Ashton Kutcher Finds `Room’ to Work His TV Magic

Ashton Kutcher is studying French these days.

It’s not because he and his famous family _ he’s married to Demi Moore _ are heading to France, but rather to play a substitute teacher in “Miss Guided,” a midseason series he’s producing for ABC about a guidance counselor.

“I love acting,” he says. “It’s so much fun.”

Kutcher also loves to produce shows.

His company, Katalyst, has 20 TV projects and about a dozen feature films in development. His latest TV work, “Room 401,” launches Tuesday night at 10 EDT on MTV. It revolves around unsuspecting people walking into horror scenes created by magicians and illusionists.

For instance, a crime-scene cleanup crew goes into a place where police have left a body. But as one crew member watches, a spirit sits up and waves. In another, bugs crawl out of a guy’s chest in a sushi restaurant.

“We saw a video of some magicians doing some hidden-camera magic,” Kutcher told the New York Daily News. “We said, we can do that better than anyone.’ We’ve had a ton of experience in the hidden-camera space.”

Indeed. Kutcher and his company, including partner Jason Goldberg, have produced the hit series “Punk’d” for MTV and “The Real Wedding Crashers,” which was pulled after a low-rated run on the cable network.

He’s also produced the MTV show “Adventures in Hollywood” as well as the CW hit “Beauty and the Geek.”

“I like magic a lot,” he says of the real magicians used in “Room 401.”"Film is magic, really. We all go to movies and watch things that blow our minds that we never thought were possible. We see things on TV we believe for that brief moment in time. That’s what moviemaking and television-show-making is about: Taking things just beyond reality.”

With “Room 401,” Kutcher says, nothing was manipulated in editing and that everything people see will be in real time. Likewise, in keeping with magician code, the tricks behind the shows won’t be revealed.

“That’s for you to figure out,” he says. “You can rewind it. You can figure it out. When they do rewind it, they may find something that’s there. It isn’t cheated. It’s really happening. There’s some stuff in there I don’t think MTV is aware is there,” says the notorious prankster.

Apart from “Miss Guided” and his acting work, most of what Kutcher does as a producer is reality TV.

“Reality TV is interesting to me because it’s 100 percent real,” he says. “They’re true, honest, visceral reactions. But even with reality TV you can `take two.’ You can ask them to walk down a stairway again.”

In “Room 401,” he says, the stakes were higher because once the “victim” realized the tricks that were going on, the whole scene had to be scrapped. “The rules become very confining,” he says. “You’ve got one shot to make it right. If you don’t make it right, you’ve wasted a lot of money.”

That said, Kutcher says he can still learn from shows that don’t fare well. The reasons behind the failure of “The Real Wedding Crashers,” he says, are varied. Was it the time period? Was it the lack of a comedy lead-in? Was it the concept of the show?

“Those are the real gifts,” he says. “When you have a shot that doesn’t work, that’s where we, as a company, we grow. You have to go back through your process, go back through your mistakes. Without mistakes you can’t learn.”

As for his acting career, the former “That `70s Show” star says he’s open to returning to a series role, if it’s right. The writing and the character would have to be challenging, he says. At one point, Kutcher was developing a show in which the character would be reincarnated, and would die and come back as something karmically related, which would keep him interested. That show, so far, has gone nowhere.

For now, though, he’s preparing for a couple of episodes of “Miss Guided,” and guiding other projects produced by his company. Shooting on “Miss Guided” begins late next month. Whether he’s starring in a project or producing it, the value is the same, he adds.

“I take it personally if a show doesn’t turn out fantastic,” he says. “I don’t care how it affects me. I’m doing all right. I’m not worried about me. I have a really awesome life. I’m financially stable. I want to take the 300 people that are the crew of the show and say you’ve got a job this year and next year.”

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(c) 2007, New York Daily News.

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Ashton Kutcher

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