Cause Celeb

By MIKE PENNER

June 7, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It is one hour before tipoff, Game 5 of the NBA Western Conference finals, just another night in La-La-Lakerland.

Rob Lowe is standing next to a rack of basketballs on the Staples Center floor, setting up behind the three-point arc and firing air balls from the baseline.

Lennox Lewis is in the parking lot and a Staples Center operative is on the cell phone, wanting to know where the champ can pick up his tickets--five, near the floor.

Tim Harris, the Laker vice president of sales and marketing, is seated in the stands with a reporter and is trying to discuss the madness that is his current lot in life as the man the celebrities turn to when the Lakers are on the marquee and choice seats must be had.

He is trying, but with limited success, because Harris’ cell phone has become a gate crasher. Every few minutes it rings again, interrupting the conversation with reports of celebrity sightings and updates from the field.

Harris apologizes and, perhaps feeling a need to make amends, asks the reporter if he’d like to visit “The Room” at halftime.

“This is, by far, the most desired room to be in--at halftime--in L.A.,” Harris says, calling it “the craziest 15 minutes in Los Angeles.”

“People are dying to get into this room. And no one really knows the name of it. The official name of the room is ‘The Bank of America Chairman’s Room,’ but everyone just says, ‘How do we get into ‘The Room?’ ‘How do I get into that room?’

“And everybody knows. Agents will call and they’ll say, ‘Look, I’ve got tickets, but my client needs to get into some room.’ . . . It’s only for 15 minutes, but they want to be in because there’s social status attached to being in there.

“So therefore, there’s some sort of lessened status by not being allowed in ‘The Room.’ ”

Harris is offering a free look-see, this night only--an offer that, in this town, is flatly impossible to refuse.

Deal done.

To “The Room” it is.

Two minutes before halftime and nothing is happening in the “The Room,” which is really nothing more than a wood-paneled bar just inside the tunnel alongside Section 103 at Staples Center. A television monitor carrying the live feed of the Laker game is flickering overhead. Elevated tables surrounded by bar stools are positioned across the carpet. Bowls of popcorn and peanuts rest atop the tables.

It is fairly nondescript, except for the bouncers outside the door.

“Subtle bouncers,” Staples Center public relations director Michael Roth said with a grin. The bouncers are assigned to inspect passes, gold-colored credentials, that are required for entry.

Of the 130 floor-seat holders paying $1,150 per seat per game for the privilege, only 85 are given gold passes into “The Room.”

It is quiet now, and virtually empty, but the horn has just sounded, ending the first half.

“Just wait,” Harris advises. “And watch.”

Within seconds, Penny Marshall bounds into “The Room.”

Followed immediately by Jack Nicholson--”The Man,” Harris says in hushed tones. Then Seal, the pop singer. Then Irving Azoff, the Eagles’ manager. Then Dustin Hoffman, Michael Clarke Duncan, Cuba Gooding Jr., Glenn Frey, Dyan Cannon, Denzel Washington, LeAnn Rimes, Phil Spector, Robert Shapiro, Andy Garcia.

A torrent of glitterati comes flooding through the door, filling the room with record and movie industry types in less than two minutes.

“The industry wealth in this room is just stupid,” Harris says with a bemused smile.

Lennox Lewis and his entourage--two bodyguards, his girlfriend and his agent, Leigh Steinberg--situate themselves near the rear of the bar. Marshall playfully elbows her way past the heavyweight boxing champion.

“Coming through!” she announces.

Gooding spots Steinberg, who served as the real-life model for the fictional agent in “Jerry Maguire,” and rushes up to him shouting, “Show me the money!”

Fran Drescher comes over to say hello to Harris.

“It’s fun and it’s a happening,” Drescher says of the chaos unfolding around her. “I still get excited seeing all this talent.”

So much so that Drescher momentarily forgets herself, as well as the Lakers’ nagging lack of bench depth, and giddily declares: “Lakers in five!”

Gooding also stops by, reveling in the insanity.

“I feel like I’m at a Hollywood premiere,” he says, laughing as he scans the room.

“I didn’t know so many people in Hollywood like basketball. The studio heads in here? I never knew they followed the Lakers.”

Jeff Shell, president of Fox Sports Net, jokingly refers to “The Room” as “the Forum Club Plus. It’s very exclusive. It’s the place to be seen.”

It’s a 15-minute sensory overload, the adrenaline rush of Oscar night vacuum-packed between two quarters of basketball, and it crashes almost as quickly as it peaks. As soon as the TV monitors show players back on the court warming up, it’s as if someone announced they were towing stretch limos out of valet parking.

“And once again,” Harris says as the last A-lister hustles out the door, “it becomes a ghost town.”

According to Harris, the frenzy about “The Room” is an unintentional insanity, an accidental anarchy.

Originally, the Chairman’s Room was built so Staples Center owner Philip Anschutz could entertain guests between periods of King games.

“The arena people came to me,” Harris says, “and asked, ‘How do you want to handle this for Lakers games? You’ve got this room.’

