Hot Shots in Hot Spots : As Some Movie Crews Called It Quits, Others Made Fires Part of Their Shoot

When fire rolled through the hills around Simi Valley, the crew of “Cheyenne Warrior” was deep in a canyon, barreling through its last week of shooting.

Horses were skittish, winds were whipping up and a crew member with a walkie-talkie, acting as lookout, was on a hill watching the fire move within a couple of miles. By midmorning Wednesday, the horse wrangler had nixed bringing the horses down into the canyon for an action shot and by noon the on-set fire inspector, fearing that the crew would be trapped in the canyon, closed down shooting of the Western, produced by low-budget movie meister Roger Corman.

But there was one scene that second unit director Alba Francesca realized she could finally get--a wagon train fire in the distance. “Pretty instantly it occurred to me that we should take advantage of a bad situation,” Francesca said.

Hollywood greeted this week’s firestorm with its usual mixture of enterprise, creativity and wisecracks. No major film or television productions were affected, despite the fact that the bulk of all filming in the country is done within a 30-mile radius of Beverly and La Cienega boulevards.

On the “Cheyenne Warrior” shoot, Francesca quickly determined to make the best of things. (She is no stranger to disaster on location. A year and a half ago, the riots forced her to stop a shoot at Corman’s Venice studio.)

For this project, they didn’t need a wagon train--just a fire in the distance. They zeroed in on the smaller hot spots lest they get too much of a good thing. “Our story line is that it’s a small wagon train on fire--not a whole mountain.”

At the same time, all around them, residents in trucks were collecting their belongings and stopping to embrace each other in comfort. “We were watching this real human tragedy,” Francesca said. “It was rather frightening.”

As the inferno grew, a fine rain of ash showered onto location shoots from Simi Valley to Downtown Los Angeles. The soot was easily ignored and sometimes even welcomed as an interesting effect. After the crew of the ABC-TV show “NYPD Blue” shot on Downtown streets Thursday, assistant location manager Curtis Wilmot said, “This is a New York show, and all that ash in the air gives it a perfect snowy effect.” The episode, it turns out, will air in January.

But on the more remote beaches and hillsides and wide plains that have made Los Angeles such a lush and varied backdrop, filming was delayed or modified.

In Malibu, at Malibu Creek State Park as well as Leo Carrillo, El Matador, El Pescador, and La Piedra beaches, film crews that often wait weeks for one of the area’s coveted three permits a day found their shoots were canceled. “I would say we’re talking about seven or eight shoots impacted in the last few days,” said Pamela Powell, deputy director of the California Film Commission.

The crew of “Tammy and the Teen-Age T-Rex” got lucky.

The 50-member crew--plus a mechanized dinosaur--arrived on the site of the White Oak Farm at Las Virgenes and Mulholland Highway in Calabasas at 7 a.m. Wednesday. “We could see fire, we could see smoke, we could definitely smell it, it was pretty tense,” said Claudia Eastman, the location manager of the campy low-budget film. (“It’s a love story,” she said.) Crew members had been there only an hour and a half when state park officials asked them to leave. But the first assistant director persuaded the officials to let them stay, promising that the crew would be vigilant and pack quickly if necessary.

“We had reserved these dates a long time ago and I think they knew how tight our schedules were,” Eastman said. “Basically we only have the dinosaur for 10 days.”

It was too soon to gauge the fire disaster’s movie of the week potential. No network folk would admit they had been pitched yet. “It’s only been two days, give them until Monday,” said one ABC public relations spokesman.

“I would bet the farm there are people down there trying to acquire rights, walking through rubble and trying to meet firemen,” said Brian Pike, executive producer of a TV movie on Hurricane Andrew that was shown in May.

CBS’s “How’d They Do That?”--which looks at the background of unusual events--is already on the case. Next Wednesday’s show will be devoted to the fires, its crews having been on the scene with cameras since the fires started. In keeping with the theme of explaining unusual phenomena, “they explain how the fire started, tracing the beginning of the Santa Anas in Colorado,” said Terri Corigliano, director of media relations for CBS.

“They were able to put a camera in one of the helicopters that was fighting the blaze from the air--you get to see how that works,” she said.

The show also happened to be with the burn surgeon who was treating four injured firefighters--”just as (the doctor’s) wife on their ranch was calling and telling him, ‘Honey, 22 acres just burned, what should we do with the horses?’ ”

A writer on the 20th Century Fox lot, where a detailing service takes care of cars while writers and executives work, suggested Hollywood was feeling only a remote connection to the blazes: “I think the most immediate impact on the film industry was that anyone who had their car detailed Thursday found it covered with ash.”