The setting is a rundown Los Angeles neighborhood said to be a hotbed of Hollywood hopefuls and hopelesses, and more particularly a rundown apartment house harboring at least two such types. One of the hopeless hopefuls therein, a single mother (Susan Dey) who has been running a classified in the L.A. Weekly -- "Experienced Leading Lady, Available Immediately" -- without response for a year, is pressed by necessity to advertise also for a roommate. This elicits a parade of fat people, punk people, kung-fu people, yoga people: something like a casting call for a Fellini film, observes the movie-conscious heroine: "No. No. More depressing. More like a Fassbinder." A love of parades permeates the entire movie, or, to put it in stylistic terms, a love of the anecdote and the montage. The applicant who ultimately takes the room happens to be a pizza deliverer (Tom Hulce), and his job, driving a doorless truck with an electrically twinkling pizza slice on the roof, sends him down a daily gauntlet that stretches from a studio rock band to an enclave of Hell's Angels. The would-be leading lady gets her first big break (as she tries to see it) as a "strippergram," with an even more diverse clientele. All of this, and the rest, is exaggerated to within a step of a third-rate TV sitcom. No doubt that scriptwriter (and L.A. Weekly film critic) Michael Ventura had something more serious in mind. And he gets it off his mind in one philosophical exchange, lasting maybe an entire minute, between the house-call stripper and house-call pizza man: are we all (as he theorizes) just pizza deliverers pretending to be actors and writers, or are we really (as she would have it) actors and writers pretending to be pizza deliverers? Class dismissed. Directed by Robert Dornhelm. (1986) — Duncan Shepherd