A ‘Shampoo’ and set

For anyone who thinks movies don’t influence kids, consider this: A young boy named Jonathan Antin watched the 1975 movie “Shampoo,” in which a handsome hairstylist (Warren Beatty) worked his magic on the most desirable women in Los Angeles. Antin immediately decided that that was what he wanted to be when he grew up. By age 23, he had his own salon in West Hollywood, and his client list included Madonna, Kevin Costner, k.d. lang, Steve Tyler and Tiger Woods. Thank goodness he didn’t watch “Scarface.”

Not too long ago, a TV executive had a vision to revisit “Shampoo” as a reality show. Ben Silverman had achieved success with “The Restaurant,” an NBC series that re-airs on Bravo, featuring the drama of starting up and running a restaurant in New York. He wanted to do the same with a salon on the other coast. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to follow a straight, single hairdresser going on a similar journey to the one that Warren Beatty went on in Beverly Hills?’ ” Silverman said.

The casting wasn’t easy. “Finding a straight, single, charismatic, wild man chef [for ‘The Restaurant’] was like shooting fish in a barrel,” Silverman recalled. “Finding a straight, single, charismatic hairdresser was a whole lot tougher.”

Eventually, he and Antin found each other. The resulting show, “Blow Out,” will air on Bravo for six episodes beginning Tuesday.

Like the younger Beatty, Antin’s telegenic appeal is immediately apparent. At age 36, he has chiseled good looks and a casual yet impeccable style. He’s hip, tattooed, gregarious and given to wild hyperbole and the vocal stylings of a surfer dude. He refers to just about everyone he works with as a genius. “He’s very passionate and serious about hair, which I think is both amusing and cool,” said Silverman, who can’t quite grasp how important a haircut can be. “He’s incredibly earnest and funny and charming, but also aggressive. He’s not scared of confrontation. And he has a huge ego, all of which also enables a good character.”

Antin had been planning to open a new salon at the Argyle Hotel on Sunset, but the owner wasn’t interested in a reality show filming on the premises. So Antin set his sights on Beverly Hills, where he’d grown up. He found a location on Wilshire Boulevard near Roxbury Drive, and he used architect Ron Radziner of the L.A. firm Marmol Radziner and Associates to help him create his dream salon.

A week before the salon was set to open, Antin and a film crew watched as a slew of construction workers tried to finish the job on time. It didn’t look promising. Standing in the alley behind the shop, Antin couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten any sleep, between overseeing construction, hiring for the new place, preparing to open and running his West Hollywood salon.

The show is likely to change Antin’s life -- one way or another. “The Restaurant’s” chef, Rocco DiSpirito, has become a star, with cookbooks and a line of cookware. The show drew respectable ratings when it debuted on NBC last year; when it was broadcast on Bravo, it almost tripled the cable channel’s previous ratings for that time period. But after an auspicious start -- thanks to all the publicity -- the restaurant itself is in trouble, caught up in lawsuits between DiSpirito and his partner and financial backer, Jeffrey Chodorow.

“The restaurant would have done great if they didn’t have their legal feud, which basically caused them both to not pay attention to it,” Silverman said.

The show didn’t create the legal wranglings, but surely the problems of one little restaurant wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans -- let alone national news -- had it not been televised.

Bucking the odds

For Antin, the new salon is a homecoming he never expected. “It was kind of an emotional thing for me to start looking around Beverly Hills for a salon, because I was a black sheep; I was the least likely to succeed in school,” he explained. He talked of finding the location, wiping a clear spot off the dirty window and looking inside, and then he stopped his story, briefly choking up.

He put on his sunglasses and continued. “It was just kind of a heavy thing for me. Because it was like no way in a million -- look, I had this tattoo in 10th grade.” He displayed the image of a gangster inked on his arm. “I was not at all supposed to be an owner of a business in Beverly Hills ... The concept that I got the show or that I was going to open a salon, or even that my life savings would even be enough ... “ He stopped again, then asked, “You’re not going to write that I got emotional while I was talking, are you?” When answered in the affirmative, he smiled and shrugged it off. “Whatever.”

Suddenly, the crew ran by to film the building inspector as he pulled up to the curb in his black Hummer with vanity license plates. He parked illegally, of course. Silverman was thrilled. “I couldn’t ask for that!”

