ON LOCATION : Hollywood Is Casting Eyes on Orange County for Everything From Features to Commercials

Hollywood is looking for some superstars in Orange County, ones that don’t need sparkling smiles--or even teeth, for that matter.

What Hollywood wants, and is willing to pay good money for, are one-of-a-kind mansions, unusual homes, houses that can double for dwellings in the East or Midwest.

After decades of being used as a real-life back lot, Los Angeles has reached the saturation point in some areas for location shooting, so many a film maker’s eyes are gazing wistfully a little to the southeast.

“I get a lot of requests for non-L.A.-looking locations without the palm trees: the old brick houses, Tudors with trees,” says Liz Ervin, co-owner of El Toro-based Pacific Location Search. In her files, she has everything from “upscale mansions to slums.”

Ervin, a free-lance script supervisor, began her location-search firm six months ago. She says she receives about five requests a week from Los Angeles commercial and feature film production companies looking for locations. One feature film company recently asked her to shoot five rolls of film of “an Irvine-type neighborhood,” including such details as street signs, lampposts and mailboxes.

The California Film Commission, a state agency whose purpose is to stem the tide of runaway productions, also maintains a file of more than 50,000 California locations for film makers--everything from small towns, hotels and state parks to roads, bridges, lakes, ponds and piers. (Among the Orange County locales on file are the Anaheim Country Inn and the historic Heritage House in Fullerton.)

“We are looking for the unique,” says Donna Wells, the Hollywood-based commission’s production specialist. “We’re not very much looking for just tract houses--unless it’s a developer with a tract about to open, or if somebody is going to tear down a house--a lot of movie companies are doing explosions and driving cars into houses--or buildings, warehouses and factories that are going to be demolished.

“Anything that’s abandoned is of great interest to us: Churches, restaurants, hotels. It’s like a standing set. So we welcome hearing from people out there.”

On any given weekday, about 65 film companies are on location in Los Angeles County. But, according to Wells, many Hollywood-based film production companies overlook their next-door neighbor to the south.

“We’ve been doing our best to encourage people to go there,” says Wells. “Orange County hasn’t been overshot. It’s virgin territory, and I think the community is amenable to filming

and would welcome the film industry.”

“It’s a great location,” says California Film Commission director Lisa Rawlins, who grew up in Costa Mesa. “Chapman College is of interest, I know, and that whole (town) square in Orange has a wonderful look and it’s used. But for the most part, Orange County is just not used that much. It’s really kind of a shame because there are wonderful locations there.”

In exclusive Hancock Park, where mansion owners may receive $5,000 or more a day for filming, several companies are on location every day of the week. In many of these over-filmed areas of Los Angeles, some residents have started to complain about the inconvenience of having a large convoy of studio trucks parked on their streets. Some cities now even restrict the number of trucks that can be parked on the street, or as in the case of San Marino, charge film companies $2,000 a day to do so.

“Los Angeles is becoming really difficult (for filming) and there is a need for Orange County homes,” says Jim Thompson, president of Real to Reel, a Hollywood location service. “The problem with Orange County is it’s outside the 30-mile zone.”

Therein lies the catch.

The zone refers to a 30-mile radius extending from a point in Hollywood (actually the intersection of Beverly and La Cienega boulevards). Any time filming is done outside the studio zone, production costs rise because the production company must pay union crew members transportation and other per diem expenses.

Although parts of Orange County nearest to Los Angeles--roughly an arc that runs from Seal Beach through Stanton and Garden Grove, Anaheim, Fullerton and Brea--falls within the zone, most of it lies outside the limit.

That’s not to say Los Angeles-based film makers won’t film in Orange County.

For example, last fall Mary and Dr. Ralph Mack’s Big Canyon house was turned into a mini-studio for an epic starring Chad Everett (OK, so it was a commercial for a water purifier). The den became a dressing room. The dining room was used for makeup. And camera, lighting and sound equipment were scattered throughout the family room and out on the patio.

The center of activity was the Macks’ spacious kitchen with its countertop island. That’s what attracted the commercial company’s location scout to the Macks’ home in the first place. Reality, however, is never quite good enough by Hollywood standards.

The crew brought in plants so that when Everett tests the water out of the tap, it looks like a lush garden outside the kitchen window. They put up mesh netting over the patio to filter the sunlight. They even temporarily re-wallpapered the kitchen. (“They said (our wallpaper was) too busy,” Mary Mack says.)

Not that she’s complaining. When the caterer brought in lunch for the crew, Everett asked Mack and her 2-year-old son, Douglas, to join him.

“It was a nice experience, and the money’s great,” says Mack. “I would do it again. Actually, I’d like to get into something like this often.”

Television series, which operate on smaller budgets and stricter shooting schedules, prefer to stay within the studio zone. But commercial film makers, who often use non-union or in-house film crews, and the producers of big-budget feature films have fewer qualms about traveling outside the zone.

Over the years, Orange County has been the scene of many big- and little-screen productions.