“So what we decided to do was tell courtside seat-holders that if they had a ticket, they could get in. We created a handful of passes. We’ve got 130 courtside seat-holders and the occupant load [of the room] is 85 . . .

“When we created it, we had no idea that it would become so crazed and we’d end up turning people away. The only way you could make it better would be to make it smaller. Because then the desire to get in would be incredible.

“Because this is where Jack goes. This is where everyone goes.”

Everyone who’s anybody, that is.

Validation provided in the form of a small gold-and-purple pass.

“It’s sort of Who’s Who of actors, actresses, studio heads,” Steinberg says. “And many of them are carry-overs from the Forum. It’s the hot place to be in town.

“Los Angeles is a city which has always existed around the concept of ‘the place to be.’ So only in Los Angeles could you have a kitchen serving two identical restaurants, side by side, same kitchen, and one restaurant has no one there and the other restaurant has a line around the block. And they’re serving exactly the same food.

“It’s because one of them is considered ‘hot.’ And the Lakers have been that for many, many years.”

And now, courtesy of advancements and enhancements in arena amenities, the Forum carry-overs and new social climbers have a handy place to congregate and be seen.

One-stop networking, at the flash of a pass.

“If you were at the Forum, you would see at halftime that [celebrities] would all just mingle out on the court and schmooze each other,” Harris says. “Well, now they have a place to go.

“So now what you find is that everybody’s trying to get into ‘The Room.’ I have had people send me packages which include clippings and photos, and it’s all their support as to why they are deemed a celebrity and why they should have access to ‘The Room.’

“When we made the passes, we made them gold. Just purple and gold. There was no thinking behind anything other than we had to make a pass, so why not make it gold--Laker colors?

“So now, anybody who’s ever gotten a pass, they say to me, ‘I need some gold.’ ‘How do I get some gold?’ ‘I’ve got to have that gold.’

“This room has taken on a life of its own.”

If keeping their gilded fan base happy is the goal--and it most assuredly is--then Staples Center and the Lakers are passing muster in their maiden season together.

“Staples Center, they’ve got it down,” Drescher says. “They take care of the VIPs. They provide valet parking, you can come to this room, they have the upstairs restaurant, the food is delicious. They make it a whole event.”

The red-carpet treatment, however, stops short of complimentary floor seats. According to Laker officials, each of the 130 courtside seats are sold on a season-ticket basis--and they are sold out. Some are owned by the likes of Nicholson, Cannon and Magic Johnson. Others are owned by studios, networks and such agencies as William Morris, who use the tickets to entertain clients.

“The New York Knicks have eight floor seats that they have as ‘comp’ tickets for every [home] game that they give to celebrities,” says John Black, Laker director of public relations. “Here, at our games, we have a waiting list and it’s impossible to buy floor seats. Even if you wanted to buy them, you can’t get them. . . .

“If I had eight floor-seat tickets to sell for the Lakers, think of the power that I would wield. Let alone if I had eight comp seats for every Laker game to give away. I would own this town.”

Black says occasionally he will receive phone calls from agents representing clients who have received the freebie treatment from the Knicks inquiring about the same from the Lakers.

“In their minds, they’ve called the Knicks and not only gotten floor seats, but free floor seats,” Black says. “So they think that’s just the way it is in the NBA--’Hey, I’m going to be in Los Angeles, I’ll just call the Lakers.’

“What we tell them is a) they’re not available and b) if they were, you’d have to pay for them. Sometimes, they’re a little taken aback by that.”

At that point, if they are still interested, they go for the next available option: seats not on the floor, but in the lower bowl of the arena, where the likes of Andy Garcia, Pete Sampras and Frank Robinson have settled in with season tickets.

For the first-timers and the one-game shoppers, the appeal of a Laker ticket is simple.

“Total visibility,” says Steve Webster, who often purchases tickets for clients in his position as vice president of public relations for FX and the Fox Movie Channel.

“For Game 5 against Portland, the crowd was all fired up at first. But as soon as the Lakers fell behind, they were more into seeing who’s at the game.

“I was at that game and there’s this woman sitting next to me saying, ‘My gosh, there’s Dyan Cannon and Rob Lowe on the floor!’ She’s not even watching the game. I’m a basketball fan, I don’t believe in that baloney, but when it looked like the Lakers were going to lose Game 5, I’m even saying, ‘Oh, really?’

“This is an industry town. It’s not Des Moines where you’re going to rush up and ask a celebrity for an autograph. Here it’s, ‘Oh, I saw so-and-so at the Laker game.’ L.A. is so spread out, you don’t really see many celebrities in public. But at Laker games, you know you’re going to see some stars.”

It’s a Hollywood thing, Webster says.

“If you’re at the game and you’re sitting on the floor,” he says, “you know NBC is going to show your face.”

It also, most importantly, is a winning thing.

“I have never,” Webster says, “had one celebrity request a ticket for a Clipper game.”