If you're a fat actor, "Homicide: Life on the Street" is the television program for you. The same goes for actors who are gap-toothed, beaky, acne-scarred or skanky in a hundred other ways that would exclude them from the vast majority of shows produced in Hollywood.

In that regard, "Homicide" is the Statue of Liberty of TV programs. Give me your blemished, your pockmarked, your hairless heads yearning to be seen on network television. Another pretty face is the last thing the casting office at "Homicide" wants, unless it belongs to an actor good enough to overcome pleasing looks.

The purveyor of this counter- intuitive casting philosophy is a volcanic, 57-year-old Baltimore landmark named Pat Moran. In almost anyone's imagination, she's the antithesis of Hollywood convention, a pumpkin-shaped figure with neon-bright red hair and owlish spectacles, who learned her craft working in -- where else? -- John Waters' scorched-earth brand of filmmaking. Whether it was there or elsewhere, admirers say she acquired perfect pitch for the look and sound of real Baltimore.

Moran is what is often referred to as a "character," a description she wastes no time living up to. She begins many workdays by warning her two devoted assistants that they'd better not get on her nerves, especially if it happens to be sunny and mild outside, weather that she -- a close relative of the Addams Family -- considers "hateful." Brightness alone would keep her from ever living in Los Angeles.

Other aspects of L.A. are also anathema to her. For instance, next to being judgmental, her least favorite human characteristic is phoniness. Her No. 1 admonition to her two children was typically straightforward: "Don't be a jerk," only she didn't use the word jerk.

Between audition sessions in her "Homicide" office on the old Recreation Pier, Moran barks at her 127-pound Doberman, Baby: "Don't talk to me. DO NOT TALK TO ME." Having no intention of crossing her mistress, Baby curls up for the day on her dog pad under a window overlooking the harbor. Every so often, the voice of Jim Finnerty, executive director of "Homicide," booms up the winding staircase to her office. "Be nice!" he yells, advice Moran claims to have no intention of following.

Everyone participates in this charade, pretending not to know that Moran is the softest touch in the greater metropolitan area. She seems willing to overlook their lapses in acting.

And acting is something she knows something about, as the Emmy statue on her desk attests. She won it last year, the third in a row she'd been nominated as TV's top casting director for her work on "Homicide."

If she has not gone underestimated in Hollywood, neither has she gone underappreciated at home. If Maryland has become a regular setting for Hollywood films -- and it has to a surprising degree -- one of the reasons is Moran. During the past decade, most feature films shot in Maryland have carried her name in the credits. She has been on board for every Waters movie, as well as films as diverse as "Washington Square," "Species 2," "Enemy of the State" and the recently completed "Runaway Bride."

Moran keeps proving to producers and directors that she can cast most of their actors right here, saving them the enormous expense of flying talent in from New York and L.A. At the state film office, Moran is called the "Mother Superior of Maryland Film," an irony not lost on a woman who spent a lifetime denigrating her Catholic education.

Naturally, Moran is quite popular with the local branch of the Screen Actors Guild. "Around here, she's the actors' best friend," says Pat O'Donnell, executive director for SAG's Baltimore-Washington region.

No one is more perplexed about this acclaim than Moran, who often says hers is "an accidental career." The daughter of a popular Baltimore bandleader, she didn't hatch a dream growing up in Catonsville and then set about realizing it. "This isn't something you work toward, because you could never have had the brains to work toward it. Cannes? An Emmy? It's impossible."

Except that it isn't. A dream Moran never had came true anyway. Now, her life stands as a parable of sorts, and it goes something like this: There are many paths to contentment, so why not choose the eccentric one? It's sure to be the most entertaining.

A BIT STRESSED OUT

It's Day 2, and "Homicide" Script Number 21, the season's second-to-last, hasn't landed yet in the casting office. Moran and her assistants, Jonah Wortman and Jonathan Gorrie, have only seven working days to find, audition, select and sign all the episode's "day players." Those are the nonregular cast members with speaking parts. Usually, each episode has between 10 and 20 day players. Additionally, Moran and Co. provide as many as 150 nonspeaking extras every week.

Moran is agitated this Thursday, muttering to herself about a headache, her "disaster of a desk," and her obligation to entertain out-of-town guests that night. ("I gotta go home tonight and be Suzy the cruise director," she complains.) Apparently, she is always like this, a radiator forever blowing off steam. "I'm nervous all the time," she says in a voice that approximates the sound of gargling. "I like to be nervous. Only a fool wouldn't feel stressed when you've got only seven days to cast a show."