Among the more frequently used Orange County locations are Santa Ana’s turn-of-the-century red-brick courthouse and the futuristic, all-glass Parc Place next to the San Diego Freeway in Irvine. The latter has been used to depict everything from a modern-day CIA headquarters to a building in the 21st Century. UC Irvine also has been used several times for filming, including a Paul Newman and Mel Brooks wheelchair chase scene in Brooks’ “Silent Movie” and a sequence in “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.”

Actually, Orange County’s Hollywood ties date back to 1910, when a film company headed by the legendary D. W. Griffith came to San Juan Capistrano to film an 18th-Century Spanish romance on the mission grounds with a young actress named Mary Pickford.

Since then, Orange County has been a part of enough movie history to make up its own movie edition of Trivial Pursuit:

When silent film vamp Theda Bara boards a gilded galley and goes floating down the Nile in the 1917 production of “Cleopatra,” she is actually cruising down Upper Newport Bay.

When hundreds of Egyptian charioteers pursue Moses and the Israelites into the Red Sea in Cecil B. DeMille’s original version of “The Ten Commandments,” they are actually running into the surf off Seal Beach.

And in the classic “All Quiet on the Western Front,” when World War I doughboys are battling it out in the trenches, they are actually emoting on a then-undeveloped stretch of Corona del Mar.

More recently, the landmark Swallow’s Inn, a freewheeling saloon in San Juan Capistrano, was typecast as a Marine hangout last year for Clint Eastwood’s “Heartbreak Ridge.”

Laguna Beach was involved in another piece of typecasting last year for Home Box Office’s TV-movie version of T. Jefferson Parker’s “Laguna Heat.” But beyond a few brief establishing shots, little of Laguna was actually used in the film. The Surfside Country Club, a fictional club in the book, was shot at the Mandalay Country Club in Oxnard.

Director Graeme Clifford had better luck in filming “Gleaming the Cube,” a feature-length murder mystery that will be released by 20th Century Fox. Clifford insisted on shooting on location in Orange County last fall. The film company, which stayed in the Holiday Inn in Irvine, shot scenes among the orange groves on the Irvine Ranch and at Woodbridge High School, John Wayne Airport and a motel near Disneyland.

“I fought very hard to get as many days’ location in Orange County as I could,” says Clifford. “I didn’t get as many as I wanted for the usual reasons. The powers that be say you can get something just about like that in the 30-mile range.”

Clifford disagrees. “A lot of the streets in Orange County, I don’t think, can be successfully duplicated in L. A. They’re wider, newer and more landscaped. It gives sort of a fresh, clean, new look to the movie, which is what I wanted instead of the more soiled Los Angeles appearance.”

From the California Film Commission’s standpoint, Orange County, like any other California community, stands to benefit a great deal whenever Hollywood comes to town. Film making, after all, is a $6-billion-a-year state industry.

In 1986, director Francis Ford Coppola spent several weeks on location filming “Peggy Sue Got Married” in Sonoma County where, Wells says, “they left $4.5 million dollars behind in the community. They bought lumber, they bought gas, they ate there and lodged there and hired hundreds of local people. Just a commercial can leave $30,000 behind in one day. So it’s a big injection of cash.”

To help promote film making in Orange County and aid producers once they’re here, Liz Ervin is in the process of publishing the Orange County Film, Video and Audiovisual Resource Directory ($19.95; Golden Gate Communications). The directory will list everything from free-lance crew people and post-production facilities to car rentals, hotels, boat charters and even ice carvers. It also will include updated information on each city’s film permit process, which ranges anywhere from three days to three weeks.

Last fall, the film commission’s Rawlins met with Orange County Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez to discuss the need for an ordinance that would streamline the film permit process in the county. Vasquez’s office is now working on an ordinance .

Rawlins would also like to see the appointment of a film commission liaison in Orange County who would help coordinate filming in the area. There are 52 such liaisons in the state, usually someone connected with a chamber of commerce or visitors and convention bureau.

Orange County will never rival Los Angeles as Hollywood’s favorite back lot, but the opportunity is there for some Orange County residents to experience a bit of Hollywood magic in their own home.

Renting your home to movie makers, however, may not appeal to everyone.

The bottom-line motivation for those who do is not too hard to guess.

“Money, of course,” says Wells with a laugh, “because it’s a big hassle. People feel it’s glamorous and people think it’s exciting to see their house in a movie. Basically, you need to be reimbursed for the interruption. Sometimes there’s damage with 100 people tromping around your house. It’s not something you do lightly. But it’s exciting and fun. If you’re not the nervous type it can be a kick to watch how it’s done.”

And who knows, you might even be “discovered” in the process. And if not you, maybe your dog.

That’s what happened when Randall and Ellen Lunn of Nellie Gail Ranch rented their two-story house with its “generic white picket fence” for the exterior filming of a Suzuki car commercial a year ago.

Traveler, the Lunn’s golden retriever, befriended the crew and, to the Lunns’ surprise, wound up being used in the commercial. Of course, it was only an uncompensated walk-on. But Ellen Lunn says that was the “most fun part” of the entire experience.

“The dog had a wonderful time,” she says. “He’s the ham in the family.”