When aspiring actor and stand-up comedian Myles Maher moved out to Los Angeles, he found himself all the sudden very uncertain about taking the first big step, one initially defined by a minor action. “I got the interest of a manager out in LA who wanted to represent me. He said, “What you need to do now is get your headshot taken, and we’ll try to send you out to auditions,” Maher says.

At the same time, he began to notice around his neighborhood the plethora of these same headshots plastered on the walls of the local restaurants and shops. Looking at these many faces, several now unknown in the film industry, Maher realized that he didn’t want to become one of them. “Or, I wanted to find out what happened to them before I made that leap,” he amends. “Until I found out what happened to some of these people, I was paralyzed to make that decision.”

From this worry was born Hollywood Headshots, a humorous documentary sketch of former and still working actors that comments on the space between anonymity and celebrity. “I would start to look at these people’s faces and needless to say tons of characters, and I said, “Who are these people, and what’s their story?,” he says. “At the time I was doing some very low-budget comedic documentaries, and from that the spark went off. I said, “Hey, how about that being a story I want to pursue, the stories behind these faces.”

A year and a half of work production and post later, Maher had a final cut of the feature version, and since then it’s been progressively cut into shorter, more Internet-manageable segments. While not technically clean, the shakey cam more than hinting at the amateur, there’s such inspiration in the film’s concept and such respect that Maher treats his interviewees with that it’s hard not to be intrigued by the layers of the story.

Now a father and husband, working in spare moments on his own comedy, Maher shares his thoughts about the search for celebrity and the true nature of Hollywood.

SM: How did you get into doing comedic documentaries in the first place?

MM: I have a background in writing. Before I was in LA, I was in Austin, Texas, where I went to grad school, and I started doing stand-up just as an outlet to explore different strengths and weaknesses and to make sure that I was comfortable on camera. But, the reality was that when I finally wanted to shot this project, due to the resources and wanting to do it as lean as possible, I figured, “Hey, I can step up and do this,” and it was just myself and a friend, Andy Keiler, with his camera and the on-board mic. We did it for almost no budget at all.

SM: What struck me when I was watching the piece, outside of just being funny, which I know now comes from your work in stand-up and your comic sensibilities, was the dichotomy we see in the people who become anonymous but who, in their own head, do not recognize that anonymity.

MM: Absolutely, that’s interesting. Really the heart of the project is the quest for stardom and what attracts people to Hollywood. I was certainly someone who went out there for something that I thought was critical in my life, and there’s this constant, ongoing migration, and it’s especially common with actors, that goes out there to find fame and to get the spotlight. What I discovered is that, this to me became the real Hollywood. Hollywood isn’t about the dozen people who are receiving the A-list attention and are in People Magazine and Entertainment Tonight. It’s the other 99 percent of people that come and go, are in it and don’t have the spotlight. As a human interest piece I thought, “Not only are these people very great for me, but they are great characters.” They don’t realize that they might not have made it, or they might not make it. To them, they are in it, which is fascinating I think.

SM: Talking about characters, structurally what occurs in the cut I saw is a progressive movement from people who are more like characterizations toward those in the middle displaying more humanity…That’s an interesting arc—to go from an overblown story about alien abduction and sex to a much more heartfelt moment where your interviewee talks about conversations with Orson Welles, asking him “How did you get that shot in Citizen Kane?” You realize then it’s just about two people communicating.

How did you go about planning how this stream of alternating comedy and sentimentality was going to work?

MM: To answer the question is to go one step backwards: What type of people did I focus on? Number one: They couldn’t be too famous because then it’s a, “Where are they now?” And, it couldn’t be somebody who did nothing because that’s not interesting. It had to be people who had some success or some fringe level of success where people could relate and understand, “Hey, I’ve heard of that. I’ve heard of him.” So that was the first step.

Then, what I basically did was after contacting them and having some sort of communication, whether it was phone or e-mail, I got a sense of who they are, and I just really wanted to spend time with them in their own element. It’s hard to tell exactly from the pieces, but with some people I went to their house, some people I went out to dinner with them and their kids, some of the people I went out to party with. I asked them, “Where were they comfortable to share their experiences?’

SM: Talking about this tenuous space between recognition and anonymity, how is it that people come to be—I don’t want to say deserving; I would think everyone is deserving, as Andy Warhol would have us, of our fifteen minutes of fame—but, did you ever hear the stories as to how these actors fell from grace? Some of the stories we knew would—the DJ, for example, maintaining that lifestyle for more than 20 years would be really difficult. But, with a lot of the interviewees, there was quite a bit of confusion for me as to how they fell from grace so to speak.

MM: First of all, it’s generous that you put them in a state of grace…You mention the DJ, Don Blanton. He actually had a pretty interesting career as a DJ, and he did some work that you would know in terms of on-camera acting work. Today he’s wildly successful financially. He runs a multi-media company and produces the very large multi-media billboards that are in Vegas and Times Square. I went out to his house, and he had an enormous place up on Mulholland Dr. He was very quick with his time and gave me about an hour. But, this guy is enormously successful professionally, probably many-fold above what he could ever do as an actor.

So that was interesting, and you alluded to this before, that people found their place. Sometimes it’s for the better; sometimes it’s for the worse. That’s really the human interest story. It’s not a case of somebody who had a lot and now has nothing, or had a great jumpstart to a career and then it never happened. These people had a handful of moments, and some of them are doing better as a result, and some of them aren’t. So, I don’t know if it’s accurate to say there was a state of grace reached and then they fell from it. Everybody is their own person with their own story.

SM: What’s the reaction been by all the interviewees to the final film by the way?

MM: To be honest, I don’t know how many have actually seen it believe it or not. I was on my way out of Hollywood as we were putting a cut on the movie version. I had a screening which was pretty well received but only one of the people who I did shoot came to it, and I think she was pleased with it.

It’s a really difficult line because I never wanted to make fun of these people. I really cared for them and appreciated what their stories were. Sometimes people can see it differently.

SM: What are you doing with the piece now? Do you have an interest in continuing it?

MM: It had a number of deals on the table in terms of trying to figure out a way to do a TV series or Webisode series. I’m assuming nothing’s worked out.

In terms of the actual quest of these people, I still think about it all the time. I would love to be able to uncover more of these people and have them have the opportunity to have a little piece of the spotlight.

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