Jonathan and Jonah, both in their 20s, are temperamentally Moran's polar opposites. They are mild and consoling, counterbalances to the commotion of their boss. Equally as important as their casting duties is their function as Moran's human sedatives. "Should I smoke a cigarette, Jonah?" Moran, a recent quitter, bleats several times a day as she reaches for a pack lying on her desk.

"No, Patty-O," he says, and she doesn't.

She will not miss a deadline or a day's work, a legacy from Grace, her late beloved mother who owned a grocery-liquor store in Beechfield. So strong was Grace's work ethic that when she was pregnant with Pat's younger brothers, she arranged to deliver them on Wednesdays, the only day the store was closed. So Pat, or anyone who works for her, isn't going to take a day off for any reason, be it sickness or national calamity. "I'm never not going to be here."

The script finally shows up after lunch, and Moran and Jonah pore over it to identify the roles they must fill this week. The episode calls for 13 guest parts. Among other characters, Moran and her crew will have to find a Mafioso killer, a junkie killer and a Baltimore hillbilly killer. "Homicide" will live up to its name again.

Sometimes the script writer specifies characteristics. For the neighbor of a murder victim: a white, male Greek-American in his 50s. For a bank teller robbed by a drag queen: a young black woman. Even within those specifications, Moran finds lots of maneuvering room, and many other parts are wide open to her imagination. So, for the part of a strip-bar manager, she thinks she might look for older men who could play the part with the appropriate sleaze. But she also has in mind a middle-aged actress who could make the manager a take-no-prisoners lesbian.

Jim Yoshimura, one of the show's senior producers, says Moran constantly surprises and impresses him. Her imprint, he says, is evident in every episode.

"She loves the down-and-dirty-looking people, and that serves the show well," says Yoshimura, an Emmy-nominated writer. "You don't get that in typical Hollywood shows. With them, it's clean and glitzy and fresh-looking. Pat likes the gritty, guys missing a tooth or woman with a look that is off. It's great for the writers because it means we can write really funky parts and know Pat is going to find the actors."

The next day, Moran roots through photos and resumes Jonah has screened for her. Looks alone will rule many out. Too old, too blond, not Italian enough. Too pretty. Too pretty. Too pretty.

Acting experience is generally more important than appearance, although Moran occasionally hires non-actors because she can't resist their looks. That is how a church worker named Shelly Stokes ended up with a speaking part as a neighbor of a murder victim. She's a 350-pound, blond-haired black woman who sent her photo into the casting office hoping to be an extra. Little did she know Moran was a sucker for precisely her type.

As for acting credentials, Moran is especially impressed by stage work, none more so than Shakespeare. " 'Richard III,' 'Macbeth,' " she says, perusing one actor's resume. "This guy's got plenty of starch."

The longer the run of "Homicide" continues -- it has now finished shooting its seventh season -- the harder Moran's job becomes. The show has a policy against day players returning in different roles. "Every time you hire someone, your pool is diminished by one more good actor," she says.

By lunch, Moran has decided on the five or six actors to test for each part. But because of the Presi- dent's Day holiday, she can't get started with auditions until Tuesday. That will leave her four days to fill all the day player roles before cameras start rolling on Episode 21. She's feeling a bit stressed-out. Everything's going fine.

FAMILY AND FRIENDS

At least three or four times a day, every day, Jonah or Jonathan answers the phone and announces to Moran, "It's Him."

"Him" is the man who has been Moran's best friend since they laid eyes on one another at the Flower Mart 35 years ago. Friendship is too limp a term to describe their relationship. Few lovers are more in sync. As Him himself says, "I don't know how two people could be closer."

So, when John Waters calls, Moran snatches up the phone and without any greeting or introduction launches into whatever topics engross them at that instant. Today, they prattle on about her shiny new black shoes (his Christmas gift), his bout with the flu and whether he should cancel a trip to Dallas for a weekend art show (he does) and Jerry Falwell's outing of a Teletubby. (Moran: "It's ridiculous. They don't even have genitals.")

Abruptly, with no sign-off of any kind, she hangs up.

"It's an ongoing conversation in snippets," Jonathan explains. "They'll pick up later in the day from the same point."

