Waiting for Oscar

One of the most durable themes of Hollywood cinema is: just follow your dream, be persistent, and your dream is sure to come true. Of course, in the real world, that's not the way it works. For every Rocky who wins the championship, there are 99 (or maybe 999 or some 10n -1) who don't - some with the same talent and perseverance. Nevertheless, there is something worth celebrating in the aspirations, delusions, and disappointments of these beautiful losers - which is the thrust of Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration, as well as his three previous improvisational ensemble films.

In Waiting for Guffman, it was a small-town theater group; in Best in Show, a variety of competition-obsessed dog owners; in A Mighty Wind, folk singers with a shot at a comeback. This time around, the setting is Hollywood, where a troupe of far-from-first-tier actors are working on a "serious" indie production, Home for Purim.

Marilyn Hack (Catherine O'Hara) portrays the dying mother in a Jewish family in Georgia, apparently during the 1940s; her devoted husband is played by Victor Allan Miller (Harry Shearer); her children by Callie Webb (Parker Posey) and Brian Chubb (Christopher Moynihan). They are ... the Pischers.

The mere sound of the name is funny enough, even if you don't know it's a dismissive Yiddish word meaning (basically) non-entity. The fact that it's uttered in the film-within-the-film with absolute gravity and in a Southern accent makes it even funnier. And there are layers beyond that: Hack and Webb are, in the common stereotype, a tad gentile-looking.

"It's all multidimensional," Guest explains, in an interview last week. "I mean, this comes from a real thing of me being in the Deep South and hearing people in Alabama speaking Yiddish with a Southern accent. That was very striking to me. That was 20 years ago, almost. It eventually worked its way into this. And then the idea that they would cast these people. It's a comment that these are the people they hire to play these parts.

"And the name ... . We actually looked up the name. We were looking for names, and we looked up Pischer, which already made us laugh. And it turned out that it's actually a name. There are Pischers in various cities. We had thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if this was actually also a name?' ... and it is."

Hack is an almost-was, whose career never really took off despite attracting attention years earlier as Imogene, the blind prostitute, in Song of Reuben. Miller, with decades of credits in local L.A. theater, is a never-even-almost-was, by far best known for his unfortunately indelible work as Irv the Footlong Wiener in a series of TV ads. And Webb is the hopeful up-and-comer, a veteran of standup comedy - "I worked at Chortles and Jerry Seltzer's Laugh Emporium" - whose one-woman show was ambiguously described by a critic as "a humorless romp."

One day, a writer for an online movie site, after visiting the set, posts speculation that Marilyn's performance might be worthy of an Oscar nomination. Marilyn - like most of the older characters in the film - isn't very Internet-savvy; when one of the younger crew members finds the quote for her, she tries to act blasé, but just the single mention of a possible nomination plants a rapidly sprouting seed of hope.

The unit publicist (John Michael Higgins) manages to spread the word, giving the film's public awareness an unexpected jolt. The buzz grows. Soon Marilyn, Victor, and the others are appearing on local morning shows and then on an Entertainment Tonight!-like program, hosted by Cindy Martin (Jane Lynch) and the effervescently inane Chuck Porter (Fred Willard). Things snowball, with other cast members becoming hopefuls and the film looking like a major sleeper.

Most of Guest's actors are veterans of one or more of his earlier movies in this vein. A few were even in the greatgranddaddy of them all, This Is Spinal Tap: Shearer; Willard; Guest, who here plays the director of Home for Purim; and Michael McKean, who portrays one of the writers.

Like Spinal Tap, these improvisatory films are a kind of highwire act - a lot of preplanning, intense focus while shooting, and the editing room as a safety net. (Guest and his editor typically spend a full year wrangling roughly 60 hours of footage down to around 85 minutes.) "The screenplay was probably 23 ... 25 pages, something like that," Guest says. "It's a screenplay without the dialogue. It's the story. It's got the background of all the characters. It describes what happens in every scene."

Eugene Levy - who has appeared in and cowritten all four films with Guest - elaborates: "As Chris said, we have extended character backgrounds. More so than you would find in a normal script."

"In most scripts, you're not going to get anything. Virtually nothing," Guest adds.

"We indicate some jokes that have come up in the office," Levy continues. "We sometimes indicate lines, but there's no dialogue written. Except, in this case, the movie within the movie was scripted. And some of the TV shows in the movie were scripted, but everything else is improvised."

How do the actors get involved?"First," Lynch explains, "you get a call. And in this case, the script came about a month later."

Willard says, "First thing after getting the script, I called to find out who was playing what, because you want to picture who you're going to be talking to; it's different if the character is interviewing Harry Shearer or Chris Moynihan or Chris Guest or Eugene. And then you get a handle on your character and try to bring life to it."

Lynch describes the extensive back story the script gave for her character. "Cindy started out with a cooking show in Chicago, and her coverage of the Christmas Day parade was so celebrated by fellow Chicagoans that a producer from Hollywood came out and said, 'You'd be perfect for this show,' and we've obviously been together for a really long time. We're kind of like John Tesh and Mary Hart."

The first time Lynch appears on screen, her unnatural stance gets laughs, before she even moves a muscle. "That was my observation of those women; I just love what they do," she says. "They obviously stand in the mirror and see that this is the way their waist looks smallest, their legs look longest, and it minimizes their ass. And they hold that through the entire thing."

While Lynch's character is wholly different from in the earlier films, Willard is playing another of his fatuous dopes. "I try to make each one a little different," he says. I ask if there have been times when he just couldn't do it. "No, it comes very easy to me." After a beat, as though on the verge of a self-realization: "I don't know why."

In Best in Show and A Mighty Wind, Jennifer Coolidge played ... well, "dumb blondes" isn't quite right; let's say "really, really strange blondes." In For Your Consideration, she's the clueless diaper-service heiress who's backing Home for Purim. "Usually directors have a specific thing that they want you to do," Coolidge says. "Christopher has a very specific vision of what he wants his movie to be and who he wants you to be, but he's incredibly loose at the same time ... ."

"It's because we're included in that vision," O'Hara adds. "He trusts us. Part of the vision is you bringing what he knows you'll bring, without him having to know what exactly you'll do."

I ask O'Hara about playing an actor playing a character in the Home for Purim scenes. "That dialogue was written, and it was so ridiculous," she says. "I decided that my character would serve any script and serve any director. And so the more seriously I took it, the sillier it was. For the Jewish element, I tried to add Georgie Jessel. Those days were like Free Day, because there was dialogue written. And I tried to act really well ... which is really sad. I tried. I really tried ... ."

I'd always assumed that, after studying the script and working out the characters, there would be rehearsals to develop material before the cameras rolled. Right? Wrong. "We don't rehearse," Lynch says. "The other movies - and most of this movie - were improvised. There is no rehearsal. You look at what your given circumstances are, and you look at what you have to convey in the scene, and you go."

It sounds nuts, particularly when you realize that many of the cast members - Posey, McKean, Ricky Gervais, Shearer, even Guest himself - don't originally have an improv background. It all comes down to Guest's knowledge of, and trust in, his actors. He affirms that, while he and Levy are writing, they have a particular performer in mind for each character. But then, what happens when someone can't do the part, because of a scheduling conflict?

"Never happened. Not once. We've been very, very fortunate considering how many people there are in these films," says Guest.

It's a good thing. I can't think of any other director who has worked in this manner - except, of course, for Rob Reiner's one-shot with This Is Spinal Tap. I suggest to O'Hara that there can't be a huge number of actors out there who could function in that environment.

"I don't know," she replies. "The good thing is that Chris doesn't think there are. And whatever he doesn't know can't hurt him."