Echo Park

Echo Park is a friendly little independent film that tries awfully hard to be whimsical and cute. The problem, needless to say, is that whimsy and cuteness die on the vine when you try too hard, and a lot of Echo Park is left hanging in the vineyards.

However, due largely to the attractive cast and the basic subject matter, Echo Park is painless. It’s the one about the group fo misfits living hand-to-mouth in Los Angeles while they wait for their big break in showbiz. They share a rickety old house in the Echo Park area.

May (Susan Dey) is a bartender who wants to be an actress. But her job-hunting method is decidedly laid-back: She puts a classified ad in the LA Weekly advertising herself as an experienced leading lady. She has an eight-year-old son who is dubious about her first gig, which is with a singing-stripping telegram service.

August (Michael Bowen) is a weight-lifter – er, make that “body sculptor” – who lives in the adjacent apartment. He wants to be the next Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he’s got the beef and the thick Austrian accent to prove it.

Jonathan (Tom Hulce) rents a corner of May’s apartment, and quickly develops a crush on her. He’s a pizza deliveryman who writes songs on the side.

The film, written by film critic Michael Ventura and directed by Robert Dornhelm, charts the professional and personal ups and downs of this mixed bag of people. (It debuted at the just-completed Seattle International Film Festival.)

It’s spunky enough. Individual scenes are very amusing, especially the string of potential renters who investigate May’s apartment – like the cast of a Fassbinder movie, she says. And her experiences with the stripper-gram service provide some expectedly funny incidents.

As a whole, the movie has its share of narrative lapses. There are a few loose ends and sometimes it seems whole scenes have been left out.

It’s the authenticity of the actors that makes Echo Park diverting. Dey, who achieved some kind of fame at the age of 16 with TV’s immortal The Partridge Family, turns out to be exactly right for May. Dey looks just past her prime, just hardened enough by disappointment, to fill out the role. She looks and speaks precisely like the kind of person who’s been waiting for that big break a little too long.

Tom Hulce was last seen copping an Oscar nomination for the title role of Amadeus. He’s a likable fellow, although at times his line readings seem almost too polished.

Bowen, the bodybuilder, is amusingly dense, and small roles are filled by Cheech Marin and Cassandra Peterson, who plays “Elvira” on television. John Paragon is slyly good as the director of the stripper-gram service, who is not quite the snake-in-the-grass he seems at first – not completely, anyway.

Although Echo Park looks like an American film, it’s technically an Austrian production. Other than being a source of money and another Schwarzenegger connection, I have no explanation for this – nor, in the spirit of the film’s lazy ambiance, does any seem particularly urgent.

First published in The Herald, July 1985

Dornhelm also did Cold Feet and tons of TV movies. I guess this movie is part of the mystery of Susan Dey – she did it about a year before L.A. Law brought about her enormously surprising comeback. I neglected to mention that Timothy Carey is also in this movie, which doesn’t seem like the kind of thing one would neglect to mention.