The Mansion Family

The 9,690-square-foot mansion was built in 1952. It is north of
Carkeek Park, almost as far west as you can go without being a giant
Pacific octopus, and suffered a semitrashy renovation in 1994. “See,
it’s designed so you can do cocaine off every surface,” one of its
residents, Annette Auger, told me in the marble-tiled “Less Than
Zero room.”

The nine bedrooms house nine members of the Beta Society, a
filmmaking collective and production company and
fanny-pack-for-your-head* distributor formed by Auger, Celene Ramadan,
and Jessica Aceti in April 2008. There is a swimming pool, a hot tub, a
retractable glass roof over said pool and tub, an outdoor wood-fired
pizza oven and gas grill (at least one person was eating a hot dog
every time I visited), two refrigerators, a rooftop deck twice the size
of Africa, an ivy-covered gazebo in which to watch sunsets and receive
bug bites, an indoor koi pond that is possibly also a volcano, a home
theater worthy of any celebrity’s Cribs except maybe Mariah
Carey, a bidet in every bathroom (seriously), a circular drive with a
fountain, too many fireplaces, and a panoramic view of Puget Sound and
the Olympics. It is fucking insane, and hardly a place for
non-oil-baronesses to live. Rent is approximately $700 each.

Sitting at the kitchen table, Ramadan—her acting background
broadcasting loud and clear—starts talking about Alan Thicke,
best known as Growing Pains‘ Jason Seaver, the 1980s’
second-most-attractive sitcom patriarch (after Tony Danza, obv). The
best part of the story: Ramadan and Aceti are sitting on the front
porch of a well-appointed home in Santa Barbara, California. Suddenly,
Alan Thicke emerges from the house, screaming, “HONEY, CALL THE COPS!
THERE ARE THIEVES IN MY HOUSE!” Aceti and Ramadan watch,
freaking-the-fuck-out, as the accused—a British television crew
there to interview Thicke—gather in the driveway, deny the
charges, and plead with Thicke to calm down. “They’ve been taking
silverware! Valuables! Some woman was just dumping them in her purse!”
he counters. The police have been called. Thicke blocks any British
escape attempts with a large SUV. “Alan, don’t dooo this,” the
interviewer pleads, Britishly. “We’re friends, Alan!” Then, in
front of Ramadan and Aceti’s eyes, Alan Thicke wrestles a man to the
ground.

This, obviously, is the best thing that has ever happened.

As it turns out, Thicke is absolutely correct: The crew had been pocketing treasures, but not because they were thieves. Apparently
they were pranking him for a television show (on Showtime or something,
though nobody’s sure). “Well, I guess it was a prank, but it wasn’t a
very good one,” Thicke told Ramadan and Aceti in his Thicke voice, once
the scene had calmed down. “Looks like you ladies got more than you
bargained for! Well, I gotta go. But you should really go explore Santa
Barbara—they’ve got some great restaurants down on State
Street.”

And Thicke was gone.

How they got to Thicke’s doorstep in the first place: In the winter
of 2007, the group (then known as the Seattle Neutrino Society) was
putting together a holiday variety show called A Very Alan
Thicke-mas. “We had developed this semifictional character of ‘The
Thicke,'” Ramadan says, “where we’d just trade outlandish statements
backstage, like, ‘The Thicke once pissed chain mail’ or ‘The Thicke
once had sex with wine.'” So, just for poops and chuckles, they
e-mailed Thicke’s website. And he wrote back. And a weird,
long-distance partnership was born. Thicke wrote a letter to be read
aloud at the first A Very Alan Thicke-mas. The following year,
he wrote an original song and made a music video (“we got all
this footage in the mail,” Ramadan says, “and it’s like, Alan Thicke at
the kitchen table, looking at bills; Alan Thicke in the backyard, like,
rocking a baby…”). So when the gals decided to take a trip to L.A.,
Thicke invited them by to say hello. And then, you know, that happened.

