Scripted hour-long American television famously gives the impression that there are maybe two dozen occupations in the entire country, with doctors being investigated by forensic specialists, lawyers suing fashion magazine employees (and perhaps one another), and cops chasing crooked psychologists while desperate housewives sip on spiked coffee behind their picket fences.

Both independent film and their low-budget documentary brethren, however, often offer all sorts of opportunities to explore the great, untilled territory of more off-the-beaten-path jobs. In the past year and a half alone, there have been spotlights thrown on such atypical vocations as topiary gardening, commercial fishing, vacuum cleaner repair and library work, to name a few.

Debut feature director Wayne Price’s The Doorman (Gigantic Pictures, unrated, 73 minutes) spawns similar intrigue as to the make-up and routines of its subject subset. It was, after all, a doorman at the Beverly Hilton Hotel who recently helped rescue former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards from a bathroom and, at 2 a.m., escort him past tabloid reporters seeking corroborative photographic evidence of his presence at the hotel at the same time as his now-confirmed mistress, Rielle Hunter. At trendy clubs, bars and hotels alike, doormen are the first face of the establishment and the image it wants to project — demi-gods, and arbiters of cool who, in certain situations, decide who ends up gaining admittance and who is destined to spend an hour or more standing in line outside.

A New York-set mockumentary about a smooth-talking, high-end gatekeeper, The Doorman follows a film crew who set out to make an insider’s guide to the legendary New York City club scene, using as their host and guide Trevor (Lucas Akoskin), an Argentinian who looks like a cross between Andy Samberg and Aaron Eckhart. Trevor has the power; he knows people. But more importantly (as Trevor frequently points out), he knows people who know him.

Or maybe not. As the film wears on, Trevor seems much less a player and more of a hanger-on. He mysteriously loses his job, struggles to keep up appearances in front of the camera, and gets caught in various lies that undermine his boastful self-presentation. Director Price (also playing himself on camera) becomes more and more exasperated, finally forcing the issue on Trevor, who admits to not being all that he seems.

Despite the fact that it features dozens of cameos by real-life boldface names — including Peter Bogdanovich, Thom Filicia, Denise Quinones, Amy Sacco, members of the band 311 and even lingering background footage of Paris Hilton — the film itself is a mess. If one takes honestly the notion that an outward face is super-important for glamorous, high-end nightclubs, then it makes no sense, I’m sorry, to have as your entrée into this world a smarmy braggart who pronounces Las Vegas as “Bay-gus.” Forgetting for a moment that the reality of Trevor’s grifter-type existence is completely at odds with all the interstitial talking head interviews that tout him as a global sensation (!), the satire here is simply nowhere near sharp enough. The concept is golden, worthy of a Borat-style treatment that skewers club owners and patrons in equal measure. The Doorman, though, comes off as a lazy execution of its distilled, single-sentence pitch line, in every way, shape and form.

Still, I left the movie intrigued. I wondered what kind of interesting glimpses into the lifestyles of privilege, and all the illicitness and rich-bitch fits that might theoretically entail, such occupational proximity would afford. So over the course of a couple weeks, I discreetly approached a couple real-life doormen at various Los Angeles hotels — people that I didn’t know by name, but a couple of whom I’d seen certainly dozens of times after more than a decade of conducting press junket interviews at such locations. Interesting stories about pre-“Brangelina” Brad Pitt and John Travolta ensued, as well as anecdotal bird’s-eye views of infidelity, something few other occupations offer. For the full, original piece, from FilmStew, click here.