Hollywood party crasher tells all, on film

HOLLYWOOD, Calif. —

Scott Weiss could barely suppress his panic. Perspiration glued his tuxedo shirt to his back. The forged, all-access badge and tiny digital camera hung like weights around his neck as he approached the loading-dock entrance.

The theater crawled with cops, high-priced security guards and federal agents: FBI, sheriff's deputies, Los Angeles police bomb-squad specialists and SWAT snipers, all on high alert.

If caught, Weiss knew he could be charged with criminal trespass. But in broad daylight, at last year's Oscars, he headed for the only entry that did not have a computerized badge-checking device. Co-conspirators filmed his every move.

Approaching the entrance, Weiss pretended to be engrossed in a cellphone conversation. He carried two notebooks containing fake call sheets. In his head, the bearded, slightly portly party crasher ran through the spiel he had concocted to explain his presence. He was sure a guard would question him.

Crash course

In summer 2007, Weiss, a former actor who had a small part in "RoboCop," was regaling longtime friend Ron Magid with stories from his glory days as a party crasher. He even had photos.

Weiss had paid $1,000 in the early 1990s to take a seminar in gate-crashing from a man who produced a cable-access show called "The Party Crasher." There, Weiss had mastered the art of sneaking into glitzy events to hobnob with the likes of Clint Eastwood, Courteney Cox and Prince Charles.

"There were times I said to myself, 'On the entire planet, this is the place to be,' " said Weiss, a real-estate appraiser. "Great food, exciting people. There is an exhilaration you get from doing this."

But after four months, he decided to retire. "I moved on with my life," Weiss said.

Magid, a freelance journalist, came up with the idea of filming Weiss in what they imagined would be a cinéma vérité comedy of an inept party crasher.

He enlisted Larry Torro, a freelance artist-filmmaker and former set painter for Warner Bros. Magid had seen his feature-film debut, "Jimmy 9 Lives," in 2006.

They hatched a plan to infiltrate all of Hollywood's major awards shows. Weiss, 48, would be the face man. Magid and Torro would be his backup. They would call the documentary "Crasher."

"We thought the movie was going to be 90 percent him getting turned away and getting humiliated," said Magid, 48.

Starting small

As a dry run, in July 2007, Weiss crashed a celebrity-packed party that Tom Cruise threw for soccer superstar David Beckham. Weiss was stopped by security, but he refused to give up. Pretending to be a lost guest, he bluffed his way in and used a small camera to take "grab shots" — photos of him mugging next to someone famous — alongside Queen Latifah, Beckham and his wife, Victoria.

Weiss was ready for his first major event: the Emmys in September 2007. This time, the filmmakers were organized. They outfitted a Chevy Suburban with party-crashing aids and props: wine glasses, a police scanner, colored paper for parking passes and clipboards, and a laptop computer and laminating machine to gin up fake badges.

Outside the Shrine Auditorium, Magid surreptitiously photographed a production badge. Within 20 minutes, Torro had made a good fake.

With his necklace-cam recording his view of the caper, Weiss cruised into the auditorium and grabbed a seat. He later posed for grab shots with celebrities, including Sally Field, Hayden Panettiere and Stephen Colbert.

The photos are souvenirs and proof of Weiss' conquests.

The filmmakers began to believe there was no stopping them, which is why they got busted.

Global recon

The next big event — the Golden Globes — wasn't until January 2008. Doing reconnaissance, Weiss posed as a "Star Trek" convention organizer interested in renting the Beverly Hilton Hotel ballroom. That's where the Globes were being announced at a news conference because the celebrity-studded show had been canceled due to the Hollywood writers strike.

During a hotel tour, Weiss stumbled across a blueprint of the ballroom and photographed it. The filmmakers studied potential entry points. Thinking their plan to sneak in through the kitchen was foolproof, all three decided to crash. They were caught 10 minutes later.

Weiss handed over his camera's media card, and Torro forfeited his camera's tape; all three gave their driver-license information to Beverly Hills police but were not arrested.

"It was absolutely terrifying," Weiss said. "Luckily, we hadn't gone to the effort to do much preparation. We didn't forge a production pass. So we just looked like three idiots. That saved us."

The men knew they had to be more careful. Weiss became the sole infiltrator and had no problems crashing the Screen Actors Guild Awards in late January 2008 at the Shrine Auditorium.

They stormed the Grammys a month later, fashioning a crude access badge out of the gramophone logo from a pack of commemorative Grammys playing cards. Weiss breezed by security.

But heading into what they refer to as the "Mount Everest of party crashes" — the Academy Awards — the filmmakers weren't sure they could pull it off. They assumed Globes producers had tipped off Oscars organizers.

Nevertheless, Weiss began casing the Kodak Theatre. He concluded the theater was "like a suit of armor" with the wearer's rear end exposed. The loading dock was his best bet.

Crashing in character

The three men also decided Weiss would play "characters." Magid called it the "method-acting" approach to crashing. They searched online photos of Academy Award nominees and came across Alexander Petrov, a Russian animation director whom Weiss vaguely resembled. Weiss practiced a Russian accent.

"My back story was twofold," Weiss recalled. "I was an assistant who had to run out to the car to get the call sheets and bring them to the show's producer. But when I got backstage, I knew I had to get my badge off as soon as possible. Then my goal was to switch roles (to be the Russian nominee)."

On the day of the show last February, Torro and Magid photographed an access badge of an Oscars worker to create a forgery.

Magid and Torro walked into the office of an apartment building behind the theater and asked if they could rent a room for a few hours. Nothing was available, but the rental agent knocked on a tenant's door. College students who lived there allowed Torro and Magid to film from the balcony.

Just before the show, Weiss wandered up to the guards, expecting to be stopped. Posing as a producer's assistant, he walked right in, no questions asked.

Inside the Kodak, he had no idea where he was going and wandered the bowels of the theater, at one point brushing past Anne Hathaway near the green room.

The necklace-cam footage in the film shows him nearly hyperventilating when an usher stops him at the door to an upper balcony. But she allows him in, and Weiss turns the camera around and films himself sitting happily in the audience.

Later, he used another fake pass for the Governors Ball. There, he snapped grab shots with Oscar winners Javier Bardem and Daniel Day-Lewis and master of ceremonies Jon Stewart. With that, he had accomplished what he calls the "grand slam of crashing"

Next: security advisers

The filmmakers last week provided a free consultation about security problems to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officials. The academy also arranged for every guard working the Oscars this Sunday to view "Crasher," which the three have yet to sell.

"There is a distinct possibility that the publicity about these crashers — as well as the video itself — could serve as an inspiration or a road map for those looking to commit far more serious criminal acts," Academy communications director Leslie Unger said.

Weiss, Torro and Magid met with a SAG Awards producer to discuss similar security issues. They have offered their knowledge to producers of the Emmys, Grammys and Golden Globes.

"This is good for them to see all the things that could go wrong so it doesn't happen when the bad guys are there," Weiss said.

Now retired again from party crashing, Weiss said he will watch the Oscars from home Sunday. But he had no problem sharing his secrets.

"If you dress the part and put on an air that you belong there — and that you don't really have time to be stopped by anyone — people are generally very polite," Weiss said. "People in security don't want to offend big shots. If you look like one, they won't bother you."

He added: "That's the whole flaw in the system: the human touch."