Oscar’s Best Audience They May Not Be Hollywood Celebrities, But Donna And Bob Stout Played Them On TV

Donna Stout is obsessed with Hollywood.

By her own admission, she owns “lots of posters and tons and tons of books, biographies of the stars.” In fact, she has so much movie-oriented memorabilia that her Moran Prairie home is too small to display it all.

But nothing in her scrapbook matches the memories she and her husband, Bob, earned during a recent trip to Los Angeles.

For, you see, Donna, 38, and Bob, 34, just happened to spend the night of March 25 schmoozing with the stars.

At the Oscar ceremonies.

That’s right. As up to a billion people across the globe watched Whoopi Goldberg crack wise, Jim Carrey mug, Sharon Stone cause Gap stock to rise precipitously and Mel Gibson walk off with a handful of gold statuettes, the Stouts from Spokane shared seats in the studio audience with the likes of Jeff Goldblum, Randy Newman and other Hollywood celebrities.

“I’m kind of on cloud nine,” Donna had said before her trip. “It’s a dream come true. It’s the best part of my collection that I’ll ever have.”

Here is the story of how the Stouts Oscar evening came to be:

“Hollywood is my hobby,” Donna explains. “I’ve collected anything to do with Hollywood since I was a kid.”

Her friends know this, of course. So last summer when one of them read an Oscar-related story in The Spokesman-Review, she immediately thought of Donna.

It was a story about what she calls “seat-fillers.”

Excuse me?

“They don’t want any empty seats shown on TV,” Donna explains. “So when the stars or whatnot go up to do the presentation or receive an award or whatever, they gotta fill those seats.”

That’s when the call goes out for seat-fillers, non-celebrities that the show’s producers import to sit in the vacated seats. They remain there for however long it takes the presenters or award-winners to do their job, maybe 15-20 minutes. And then during a commercial break they give the seats up.

They repeat this exercise throughout the evening, moving from one seat to the next. In the process, they get to sit next to producers, next to directors, and, if they’re lucky, next to stars.

It sounded like a dream deal to Donna.

“At the very end of the article,” she says, “there was a little paragraph that said, ‘If you’re interested in trying to go to the Academy Awards, write a letter about yourself, send your picture in care of ABC studio, and send it in January.’ “

Since the article ran last summer, Donna tucked the information away and “didn’t think about it for about six months. And then after the holidays, I just put a little package together and told about myself and sent it to them, not thinking that I would ever really win.”

But she did.

“The next thing I know, this guy calls me from California,” she says.

The guy in question was the assistant of the man running the contest. “And he said that they really liked my letter,” Donna says. “‘You guys look like a cute couple and a lot of fun, and we’d like you to come down here and join us.”’ Shortly afterward, a formal letter followed that outlined what the Stouts needed to do, where they needed to go and what they needed to wear.

That’s how at 11 a.m. on the morning of March 25 they found themselves at the network headquarters of ABC, sitting with some 152 other seat-fillers, most of whom were ABC employees, listening to an explanation of what was expected of them.

The rules were fairly simple.

Donna: “Don’t make a fool of yourself, don’t make a fool of ABC …”

Bob: “Don’t embarrass ABC or the Academy in any way, shape or form.”

Donna: “… just remember that this is the movie event of the year.”

Donna and Bob were prepared. They’d left their 2-1/2-year-old son David with Donna’s parents in the Tri-Cities, rented a gown (for Donna) and a tuxedo (for Bob) and even gotten Donna’s hair done in a salon on Rodeo Drive.

Even so, the evening held its own share of surprises for both of them. For one thing, they quickly discovered that the world of television is quite different on the performer’s side of the camera.

“It was much smaller than you’d think,” Donna said of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Oscar’s traditional home. “It was very deceiving. Even from way in the back, and I was sitting at one point in the third row from the back, the stage was kind of right there.”

And so were the stars.

In the half hour or so before the 6 p.m. broadcast, the Stouts stood with the rest of the seat-fillers as one Hollywood mega-celebrity after another walked past them into the auditorium.

Here are just some of the notables whom Donna could have reached out and touched (if she’d dared): Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, Laurence Fishburne, Richard Dreyfuss, Robin Williams, Nicolas Cage, Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern, Meryl Streep, Christine Lahti, Anthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt and Gwynneth Paltrow, Tim Roth, Winona Ryder, Ed Harris, Jackie Chan and Sharon Stone.

Many were late, a common occurrence that gives seat-fillers a chance to get in the auditorium early. But even amid the busy atmosphere, which Bob describes as “organized chaos,” the Stouts discovered that Hollywood’s reputation for big ego seems unfairly earned.

At least on Oscar night.

“I guess, never having done it before, that I thought they would be all wrapped up in themselves, that they wouldn’t even know that we were there,” Donna says. “But actually, it was just the opposite. Everybody was very polite.”

Bob discovered this when he was assigned to fill a seat just seconds before the show went to air.

“It was a bit pandemonius,” he recalls. “People were zooming to their seats, getting to their chairs as fast as they could.”

His seat, which he spotted just as the stage manager began counting back from 30 seconds, happened to be in the middle of a row. “And,” Bob says, “Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern were right there at the end. Well, Jeff Goldblum was sitting crossways in the aisle. And he’s a big fella. I’ve got to get there and I hear the countdown and I finally just tapped him on the shoulder and said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Goldblum, but I’ve got to get by you.’ And he just stood up, nice as can be.”

A few minutes later, when the person whose seat he was filling finally showed, Bob had to pass by Goldblum again. This time the two shared a smile, and Goldblum even remarked on the theatrical quality of it all.

“Got out quick, huh?” he said.

Imagine that: Dressed by Armani but still a regular guy.

As were they all. During the first commercial break, Bob filled a vacant seat next to past Oscar-winner Louis Gossett Jr. In front of him sat Will Smith (“The Fresh Prince of Bel Air”) and in back Bob spotted Marina Sirtis (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”). As fate would have it, he didn’t move the rest of the night.

Donna ended up filling five or six different seats, even, curiously enough, Goldblum’s for nearly 45 minutes (“Thanks for keeping it warm,” the gracious “Jurassic Park” star said upon returning).

Both even earned a bit of on-camera time, moments that they captured at home on their pre-set VCR.

When the show drew to a close, the seat-fillers gathered in the auditorium’s lobby for the bus ride back to ABC headquarters. And if even then they were wondering whether the stars knew who they were, David Copperfield walked by and applauded.

“He said, ‘Yay, these are the people who really worked the hardest!”’ Donna recalls.

As they watched the brightest stars in Hollywood head out for parties at such exotic eateries as Spago, Donna and Bob reflected on what they most appreciated about the experience.

“It was a fascination to me,” Donna says. “It wasn’t just the fact of glitter and fame, it was how they do everything. How nice the stars were, just ordinary people who make more money than I do.”

“Admittedly, we both have these lofty, gargantuan ideals of Hollywood and stardom and all this kind of stuff,” says Bob. “And it was nice to have it become a little bit more down to our level.”

So it should come as no surprise as they drove away at midnight in their rented car that Donna and Bob Stout of Spokane, Wash., famished after having eaten nothing since lunch, staged their own post-Oscar party.

“Our big celebration was going to a McDonald’s drive-through,” says Donna.

“In Hollywood,” Bob adds.

“In our fancy clothes and with our Big Macs, we went back to our hotel room,” Donna says.

And then she smiles.

“But the next day we went on a tour and saw where Spago was,” she says. “So at least we got to see where everybody else went.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo