Actress/21″/dp1st/mark2nd

By DAN TURNER

Staff Reporter

Lisa Keller tends to attract attention when she walks into a room. A 26-year-old actress from Marietta, Ga., she has striking blue-green eyes, short blond hair and physical dimensions that could cause accidents on Wilshire Boulevard.

But in a small waiting room at PolyGram Television at 12:15 p.m., she’s just another beautiful hopeful trying to get a break.

Keller is here to audition for a role in a TV pilot called “Mondo Picasso.” The character she’ll try out for is a 22-year-old cocktail waitress who wears skimpy dresses and dates a gangster, but is secretly in love with the show’s police-officer protagonist.

Keller is wearing stiletto heels and a bright red tube dress that leaves her shoulders bare and extremely little to the imagination. The half-dozen or so other actresses waiting for their auditions are in a similar state of undress.

“My feet are falling out of these shoes and my boobs are falling out of this dress,” exclaims a tall blond actress, who is wearing see-through clogs and a cocktail dress that seems several sizes too small.

“Are you wearing falsies?” asks another actress.

“Yes, and they’re all over the place.”

Keller is quietly waiting her turn, glancing at the “sides,” the excerpts from the show’s script that she’ll read during the audition. She doesn’t really need this job, but she wouldn’t likely turn it down, either.

She is not a wannabe. A member of the Screen Actors Guild, Keller has appeared in two independent films that were screened at the Sundance Film Festival. She makes enough money to support herself without a “day” job, doing frequent commercial and voiceover work.

In fact, it was during a long voiceover stint for a department store’s ad campaign that she lost her Southern accent. The director made her go back and repeat herself every time she used certain vowel sounds. Today, Keller sounds as if she were born in Los Angeles rather than Georgia.

During the pilot season, which runs from February through May, Keller will attend as many as three auditions a day for weeks at a time. There is no such thing as a “typical” year for Keller, but if she works three months out of 12, she’s having a good year.

“But going to all these auditions is just working without getting paid, on a daily basis,” Keller says.

Actresses stream in and out of the waiting room as their names are called. By 12:40, those who remain have been sitting in silence for some time.

Out in the hallway there is a commotion. An actress is having a loud discussion with casting director Wendy Matthews, who tells her she can’t let the actress cut in line unless the other people waiting say it’s OK.

She bursts into the waiting room, a blond woman wearing rubber pants and a leopard-skin top. Breathlessly, she explains to the room that she has to be at another audition in the Valley at 1:30, and is it OK if she goes next?

Keller and another actress say no way they have to be at auditions in the Valley, too. The blonde throws up her hands, picks up a phone and complains to her agent. Then she storms out of the room with a highly dramatic sigh.

This serves as a conversation starter. It turns out that Keller and another waiting actress have a mutual friend. The other actress is fed up with Los Angeles and getting ready to move to New York.

“It’s very laid back (in New York),” the actress tells Keller. “If they don’t like what you did, they tell you. It’s so gross here. After I tried out for one part I told my agent, ‘They like me,’ and he said, ‘Don’t believe it.’ Never believe what anyone here says.”

Finally, at about 1:10 p.m., Matthews calls Keller’s name. They go to the audition room an office conference room, actually, with a large conference table and a video camera. Keller sits at one chair at the head of the table and Matthews sits at another.

Keller gives a convincing performance, considering that she’s reading off a piece of paper. She gives the character a New York accent and a high-pitched, dumb-blonde-with-a-heart-of-gold kind of voice.

Matthews asks her to read one scene again. The character is confronting the cop after he’s nearly shot her. She is only realizing for the first time that the man she loves didn’t trust her, that he could have killed her, Matthews explains. Keller does it again, more outraged and surprised this time, her face and chest turning the color of her dress.

After less than five minutes in the audition room, it’s over. Matthews might phone Keller’s agent for a call-back, or she might not. Either way, Keller is speeding off for her next audition in the Valley.