By the time she met Waters in 1964, Moran was in her early 20s and in the process of ending the second of two brief marriages. This one had produced a son, Brook. Waters was still in high school then, though he already had made his first film. Both were discovering the delights of the downtown counterculture.

Rich and poor, straight and gay, black and white, all mixed easily and happily. There were jazz clubs to attend and drag shows and underground films. And there were drugs.

Waters was already assembling the free spirits, outcasts and troublemakers who would be involved in his movies for the next two decades and beyond, including Bonnie Pearce, Mink Stole and, of course, Divine, the mountain of mischief who starred in the early films, usually as a woman. But none would be closer to Waters than Moran. Her taste for the outlandish matched his own, as did her aversion to orthodoxy of any kind. Best of all, no one was funnier.

She became a production regular on his movies, essential as a trouble-shooter and ambassador between Waters and the actors. As his budgets increased, she started specializing in casting. To make ends meet, she worked in the ticket office at Center Stage. In the late Sixties, she opened a vintage clothing store on Read Street, where she also sold hot dogs from a cart. That's where she caught the eye of Chuck Yeaton, the sweet-natured owner of a novelty store on the same street. Although a vegetarian, he would buy her hot dogs as an excuse to get to know her. Soon they were a couple, but not before she issued a warning.

"She said that her friends were part of the package, and she wasn't going to change them for anyone," remembers Yeaton, now a building contractor who dabbles in antiques.

He had no problem with those conditions, and eventually they married and settled into an exceedingly eclectic townhouse in Mount Vernon. After three decades together, Moran still calls him "The Boyfriend," as in "The Boyfriend sent me these roses for Valentine's."

"He was threatened by nothing," Waters marvels, not even when Chuck would come home to find Moran, their new baby daughter, Greer, and Waters in bed watching movies on television. It helped knowing that Waters was gay, Yeaton acknowledges.

Greer, 26, and Brook, 31, whom Chuck adopted, grew up on Waters' movie sets, coddled by the very people who played killers, deviants and psychos in front of the camera. Divine was Brook's godfather and Waters was Greer's.

"I thought everyone was like these people," says Brook. "To me, they were the Brady Bunch. They were family, and I loved them. The main thing with my mother and Divine and everyone was not to judge people by who they are but what they do, and that anyone who does judge people, they are the ones to worry about."

It was an unconventional upbringing, but as Moran says, "Kids are kids. They don't know that all families aren't like this. It didn't hurt them. Nobody's on death row."

The kids followed their mother and godparents into the film business. Brook is now a production designer, and Greer, a Sarah Lawrence graduate, is production coordinator for "Homicide."

As a family with so many gay loved ones, the Yeatons sustained enormous losses because of AIDS. During the '80s, it seemed as though they were attending a funeral every other month, a reason Moran became one of the city's leading AIDS fund-raisers. "You forgot there were other things people died from," she says.

But there were other things. Some friends died of drugs, and, shockingly, in 1988 Divine dropped dead of heart failure at 42. "I'm not sure that anyone realizes what it's like to be in your 30s and 40s and have all your friends die," says Lynda Dees, Moran's friend, lawyer and co-founder of AIDS Action Baltimore.

Moran says the deaths made her more guarded, yet Moran seems more open than most people her age to new friendships. She collects new people like strays, which explains why the Yeatons always seem to have semi-permanent houseguests.

In 1979, she got a job managing the Charles Theater, but always a new Waters film took precedence. "The movies were appalling to parents, critics, everyone in authority, which was exactly what we wanted."

If the films were anarchic and silly beyond words, the making of them was serious business. "On 'Pink Flamingos,' we worked 18 to 20 hours a day in the cold. On 'Female Trouble,' I remember coming home to frozen pipes and sitting on the bathroom floor sobbing and sobbing."

But it never occurred to her not to go back to work, and not because she thought she was on some career track. "Nobody could have thought . . . that these gutter films would lead to something. I was doing it because I loved to. It was [Waters]. I believed in him."

But it was leading to something, and something more than just film openings in New York and San Francisco, more even than screenings of Waters' films at Cannes, with the likes of Clint Eastwood, Roman Polan-ski and Catherine Deneuve watching not more than two rows away.

In 1987, Whoopi Goldberg's company called Moran about helping cast the extras for "Clara's Heart," a film Goldberg was making in Maryland. The following year, the same producer enlisted Moran on "Her Alibi." Another Waters film, "Cry-Baby," came next and then "Avalon," directed by Barry Levinson.

Two years later, when Levinson was ready to try his hand at a Baltimore-based television series for NBC, he came calling again. Now there was no denying, even to herself, that she was in the throes of a bona fide career.

"John Waters taught me how to do it," says Moran. "Barry Levinson legitimized me."

MASTER AT WORK

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the waiting room to the casting office is full of actors of all shapes, sizes, ages and races. They sign in and collect their "sides" -- the portions of the script they will read for Moran. They will have only a half an hour or so to study their lines. Moran believes "cold reads" provide a truer measure of an actor.

It's still amazing to her that someone would hire her to judge acting talent. Viewers of early Waters films do not come away marveling about the subtlety of the acting. "Looking at John Waters' early work, you're going to have me pick your day players?" she says.

But Moran is a master at providing directors with the actors who fit their visions. "What's great about Pat is that she can work with John and give him the actors that fit his style," says Levinson, "and she can also give me the actors that fit my style. Some casting directors can only cast in a certain kind of way. Pat's adaptable."

That is one reason Levinson is certain she will continue to work after "Homicide" goes off the air. She'll always be in demand for feature films shot in Maryland, and Moran says she'd be willing to work another television show as long as it was produced on the East Coast.

One by one, Jonah summons the actors into Moran's office. She greets each warmly and directs them to the chair facing her. She then has them rehearse the scene with Jonah while she watches the performance on a television monitor. Often, she advises the actors to make their performances less theatrical. "This is television. Your back row is right here," she says, pointing to a camera a few feet away.

Moran says she can make a decision after listening to just three words.

"It's all about our ears, what we hear. Do I believe what they're saying? Acting is making someone else's words your own and making everyone else believe it." When she's impressed, she'll tell an actor, "I bought it."

After one rehearsal, the actors perform again, this time with the video camera running.

When they leave, Moran and Jonah exchange observations. "He had a great look, but the part needs a better actor," she says of one. "She made a good adjustment," she says of another.

After a pale young actor named James Christy does an eerie, spaced-out reading for the part of the junkie, she can hardly contain herself, pumping a fist in the air when he leaves. "I love that kid," she says.

Half an hour later, after watching another actor read for the same part, she's still thinking about Christy. "After that kid," she says, "you better be Richard Burton."

After each day's auditions -- 45 on Tuesday and 31 Wednesday -- Jonah copies the videotapes and sends them to the producer and director of the episode, who make selections about which actors should get a call-back Thursday. But Moran makes sure everyone she liked gets invited back, too.

Theoretically, the final casting decisions rest with the episode's producer and its guest director, but the reality is more complicated. This week's director is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker named Joe Berlinger, who has not done much feature work. He shows up at the Thursday call-back auditions along with Yoshimura and David Simon, a co-producer of Episode 21.

All the actors for the same role -- usually now down to four or five actors per part -- perform one after another, and then there's a discussion of who should get the part. Moran is not reticent about her preferences, She tells Berlinger that if they go with one actor over another for the part of the strip-bar manager, "You'll be working much harder to get the performance you want."

As the morning proceeds, it becomes clear that for nearly every role, Moran, Yoshimura and Simon are in agreement, while Berlinger has a different preference. But the three "Homicide" regulars don't give in. No amount of diplomacy -- and there isn't much going on here -- hides the fact that Berlinger isn't being given much of a say.

"Hey," he finally says to Moran, "it's your show. I'm just along for the ride."

Which is exactly the way Moran sees it, too.

"I know the show better than he does. I know what the writers want, and that's who I feel we have to serve. You can't let them [the guest directors] make a mistake."

She's particularly pleased about Christy getting the part of the junkie. He was so good, Yoshimura regretted wasting him in a relatively small part. "He was like a diamond falling out of the ceiling," Moran says.

The cast for Episode 21 is set. Day 7 now can be devoted to paperwork, making sure all union rules are followed.

Nothing left to do now except wait for an early peek at next week's episode, and take a moment or two to savor what Moran has accomplished, not simply for Episode 21 but in her entire accidental career.

"I wanted everything," she says. "I wanted the relationship. I wanted the kids. I wanted the house, and I wanted the career, and I wanted it in Baltimore, not L.A."

The funny thing is, she got it all. Undreamed dreams do come true.

Pub Date: 03/21/99