A Long Road to Instant Success : Show business: UC Irvine drama showcase graduates are learning the hard way that breaking in is not that easy.

IRVINE —  Actress Gabrielle Beimforde’s first big date with Hollywood smacked of a relationship with a commitment-phobic mate: When you’re miles away, it’s all sweetness and light. Move close, and you’re yesterday’s news.

Last spring, Beimforde received a winning response from Hollywood casting directors and agents when she performed two scenes in a showcase there staged by UC Irvine. It even snagged her an audition with an NBC executive.

The exec said, “ ‘You’re great, blah blah blah. When you get an agent, give me a call,’ ” Beimforde recalled.

All that, however, was when the 22-year-old still lived in Orange County. The moment she moved to Car Phone Central, after graduating from UCI, the gushing stopped.

“I said, ‘Here I am. I’m ready to work!’ And (several casting people personnel who had shown interest) were like, ‘Oh, we’re full now. We’re not looking for anyone.’ Clearly, I wasn’t as great as when I lived an hour away.”

To coin a phrase, that’s show biz, the very side of show biz that Beimforde and fellow UCI drama graduates have encountered firsthand since completing the school’s showcase program last spring.

Established in 1985, the program goes beyond technique. It teaches students how to write resumes, take sexy head shots, court casting personnel and sign with agents. And how to survive repeated rejection.

It culminates with the showcase, in which students perform carefully prepared scenes for casting agents in Hollywood, then fly to New York to do the same for the Broadway crowd. Program expenses are funded by a private bequest left to the UC system by Helene Travers Santley, an Oceanside theater devotee.

Last year’s students praised the program, and some benefited directly. Deanne Lorette, Mikael Salazar and Tamiko Washington all signed with agents who saw them in the showcase.

Still, there’s nothing like experience. And interviews with Beimforde and others make one thing clear: Hollywood hasn’t changed when it comes to breaking in. Overnight success is as much a myth as ever, and the classic concept of actor as waiter is alive and picking up tips.

“Even though I never said it outright,” said Beimforde, who waits tables in Brentwood, “I think I had a lot of dreams I was going to come up here to L.A., do the showcase and come back (to L.A.) and be a big star. It’s just not like that.”

Hard knocks are “fundamental to the industry,” said Prof. Robert Cohen, who founded UCI’s drama department and created the showcase program.

Unemployment typically ranges between 80% and 90%, and if anything, actors today have it tougher than ever, Cohen said. The recession may be officially over, but the film industry is still in a slump, and Broadway producers are leaning toward smaller casts, bankable mega-stars and fewer road shows, he said.

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None of the actors interviewed was ready to give up, but they had plenty of war stories, some bloodier than others.

One involves a paid vacation Leyva and Salazar enjoyed in the Rocky Mountains last summer. The trouble was they were supposed to be busy acting in Boulder’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Both aced auditions to join the festival, but specific productions were cast thereafter and directors and others gave the plum roles to others, they said.

“It’s like walking in blind,” Salazar said.

Paul Tifford has had his hour upon the stage this year, including an L.A. revue that benefited the homeless. Like some of his classmates, however, he’s still without an agent and learned how difficult it is to get one.

“My one wish come true? A very good agent,” Tifford said. “I’m doing as much as I can by myself, but with an agent I’d be auditioning twice as much.

“Tamiko (Washington) and I did a another showcase with maybe four other couples,” he continued, “and the agent who came to see us that night said we were the best of the group. But he said the credits we have right now are not good enough for his company to take us on. Well, how do you ever get those credits? It’s the Catch-22 of the business.”

Among his classmates, Tifford wins for the most unusual survival job (non-acting work) actors take to support their habit.

Tapping an old talent, he had been, until recently, promoting Miller beer with his skill as a champion Hula-Hoop artist. Visiting bars in Los Angeles and Orange counties as a “Beer Hunter,” he spoke of fine-tasting brew, then broke into his routine, gyrating with multiple hoops around his waste, his arms, his neck, his knees and his ankles.

“I can (work with) up to 16 at once,” said Tifford, who ranked fifth in the nation as an adolescent competing in Texas.

Leyva, who has catered parties to make an extra buck, actually hasn’t had to don an apron that often, earning enough with steady stage work. He recently appeared as the lead in “Eclipse” at New York’s off-Broadway Repertorio Espanol theater.

“I haven’t had to get a regular (non-acting) job since I got to town” last fall, he said.

Still, there’s the unrelenting stress of how and where to get the next acting job, a worry as old as greasepaint.

“In school, I didn’t kid myself about it,” Leyva said. “It’s kind of what I expected. But it takes over your life. You think about it constantly.”

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But it hasn’t been all brickbats for last year’s showcasers. They have received bouquets, too--tangible and intangible.

Besides Leyva’s Off-Broadway role, Beimforde was recently singled out among eight actresses by a Times critic for her performance in “Fefu and Her Friends” in Santa Ana, and Deanne Lorette has worked “pretty much nonstop.” She recently completed a five-month contract with South Coast Repertory’s educational touring program.

Salazar performed with SCR’s outreach troupe for three months, and both appeared in the theater company’s “A Christmas Carol.”

(Among earlier UCI drama department success stories are film star Jon Lovitz, a 1979 graduate. Ann Hamilton, a 1991 showcase alumna, has a starring role on the CBS soap “Guiding Light.”)

Salazar’s highest moment came during a discussion with Santa Ana high school youths after a performance of an SCR outreach play. Titled “Scrappers,” the production “deals with very serious issues of sex and drugs,” he said, “but it was not at all preachy, just a story about some people handling it.”

While some outreach audiences had been loud and boisterous, “something clicked that day,” Salazar said, “and the place was like a church. You could hear a pin drop. It was a fantastic moment in time because we really felt like we were communicating with the people. It seemed as if we had made some kind of profound impact.”

Lorette was most gratified by the dawning knowledge that, tough as it is, making a living acting isn’t impossible.

“It’s difficult,” she said, “but not this hellacious experience everyone told me it would be.”

Having had hellacious experiences or not, the actors seem to have the ability to see the bright side and keep moving ahead, skills the showcase attempts to instill.

“It was a good lesson in (the ways of) Hollywood,” Beimforde said of the closed doors she met upon moving to L.A.

“It’s just a matter of never stopping the search for work,” said Salazar, who belongs to three employment agencies and chronicles his acting footwork in a day book. “I write down every appointment, every person I’ve met, the details of the interview and how it went, and the last segment is how I’m going to contact that person again. I’m on my second volume now.”

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Washington, who has been teaching advanced acting for undergrads at UCI and is developing a one-woman show, recently adopted an outlook on her career that no class could have taught her.

“My mother passed away last year and everything fell into perspective,” she said. “Before she died, everything was so fast-paced. It was like, I have to get this, I have to get that, now! But I’ve decided I’m not going to kill myself to be an actor, and I’m not going to sacrifice who I want to be for money. Life is too short for that. It’s not about money, it’s about doing good work.”