The Thicke saga is an uncannily accurate analogy for the Beta
Society in general: an unlikely confluence of pop-culture kitsch,
fortuitous coincidence, and unflagging determination. The Beta Society
has its roots in improv. In 2004, Ramadan joined the Seattle Neutrino
Project, a spin-off of a New York improv group that incorporated short
video projects (six minutes to make a three-minute film) into their
live shows. Eventually, enthusiasm began to wane—”It was really
just a gimmick, and once it wore off, we realized it really wasn’t that
interesting… There wasn’t anything with real legs that you could
do”—and, after an incarnation as the Seattle Neutrino Society,
Ramadan and a few others reinvented themselves. Their new name: the
Beta Society—playing off the triple meaning of Beta tape (the
aforementioned ’80s kitsch), the beta version of their evolving group,
and, most importantly,
beta-as-in-ß-as-in-what-you-might-call-your-frat-house-brah! The
Beta Society envisioned itself as a kind of creative fraternity, and
Ramadan was on the lookout for Beta House, but she didn’t really imagine she’d find it.

And then they found it. On Craigslist. In a truly bizarre
coincidence, it’s owned by Garr Godfrey, a Seattle dot-com millionaire
who produced three of the most prominent local films of the past three
years: Zoo, Cthulhu, and The Immaculate Conception of
Little Dizzle. “We don’t really know him very well,” Ramadan says.
“We have a very landlordy relationship with him.”

Moving into the mansion has situated the Beta Society in a perfect
petri dish of creative possibility. They physically live in a gorgeous,
versatile set. They’ve added an editing room and built a green-screen
studio in the garage. The mansion is bustling at all hours of the day
and night—actors, writers, filmmakers, and weirdos swimming in
the pool and eating hot links and saying things like, “He
single-handedly saved my generation from all of this irony bullshit” or
“That sounds like something so-and-so would write.” It can be an
overwhelming scene, but one surprisingly free of the one-upmanship
common in big groups of performers. It’s also ideal for creative
productivity: No good idea goes unplumbed or unremembered, because even
if you’re drunk, there are 4,000 other people around to catch it.

There are approximately 35 people in the official Beta Society
orbit, from age 20 to 41. Day jobs range from server to software
engineer to freelance videographer to octopus wrangler. Their bios list
special skills including magic, iconoclasm, “styling my hair like the
first lady (not the current one necessarily, just in general),”
“Sheffield dialect at will,” huge balls, and “was once stabbed in the
arm.” Aceti, Ramadan, and Auger are known as “headmasters”; everyone
else is a “master.” (Master Betas—I assume you get it.) But
they’re not, Ramadan emphasizes, just a sketch-comedy group. The Beta
Society wants to make something with weight, something more than a
joke: “We’re such a social group—and this is my theory behind
it—that when we get together, it tends to be lighthearted. But we
want to do darker stuff, more serious stuff. We just want to make good
films.”

So far, the Beta Society is mostly potential. The collective output
consists of comedic shorts, a reeeally funny series of found footage
called VHS Gold (the latest episode is called “Oxycise,”
essentially an infomercial for breathing), an ambitious but
distractingly DIY feature-length horror comedy called Junkbucket (money quote: “If you listen closely on a quiet night, you can still
hear old Junkbucket out there, cryin’ for his mama and his lost cock
‘n’ balls”), and Cap-sac-
related ephemera. The first time I
visited, they were shooting intros and outros for a series called
Hot Tub Theatre, in which they take classics of literature and
theater and “put it in a hot tub for you.” The Betas have a sly ear for
balancing absurdity and wit, a knack for branding, and they have the
equipment and drive (and the mansion) to actually bring projects to
fruition. Whether they’ll succeed isn’t certain, of course, but fuck,
I’ll be surprised if they don’t—they’ve set a pretty remarkable
stage for themselves and seem poised on the verge of something good.
“The house is really what is going to make this all happen,” Ramadan
says. “And I’m really committed to making this a prolific time for our
group and making a name for ourselves. And we’ll see what happens.”

And as for life after Thicke? “We’ve reached out to many ’80s sitcom
has-beens—we tried contacting, like, Kimmy Gibler, but nothing’s
really come of it.” Your loss, Gibler. Your loss.