Hospital’s New Look Startled Many--Till Word of a Killer Cyborg Got Out

After blocking a drug treatment center from taking over a defunct hospital in their neighborhood, Lake View Terrace residents were startled to see the vacant buildings suddenly wrapped in razor wire-topped fences and barred windows.

What about the public hearings, the environmental reviews, the City Council debate that should have preceded such a radical metamorphosis?

But that’s Hollywood. The large white building--some say white elephant--will be the set for scenes in the movie “Terminator 2: Judgment Day,” which begins filming in January, anxious residents discovered.

Instead of portraying a hospital, which has been the buildings’ role in several television shows, the former private medical center will take on the ominous persona of a maximum-security mental institution.

“We got calls on our hot line about it,” said Eileen Barry, an officer in the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn. “People said: ‘What’s going on? What are they doing now to us?’ ”

A few callers were particularly worried that they might have triggered construction of the unsightly high fence and barbed wire by complaining that the site had become a magnet for stolen cars and drug use, she said.

Barry and other representatives of the hilly northeast San Fernando Valley community said they were asked by the facility caretaker to keep the reason for the transformation as quiet as possible, chiefly to ward off fans who might try to catch a glimpse of the muscle-bound Mr. Terminator himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Terminator sequel, produced by Carolco Pictures, stars Schwarzenegger as the unstoppable, murderous cyborg.

Since its 1986 bankruptcy, the 14-acre hospital site has been largely vacant except for a small nursing school and a jobs program.

Area homeowners have been on alert for hints of the site’s future use ever since they learned by chance in the spring of 1988 that it was slated to be turned into a 210-bed drug treatment center, named for then-First Lady Nancy Reagan.

Community protests against the center drew national attention and caused Reagan to withdraw her support the following spring, thwarting the plan.

Although various proposals for permanent use of the property have since emerged, nothing has jelled, said San Diego attorney Richard L. Seidenwurm, who represents the lending institutions that were stuck with unpaid construction bonds after the hospital declared bankruptcy.

In the meantime, the site has been frequently rented for filming movies, miniseries and television shows, said Lewis Snow, president of the Lake View Terrace Home Owners Assn. “Jake and the Fatman” taped scenes there, Snow said, as did “Hill Street Blues” and “Falcon Crest.”

Neighbors of the site said fences have gone up and come down; lights have been installed and removed; white, unmarked studio trucks have appeared and disappeared.

And this is not the first time that such frenetic entertainment industry activity has caused confusion.

While the Nancy Reagan Center was still a possibility, Snow received a call at work one afternoon from neighbors who suspected Reagan herself was touring the site. The tip-off, they said, was a motorcade snaking up toward the hospital, featuring a limousine and companion motorcycles.

What the callers didn’t see, however, was the camera traveling in front of the limousine, capturing the arrival of “Falcon Crest” star Jane Wyman for a future episode.

“It was the wrong wife,” Snow said, referring to Wyman’s past marriage to then-actor Ronald Reagan.