Entertainment

After hearing the words "false bottom" a dozen times, they start to sound funny.

The phrase is part of a line actress Danica McKellar keeps saying over and over as she plays the title character in Inspector Mom, a TV movie and Web series shooting in Dallas.

Natalie Caudill / DMN

Danica McKellar, of Wonder Years fame

On another insufferably blazing day, the crew is wedged into the dining room of a house off Kessler Parkway in Oak Cliff, the air conditioning off when the cameras are on.

Ms. McKellar became a TV celeb when she spent her adolescence as Kevin Arnold's love interest, Winnie Cooper, on The Wonder Years. Now 31 and still single, she's portraying a stay-at-home soccer mom by day, crime solver by night.

As she gets up from the couch, her TV husband, Orange native Drew Waters, wants to know where she's headed. "To check for a false bottom," she says.

Fireside Productions of Dallas is making Inspector Mom for the Lifetime Movie Network as a vehicle for television and the Internet. The original movie airs in November, to be followed by twice-weekly "webisodes" that add up to a new mystery each month. A second film is to air on LMN next year, so the production will be shooting here at least through December.

Pointing to her RV dressing room parked out front, the coolest spot on the set, Ms. McKellar says, "This is my happiness." She has ordered ice cream as a surprise for the cast and crew.

The 1993 end of The Wonder Years coincided with Ms. McKellar's high school graduation. She decided to take a break from acting "and become known to myself for something else." Attending the University of California, Los Angeles, she became a math whiz, helping to develop a theorem in statistical mechanics that bears her name.

"Every day of my life, I got complimented for the one thing" she says. "I didn't even know how to take credit for it because it was a character I was playing."

She wound up lecturing on the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem at Rutgers and testifying before Congress about the importance of women in math and science. At the Sundance Film Festival in 2003, her success outside show business was brought home. As a throng of celebrities angled to get into a party, she was recognized by the doorman.

"He goes, 'You tutored me in calculus, get in here and bring your friends.' I couldn't believe I got a status call because of math tutoring. It was so perfect. I was just in love with that moment."

Toward the end of her studies, Ms. McKellar starting feeling the pangs of acting withdrawal. She joined a Shakespeare group on campus, and after graduation landed a gig that brought her full circle: a guest shot on Wonder Years co-star Fred Savage's short-lived sitcom Working.

"I was missing sharing my insides or whatever it is about acting that we get addicted to. I realized how much it defined who I was and what I wanted to be doing. But I knew I was choosing it."

Since then, Ms. McKellar has expanded her portfolio, directing short films and writing scripts, including contributions to Inspector Mom . She's also about to release a yoga and meditation DVD called Daily Dose of Dharma with her mother, and she's working on a book intended to encourage girls to go into mathematics, set for release in 2007.

In recent years, she's made guest appearances on The West Wing, King of the Hill, NCIS, NYPD Blue, How I Met Your Mother and Strong Medicine, in which she played a heroin addict.

"It's more of a challenge for me to get those roles because people don't really think of me for them," she says. "But they're still out there, and I still get them sometimes."

To that end, Ms. McKellar has shot a horror movie, hopes to squeeze in a Vietnam film in the fall and has an offer to appear in a Sci-Fi Channel production next year.

In the meantime, she's in Dallas, though she's not getting out much. She's been to Nobu and Stephan Pyles and to the spa at the Crescent. But no late nights at Ghostbar.

"I'm in every single scene," she says. "I'm getting up at dawn."

E-mail mmendoza@dallasnews.com

Brad Keller is content to make his movies and TV shows right here in North Texas.

"We have the resources. It's just a matter of proving it," says the principal in Fireside Entertainment, currently shooting the TV film and Web series Inspector Mom for the Lifetime Movie Network in Dallas.

"When this comes out and Prison Break comes out, they'll see that this is no different than what the coasts can do. ... We do have equipment, we're nice people, and we do speak English."

A native of Redondo Beach, Calif., Mr. Keller studied film at the University of North Texas and wound up as a production assistant on JFK when it was shooting in New Orleans. After being accepted into the prestigious director's program at the American Film Institute, he moved to Los Angeles.

But then, with his girlfriend expecting, he had to drop out. After struggling for a year working multiple jobs while raising his son, he returned to Texas and began directing commercials.

Shooting straight-to-DVD films on the side, Mr. Keller began learning the distribution business. "As crappy as those first films were – Playing Dead, Loofa, titles you never heard of – they kept selling," he says.

Mr. Keller's breakthrough came with 2004's A Killer Within, starring Giancarlo Esposito. Distributing it himself, he succeeded in getting the DVD into Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Borders and other chain stores.

Inspector Mom, starring Wonder Years alum Danica McKellar as a crime-solving homemaker, will include online "webisodes" with their own story lines.

"We couldn't get away from the Internet and the future," Mr. Keller says. "The Internet of today is going to be the television of tomorrow, and movies have now become the new TV. ... We figured it's going to happen, we might as well be one of the first."

And it's all being shot in Dallas with a mostly Texas-based cast and crew.

Drew Waters, an Orange native who now lives in Sachse, plays Ms. McKellar's husband; 7-year-old Nathan Bell plays her son; and two Dallas stage actors, Jeffrey Schmidt and Stephanie Young, have small roles.

Part of Mr. Keller's company is a continuous casting facility that keeps his local acting pool stocked. "My resources are here," he says.

M.M.