Supporting Their Art : Three performers balance second careers as entrepreneurs while keeping their hands in the business they prefer.

Biff Yeager’s face might look familiar. He’s the founder and owner of Mobile Mailbox, a deliv ery service in Holly wood. It’s a successful business, but it’s only a sideline. A bit part. Yeager’s real job, his main role, is acting.

“Mobile Mailbox has given me the opportunity to make my living as an actor,” Yeager said.

Every year thousands of people flock to Los Angeles grasping for the elusive butterfly of motion picture and television stardom. Some have little experience or talent, while others are trained professionals ready to make the big jump from a little pond to the great lake of Hollywood. But all are faced with the problem of keeping body and soul together while waiting for that big break.

Eighty percent of Screen Actors Guild members make less than $5,000 per year from acting, while only 5% make $50,000 or more. On any given workday, only 10% of SAG’s 75,000 members are working, according to guild statistics.

While most actors in Los Angeles make ends meet by waiting tables, doing phone sales and odd jobs, or living off relatives or spouses, some have become entrepreneurs. These thespians must balance the sometimes conflicting demands of combining their business ventures with their pursuit of acting.

For Yeager, that balance doesn’t seem to be a problem.

“There’s no business I would get into that would not push the acting career,” Yeager said.

Biff Yeager’s first acting role was as an elephant in a nursery school play. One of his most recent credits is a small part as a security guard in “Batman Returns” directed by Tim Burton.

“Burton is so much fun to work for,” Yeager said. “He’s like a big kid.”

Yeager, 50, did not finish high school, and after a four-year stint in the Army started his own ornamental ironworks business in the Floral Park section of Queens in New York City. He occasionally acted in small productions in New York, but he did not think of himself as a working actor.

“I didn’t get into it as a profession in New York,” Yeager said. “I did it sort of off and on.”

In 1971, Yeager was moving to San Francisco to start another ornamental ironworks business. While in a Utah motel, he saw a television news report on unemployment in San Francisco, and decided to change course to Los Angeles to try to become a full-time actor.

For several years, he did odd jobs: working in a carwash, driving a bus for Starline tours, doing day labor. He wanted to start a business that could make money and provide him with access to industry executives. In 1982, he was one of the first organizers of prepared scene casting showcases for actors.

The casting showcases started then by Yeager and others changed the way some casting was done in Hollywood. Actors paid money to perform a scene before a casting director. It was a controversial practice, but for many actors in Los Angeles, it was their only direct access to a person who could actually give them a job.

The Casting Society of America later drew a distinction between prepared scene showcases and cold reading workshops, and forbade its members to take money for appearing at a prepared scene showcase.

In 1986, Yeager created Mobile Mailbox, a messenger service that delivers pictures and resumes from agents, managers and actors to casting directors. The company sells its own stamps to customers and the customers deposit their mail in one of the company’s 19 mailboxes placed strategically in businesses around the city. The cost for same-day delivery ranges from $1 to $3.

When Yeager started Mobile Mailbox, he would make the deliveries, and use the opportunity to develop a rapport with individual casting directors.

“And more than I can count, it resulted in an interview or a job,” Yeager said.

He has appeared in more than 200 movies and television shows, including “Sid and Nancy,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “ Frances,” “Another 48 HRS.” and “Repo Man.” Yeager lives in Frazier Park with his wife of 20 years, Sherri, and daughter Katrina, 13. Katrina’s “not going to be an actress, it’s too tough,” Yeager said. “There are a lot of actors out there, a lot of them better than me. But I’ve been very lucky.”

In 1985, actress Margaret Howell wanted to perform at casting director showcases to promote her career, but she could not afford to pay for them. So, she started her own. Her business, Liaison Cold Reading Workshop has been going for the last seven years.

Howell wanted to be an actress since she was 3. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor of fine arts in theater, she moved to New York and worked in theater for seven years, appearing at the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center, in off-Broadway productions and in regional theater. She made the switch to Hollywood in the late 1970s because, she said, “I love theater, but it doesn’t pay.”

In Los Angeles in 1980, she won a Drama-Logue Award for her one-woman performance of “The Belle of Amherst,” a play about Emily Dickinson.

Howell’s credits include featured roles in the motion pictures “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” “Death Wish IV” and “Tightrope,” and television programs “Matlock” and “Santa Barbara.” She is most proud of her work on the 1990 PBS American Playhouse production, “It Ain’t Be-Bop,” starring Harvey Keitel.

For years, she made money waiting tables, doing phone sales and a variety of other jobs. “In New York, I even drove a taxicab for a while,” she said.

Now, Howell organizes two workshops a week: renting the theater, arranging for a casting director to appear and booking the actors. Actors perform a scene that they have not read before and their performance is critiqued by a visiting casting director.

Actors usually pay between $20 and $35 to perform at cold reading workshops. Howell is proud of the fact that she has not raised her prices in seven years. A Liaison workshop still costs $20, or six for $100 paid in advance.

“If the casting director cancels at the last minute, I have to eat the rent and refund the actors,” she said. “There’s a lot of phone work.”

Although she initially only wanted to demonstrate her craft in front of a casting person, she thinks that having the casting people see her as a business professional helps to promote her career as well.

“It helps that I run the showcase,” Howell said. The casting directors “trust that they can bring me in to a producer and that I can do the job.”

Rick Fazel, 47, has wanted to be a performer since seeing a production of “The King and I” when he was in junior high school in Perry, Iowa. He moved to Los Angeles immediately after graduating from the University of Iowa with a bachelor of arts in speech and dramatic arts in 1970.

While going on interviews and auditions, Fazel worked in a variety of jobs until 1978 when he was picked from literally thousands of other actors and cast along with television veteran Ray Walston in a pilot for CBS called “Danny and the Mermaid.” The show was produced by Ivan Tors, the creator of “Sea Hunt” and other successful TV programs. Fazel thought his acting career was made.

“For one week, I had my own parking space at MGM,” Fazel remembered.

Unfortunately, the pilot was not picked up by CBS and soon Fazel was back among the unemployed. “Andy Warhol was right,” he said.

“I went out on a limb,” he said, “and spent $900 on a VCR just to tape ‘Danny and the Mermaid.’ ”

As the owner of a then-uncommon video recorder, Fazel was soon being asked by other actor friends to tape programs in which they were appearing. Fazel realized that he might have stumbled onto a source of income. He invested some money and started his video business editing demo tapes for actors to show to casting directors. For the first several years, he worked out of his house in Burbank. By 1980, Fazel was in the video business full time.

Today, Phase-L Productions in North Hollywood has three editing bays, a multi-camera production studio and digital-effects editing capability.

Fazel feels the success of Phase-L has hurt his acting career. “I haven’t been able to do showcases and theater, or just the general knocking on doors that you have to do,” he said. “I’m too busy. I’m locked in an editing room all day.”

He has made a conscious decision not to promote himself to industry personnel who come to his studio on other business. “I don’t attack casting directors when they come through the door,” he said. “I feel very self-conscious about using their captive audience status to show them my own demo tape.”

Still, his acting career continues. He has appeared in commercials, and earlier this year he appeared in Theater West’s production of “Aladdin’s Magic Lamp” as the genie.

“At times, I envy my clients, those people who work 10 times a year,” Fazel said. “And yet, some of them say they wish they had a business like I have to supply them with a steady income. They say, ‘It sure is tough out there. You’re lucky to have this.’ ”