business, and she was in the midst of it when I called.

Bits and Bites

I’ve already noted the popularity of Hawaii as a location for pilots this year—Hawaii Blue and Big Island, first noted in my Jan. 16 column—and now there’s a new sitcom that’s set there, in a way. It’s a pilot presentation for an animated series called Blue Aloha that Carsey-Werner-Mandabach is preparing for FOX, and it sounds a bit like King of the Hill, Hawaiian-style. Rick Pagano is casting…. The doctors are out for hiatus—at least, that’s the reason Debby Romano and Brett Benner’s address has changed again, as it did last year, too, from the hospital in Valley Village where Scrubs is cast and shot, to offices in the Warners-adjacent Forest Lawn Drive complex. They’re working on two untitled pilots, one a half-hour NBC sitcom for DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler, the other a half-hour for ABC produced for producers Marsh McCall and Joel Stein. In July, when Scrubs starts it rounds again, they’ll be back to Riverside Drive for another season… Robin Lippin recently wrapped up casting on Lucky Us, a FOX half-hour pilot, and on a new half-hour episodic for NBC, Happy Family, and she’s moved from offices at Radford in Studio City to the Disney Channel building in Burbank to cast a TV movie, Head Rush, about a former heavy-metal rocker now ensconced in suburban dadhood… Casting associate Deborah Dion did a final West Coast sweep this past week for kids for Tim Burton’s remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which will star Johnny Depp. Susie Figgis (Harry Potter) is doing most of the casting from London, but as of this past week the CDs were still listing the parts of Violet Beauregarde, the gum-chewing brat, and Mike Teavee, the boob-tube zombie. It’s hard to imagine anyone but British tykes in the roles, which they’re casting in the 9-11 age range, but then, stranger things have happened: Victoria Burrows recently told me that director Peter Jackson had low expectations for her L.A.-based outpost of Lord of the Rings casting; he was sure he’d find all his hobbits in the U.K. Well, he did find Englishmen for Merry and Pippin—but Frodo and Sam, well, you know the story. And Viggo Mortensen was, as is now well known, a last-minute American replacement for the too-callow Brit Stuart Townsend in the role of Aragorn. Here’s hoping a few of Burton’s golden tickets go to the home team.