CLOSE-UP : Info Man

“The Sally Jesse Raphael Show” wanted a telephone con artist with a foot fetish, ABC’s “Home Show” wanted the latest on back-to-school bulletproof clothes and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” wanted to know how to build an atomic bomb for a Saddam Hussein sketch--and they all turned to Chris Darryn for help.

From TV addicts to transsexuals, hormones to Harley women, it’s all in a day’s work for Darryn, 39, founder of the Research Department, possibly Hollywood’s highest-tech information-gatherer. By subscribing to many of the world’s largest on-line databases, he has access to millions of news items, thousands of publications and scientific journals and countless other sources.

Darryn started his Tarzana-based company in 1986, but his work, which costs from $50 to $500, is still one of Hollywood’s best-kept secrets. “You know L. A.” he says, “producers are very protective of their ideas. Almost every client says the assignment is confidential.”

Darryn has also done research for authors, private investigators and other information-hungry clients, but his specialty is the entertainment industry. Michael Palazzolo, field producer on NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries,” says he calls on Darryn to find the impossible. “I heard a story about a UFO that sucked a car and three occupants into the air,” he says. “I didn’t even know where it supposedly happened, but Chris found the story in Sydney, Australia, within two hours.”