"For Your Consideration" features, from left, Christopher Moynihan as Brian Chubb, Harry Shearer as Victor Allan Miller, Catherine O'Hara as Marilyn Hack and Parker Posey as Callie Webb.

By Barbara Vancheri
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette TORONTO -- Before they set their sights on Oscar silliness, Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy entertained writing a western or medieval movie.

Suzanne Tenner Eugene Levy says of his films with Christopher Guest, "You approach these movies just as great creative fun." Click photo for larger image. Movie Review Film Clips: A cornucopia of films opens for the holiday weekend Listen In: Hear excerpts from interviews with the "For Your Consideration" cast at the Toronto Film Festival: Christopher Guest, on what he and co-writer Eugene Levy give to their actors Guest and Levy on their working style Catherine O'Hara (with Eugene Levy) on developing her character Eugene Levy, on being the subject of Oscar buzz for "A Mighty Wind"

Occupying two of the nearly dozen chairs that filled a press-conference stage, they bantered about how long those ideas lasted. Until lunchtime or maybe a day, or day and a half.

"Seriously, we entertained medieval. We thought that the clothing was funny -- the tights and those big feathers, and then it wasn't so funny the second day," Guest said, during the Toronto International Film Festival.

The same proved true with westerns, as the hats and chaps lost their funniness factor. Besides, how do you improvise the medieval dialogue, Guest asked.

That wasn't a problem on "For Your Consideration," a modern-day look at what happens when Oscar buzz invades an indie film. The movie takes its title from the phrase stripped across the ubiquitous promotional ads that appear during awards season, which is now.

Co-writers Guest and Levy provided the cast with backgrounders on their characters, scene set-ups and occasional suggested jokes. The actors fleshed out the characters and improvised the dialogue.

Harry Shearer, who portrays a veteran actor named Victor Allan Miller, says people sometimes get the wrong idea about improvisation.

"It's not like 1 o'clock in the morning at an improv club. It's definitely not. It's hard work in the sense that we're all there for the single purpose of telling this story. We're not playing around."

Shearer, for instance, created a past for Miller, a hot dog pitchman with Oscar fever. Now living in an apartment, Miller once had a wife and a child, and he has one of the most poignant moments in the film.

"What people in show business work harder than anything else to try to do is to keep other people from seeing their neediness and desperation, and so part of the fun of this movie was to let this show. That is the other side," Shearer said.

But there's a lot of homework to be done before the improv starts.

"You have to know down to your soles who your person is. You can't really improvise until you do," said Jane Lynch, who plays Cindy Martin, co-anchor of "Entertainment Now." She has the blond hair, exaggerated posture and au-courant fashion sense of a Mary Hart or a Nancy O'Dell, and she comes across as oozing confidence, but she's not.

"My character is so full of fear that she's going to lose this job," Lynch said in a round of interviews after the press conference. "She has greater ambitions for herself, but she knows she's long in the tooth. She's hanging on by a thread all the time."

The fictional Martin has spent the past 15 years working with co-anchor Chuck Porter, who sports a hairstyle called a "faux hawk." He is played by Fred Willard, whose research included watching real entertainment magazine shows.

"They're all so up and positive. They love everything, and they're excited about the most trivial, banal things. I said, how wonderful to be like that. I tried to look on the bright side of everything."

When someone asks about the similarity between "Entertainment Now" and "Entertainment Tonight," Guest said with a straight face, "You may have heard that there's more than one show like that on the air. It may come as a shock."

Christopher Guest: "I wanted people to just say 'Wow' at the end." Click photo for larger image.

"ET" and its knockoffs trade in Oscar gossip, a subject that hits close to home for Levy, whose name was floated in 2003 as a possible contender for "A Mighty Wind." He and Catherine O'Hara played Mitch & Mickey, real-life sweethearts and singing partners until their marriage and careers blew up in the mid-1970s.

"A Mighty Wind" turned up on some critics' top 10 lists, and Levy was singled out by the New York Film Critics Circle and the ensemble honored by Florida critics. He got caught in the awards machinery.

"It's flattering. It's wonderful, and I'm glad they like my work. I don't know. I don't know. Meanwhile, now it's in your head," and once it's there, it's hard to get out.

But, in the end, the Academy Award nominations for best supporting actor went to five dramatic actors (Tim Robbins won for "Mystic River"), and while "A Mighty Wind" was nominated for best song, it lost to "Lord of the Rings."

In "For Your Consideration," the Oscar buzz starts with a single mention on the Internet for actress Marilyn Hack, played by O'Hara.

"My Marilyn Hack was a workhorse actress, it was not about herself, and it kind of blindsided her that anybody might be actually looking at her and thinking about her as an actress, as opposed to about her characters," said the long-haired O'Hara, looking younger and prettier than her screen counterpart.

Marilyn is knocked off balance and does some things both funny, sad and typical of actresses her age.

"It was important for us to have this movie end as it ends," Guest said. "It's a serious note, there are some laughs in the movie [but] I wanted people to just say, 'Wow' at the end," as Marilyn finds her balance and some dignity.

Guest and Levy work the old-fashioned way -- at two desks with one legal pad, manned by Levy whose handwriting is far more legible -- and with a budget of $12 million. That's a fraction of what most movies cost today, and it's only possible because everyone works for scale, no one is tied up too long and Guest's salary is the same today as a decade ago.

Levy may earn his best reviews for his collaborations with Guest but movies such as "Cheaper by the Dozen" or "American Pie" and its never-ending sequels help to pay the bills. "I like the luxury of being able to eat and put my kids through school," he quipped, calling the mockumentaries and "For Your Consideration" an oasis.

"You just look forward to these things because there's a whole bunch of creative freedom on a lot of levels that you just can't find in any other project anywhere. So, on the one hand, it's like I just do enough writing to keep me in teaching.

"As long as you don't have to necessarily worry too much about putting food on the table, you approach these movies as just great creative fun and so far [knocking on the wooden table] they've turned out well and they're good, and it's hard not to turn out well when you have a cast that is as brilliant as the people that are in these movies."