TORONTO -- Eugene Levy, the host of a high-powered weekend seminar at Hart House called Hollywood: How To Get There From Here, is on the phone from "there."

The fact that he's there -- guesting in a series from the creators of American Pie -- is ironic. Seems his career-boost as "Jim's Dad" in the Pie films is the result of some seminar advice he's only recently begun to take himself.

The advice: Get a manager.

"I think most young actors wouldn't even consider a manager. They'll say, 'I'm already paying 10% to an agent, why do I want to pay another 10%?'," Levy says. "I always wondered, why does Steven Spielberg even need an agent (to find him work)? Why does Ivan Reitman need an agent? And then you've got a manager, and if you're bigger you get a publicist. And then you get a lawyer. It's never-ending.

"But it's only been the last few years that I've had a manager and I now know how important one is. I got the American Pie script and read it, and it was a cast of no-names and no director, and it was a pretty raunchy read. And I said, 'No, I don't want to do it.' I thought it was a little coarse.

"And this manager who I had just signed with said, 'Go in and take a meeting!' And I said, 'No.' In fact, he was starting to bug me, and I thought this is the wrong guy to be managing me. But he gave me some legitimate reasons: 'You're the only adult in the movie, the studio's hot on the movie, the guys (filmmakers Chris and Paul Weitz) are hot young guys.' And when I met Paul and Chris, I trusted them implicitly and they let me make a lot of changes. That was the clearest moment in terms of what a manager can do for me."

Lucrative advice. This will be Levy's second appearance in the WB series Off-Centre. And early in the new year he'll be in American Wedding, the third in the American Pie series.

Hollywood: How To Get There From Here -- at U of T's Hart House Theatre Saturday -- is co-produced by Deborah Levy (Eugene's wife) and her partner Lesley Golden, and puts young actors, writers and wannabe filmmakers face to face with a "name" manager (Gayle Divine), a casting director (Ronnie Yeskel), a talent agent (Scott Yoselow of the Gersh Agency) and an immigration attorney (Sherman Kaplan).

Tickets are available at Hart House or at 416-978-8668.

For the price of a ticket, attendees' names are also put in a hat, with several drawn at the end for an impromptu "audition" with prepared material. "If you show a little spark, it's a big foot in the door," Levy says.

"This is really an amazing idea, and I don't say that just because my wife is running it," Levy says with a laugh. He appreciates the irony that he seems to be encouraging people to leave the country. "You don't get recognition here until you've been recognized south of the border. And then you come back and you're billed as 'Canada's own,' " he says.

"And the reality for actors who want to put food on the table is you have a pilot season in L.A. that produces 100-200 pilots. That's a lot of job opportunities in a two-month window.

"Certainly this is something I could have used 30 years ago," Levy says.

"When we opened Second City in Pasadena in 1975, it was a combination of the Toronto and other companies. So John Candy, myself and Joe Flaherty came from Toronto. And we thought 'Hey, we're living in Hollywood now. We should land an agent.' So we went around and got doors slammed in our faces, but one agent did actually sign us on. It was a small agency, but they had a huge client, the Maytag repairman Jesse White.

"We were amazingly excited, and needless to say, that agent never did anything for us."


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