Since the dawn of time, humanity has asked a series of eternal questions: Does God exist? Is morality subjective? Why is there suffering? Can a stripper, a bodybuilder, and a pizza man find happiness in L.A.? While filmdom has been less than forthcoming in resolving most of these issues, it addressed the final one with 1986's Echo Park. Alongside pizza man Tom Hulce, Susan Dey stars as a single mother looking to jumpstart her acting career through a classified ad touting her services as an "experienced leading lady," while Michael Bowen plays an Austrian weightlifter unhealthily obsessed with Arnold Schwarzenegger. They all work dispiriting day jobs, with Bowen working at a gym where his plans to harness the star power of celebrities for exercise purposes are met with polite indifference by coworkers Richard "Cheech" Marin and Cassandra "Elvira" Peterson. While Bowen hires a Burt Reynolds impersonator to prove his ideas are viable, Dey receives the break of a lifetime when an anonymous man calling for an experienced leading lady invites her to an open casting call in a spooky-looking, semi-abandoned building. After arriving at the audition, Dey learns that the audition is for a human stripper-gram, but she jumps at the opportunity, wisely viewing stripping as a terrific stepping stone to legitimate acting. (Hey, it worked for Dame Judi Dench.) But while Dey rises to the top of her profession via a newcomer-stripping-with-increasing-confidence montage, and Bowen snags a plum role in a deodorant commercial, Hulce is savagely beaten by motorcycle-riding toughs, one of whom cruelly derides him as "Pizza fuck!" Solidarity wins out, however, when Bowen and his steroid-crazed friends avenge Hulce's beating by enthusiastically laying the smack down on the hog-riding hooligans. But all is not well in Echo Park. After Dey is fondled by boorish advertising execs at a birthday party in clear view of her son and Hulce, her son flees in horror, with Hulce and Dey in close pursuit. Once back at her apartment, Dey discovers the positive side of near-sexual-assault, as her manager informs her that the impressed executives want to give her an audition for an underwear commercial, an opportunity even an experienced leading lady like Dey seems overjoyed to receive.
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