Actor-Drivers Hope Their Low-Budget Film Delivers

One minute you’re delivering linguine. The next minute you’re delivering lines.

That’s the way it’s going for one group of struggling Hollywood actors who support themselves working for a Westside takeout service.

Instead of waiting for their big break, these food delivery drivers decided to film their own feature-length movie.

About themselves.

One of them wrote the screenplay. Three others helped produce the comedy, shot on the streets of the San Fernando Valley and at a vacant building in Burbank, for about $80,000. One directed it. Six of them starred in it.

Now the staffers of Gourmet Courier of Beverly Hills are looking for an agent who can deliver a deal for them with a Hollywood studio willing to release the 88-minute movie they have titled “Delivery.”

In the meantime, the restaurant drivers are keeping their night jobs with the home delivery service they parody in their film.

The drivers shuttle takeout food from 22 restaurants to customers living in Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, West Hollywood, Century City, the Hollywood Hills and surrounding areas. Their clients include some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

The movie focuses on a typical night at the delivery service. It follows drivers and their dispatchers as they grapple with such things as romance, an overzealous parking enforcement officer and eccentric movie star customers.

The film pokes fun at the drivers’ own starry-eyed nature. In one scene, a driver hoping to land an acting role tucks his publicity photo under a pizza he is dropping off at the estate of a studio mogul.

That’s not as farfetched as it sounds.

“I’ve delivered my head shots--I’ve slipped them into bags of food,” acknowledged Devin Price, a 26-year-old former UCLA theater student who has worked for Gourmet Courier for 2 1/2 years. She plays the part of a psychologist in the film.

Price said the movie’s wacky theme is not that farfetched either. She remembers one rainy night when she got lost twice, ran her car off the road once and then was stranded when it finally conked out in a customer’s driveway.

“I was dripping wet and nearly crying. The lady invited me inside, where I waited 1 1/2 hours for somebody to come start the car. While I waited, she fed me her food--the food I’d just delivered,” Price said with a laugh.

Driver Amanda Foreman, a 26-year-old actress who has been bedeviled by parking tickets during her two years with Gourmet Courier, plays a delivery person who outwits a parking officer in the film.

Driver Elis Imboden, 25, has the role of a recluse who orders takeout food nightly. It’s a character based on several real-life customers, she said.

“This is a very offbeat job. Something weird happens every night,” said Imboden, who has done graduate work at the American Conservatory Theater.

Driver Liz Lavoie, 26, who has had her food-delivery job for three years, agreed.

“This business was ripe with film possibilities,” said Lavoie, an actress with TV movie-of-the-week credits who plays a restaurant worker. “It was just a matter of time until somebody wrote it down.”

That turned out to be Mark Esslinger. He is a sometime scriptwriter who has owned Gourmet Courier for eight years. Driver Eric Burdett urged him to do the screenplay.

“I told Eric I didn’t want to write something that was just going to sit around,” said Esslinger, 39. “He said not to worry, that we’d do it ourselves.”

Burdett, a 27-year-old USC film graduate who has driven for six years, is a fledgling director and producer. Turning to friends, family members, Esslinger’s savings and his own USC fraternity brothers, Burdett lined up the $79,500 that “Delivery” cost to make.

Driver John Santosuosso, 26, was tapped to be associate producer and production accountant. The delivery company workers and outsiders picked to fill other acting roles were not paid. Technicians hired for the film crew were.

The movie was shot over three weeks last summer at sites in the Valley--including a vacant Burbank office and the garage of Esslinger’s Burbank home. Food delivery work schedules were juggled around the actors’ scenes.

Gourmet Courier office manager Andrew Willett, 32, was recruited to portray a homeless man in a key scene. Even Burdett and Esslinger stepped before the camera in small roles.

The finished film has a surprisingly professional look to it. Although slow in places, catchy original music helps propel it toward what Burdett describes as a “ ‘30s-style romance” ending.

These days Esslinger and Burdett are working to get the completed movie screened at film festivals. In the meantime, they have circulated about two dozen videotaped copies to friends and takeout food customers who are in the movie business.

Delivery customer Cary Woods, a producer whose films include the current hit “Scream” and “Copland,” an upcoming Sylvester Stallone-Robert De Niro drama, gives the drivers an E for effort.

“They’re good guys. One of the things people say about filmmaking and writing, especially in your early years, is to write about something you know. They’ve clearly done that,” Woods said.

Esslinger said some entertainment executives have suggested that the subject of food delivery has “the makings of a five-year series” for television. And his drivers would be perfect for series roles, he said.

In the takeout business, they’d call that just desserts.