A few days after opening, the setting was free of dust and inspectors. The interior of the new Jonathan Salon was spare and simple. Large mirrors leaned against the walls in front of stylists’ stations. Bottles from Antin’s product line adorned a wall near the entrance, with no-nonsense names such as “dirt,” “thick” and “polish.”

The sleek design was offset by the bustle of salon staff and film crew. It was easy to tell the two groups apart. Members of the crew wore sneakers and jeans, while the salon staff was stylishly dressed, with the women wearing insanely high heels. “Your stylist really should be one of the coolest people you know,” said stylist Jennn MacDonald. “I feel like it’s a requirement.”

That day, edgy comic Margaret Cho had been invited by the show to get styled by Antin. The appearance was nothing if not cross-promotional. She brought Ava Stander, the designer for her clothing line, High Class Cho. As they waited, Cho joked: “I never let nobody touch my face, nor do they touch my hair. But I heard that this is a good salon, so I think I’m gonna let him cut some bangs on me. That’s it. A wispy bang.” She insisted that she relied on her kitchen scissors to do the rest.

Then Cho met the suave Antin, and she capitulated in five seconds. He gave her a thorough cut, and she liked it. Leaving the salon, she admitted she didn’t really know what hit her: “He just seduced me. He seduced my whole head.” She mentioned his Warren Beatty “Shampoo”-like quality. “And I feel like [“Shampoo” costar] Goldie Hawn now,” she said before being whisked off to perform her latest one-woman show.

A week or so after the filming ended, the frenzy in the shop had died down. The hidden cameras were gone. Two women at the reception desk played games on their cellphones as another crew filmed shots for the show’s opening sequence. Antin looked weary as he silently pointed out a big scuff mark on the front door to a crew member.

Kimberly Sanchez, Antin’s assistant, was surprised by how much people had changed in front of the camera. “It’s amazing, and it’s kind of weird to see this other side come out of people, like an alter ego. Some were for the better, some got really shy, some opened up way too much -- it got really crazy.”

Most of them trust that the show’s producers won’t make them look bad. The others don’t really care. “The truth for me was, my clients weren’t going to stop coming to me because I make [a jerk] out of myself, and I kind of don’t care whether people love me or hate me,” stylist MacDonald said. “I think the only thing that would really bum me out is if people were completely indifferent.”

Stylist Jason Low hopes the series shows the artistry of the work involved, and not just the funny, catty, eccentric elements of salon life. But he also admits that he’s afraid to watch, for his own reasons. “I have difficulty changing my outgoing message on my voice mail because I hate the way my voice sounds on the phone,” he said. “So to sit there for an hour, and see the visual too. I don’t know if I can deal with it.”

Looking back at the whole “Shampoo”-like experience, Antin mentioned another movie title: “The Good, the Bad & the Ugly.” But he tweaked it to “The Great, the Terrible and the Horrifying.” The great part is clearly the opportunity. Antin’s goal is simple: “I want to be the biggest hairdresser in the world, ever, in the history of hairkind. Bigger than Vidal [Sassoon], if that’s even possible, with all due respect. I want to teach everyone how to do hair and how to feel hair and how to live hair -- the way I live it.”

He regrets losing his temper at a few stressful moments, which he calls “pulling a Jonathan.” He recalled saying to himself, “ ‘Yeah dude, maybe you could have handled that one a little differently. Grabbing the camera might have been a little much.’ ”

Antin was philosophical about how he might come off on the show: “Listen, I’m a little intense, a little gnarly when it comes right down to it. But you know, I get the job done, the doors never close, the lights always stay on, and the checks never bounce.” If he looks like the bad guy, so be it.

Antin is financing the salon, so its success is paramount. World domination requires no less. And fame, Antin has found to his surprise, is not as appealing as it appears. “After 15 years working with every major box office celebrity from A to Z, sitting back behind the scenes and saying, ‘I can’t believe they’re complaining and freaking out at that person like that. How unnecessary and ungrateful and rude. How hard is it to sit there and do an interview? How hard is it to read a line ... you’re not hanging drywall. You’re not pounding pavement. You’re in an air-conditioned, controlled environment with people waiting on you hand and foot.’ And guess what -- it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Ever.”

Warren could have told him that.

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‘Blow Out’

When: Premieres Tuesday, 9 to 10 p.m.

Where: Bravo

Featuring: Jonathan Antin

Credits: Creator, Ben Silverman. Executive producers, Silverman, Arnold Shapiro, Allison Grodner, Frances Page.