The Valleys' Supporting Roles : Hollywood keeps coming back to this area to find a wide variety of settings for movie and television production.

By JEFF PRUGH

Jan. 7, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

“A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree--shoot it in Griffith Park!”

--Abe Stern, film producer and uncle of Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal Studios

At old Mission San Fernando, Jane Wyman marries Cesar Romero in the kind of ceremony that the mission’s Franciscan fathers didn’t exactly have in mind when they built the chapel back in 1797. This wedding is strictly make-believe, recorded by cameras for a 1986 episode of CBS-TV’s “Falcon Crest.”

“It even made the front page of the National Enquirer!” Kevin Feeney, the mission’s business manager, recalls.

In the Antelope Valley, a few residents gather beneath a glitzy, Las Vegas-style marquee bearing the name of singer Vic Damone. They ask someone how they can obtain tickets to Damone’s concert.

Alas, there are neither tickets nor concert. The marquee is a prop for the 1991 feature film “The Marrying Man,” starring Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin.

In the San Fernando Valley community of Lake View Terrace, a medical facility turned film-and-TV set has served motion pictures such as “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” “Postcards From the Edge” and “Another 48 Hours”--not far, incidentally, from the scene of a video watched by millions around the world: the beating of Rodney G. King by Los Angeles police officers.

And on leafy Orion Avenue in Van Nuys--whose white picket fences, spacious lawns and shuttered Cape Cod houses have appeared in movies (“La Bamba” and “Big Trouble”) and TV series (“Dallas” and “CHiPs”)--a homeowner recalls an early morning when her teen-age son burst out the door on his way to school, only to be startled by cameras on the front porch shooting actor Peter Falk.

“Whoops! I guess I ruined your shoot,” the youngster said apologetically.

Year after year, Hollywood comes calling--sometimes in a neighborhood near you. And three stars of the show are every bit as venerable and versatile as top-drawer character actors.

They are the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, which have appeared in so many productions--from blockbuster films to TV series to videos to commercials--that they deserve their very own stars on the sidewalks of Hollywood Boulevard.

Indeed, the list of on-location sites--even predating ex-New Yorker Carl Laemmle’s transformation of a 230-acre chicken ranch in 1914 to what is now Universal City--seemingly stretches as long as Hollywood Boulevard: Griffith Park (“Batman,” “Bonanza,” “Rebel Without a Cause”), the Van Nuys Airport (“Casablanca”), the Iverson Ranch in Chatsworth (“Ben-Hur,” “Rin Tin Tin”), Malibu Creek State Park, partly in Agoura (“M*A*S*H*,” “How Green Was My Valley”), the Sepulveda Veterans Affairs Medical Center in North Hills (“Altered States,” “Knots Landing”), East Palmdale Boulevard (“Radio Flyer”), and the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys (“Rising Sun,” “Murder, She Wrote”), among myriad others.

Then, too, countless private residences and estates provide settings as dramatic as Mediterranean villas or Tudor mansions, which look as if they’re in Connecticut or New Jersey. Or, many locations appear as perfectly mundane as the “Leave It to Beaver” set or any other house that might pass for Anywhere, U.S.A.

Each has been deployed again and again by producers and directors who often anchor their flings of fantasy in real-life, everyday places. There, production companies pay homeowners and landlords rental fees ranging from $250 to upward of $15,000 a day, noting that they’ll probably have to rearrange walls, furnishings and sometimes even landscaping, but promising to restore all properties exactly to the way they were.

Actually, their work begins months earlier when scouts for the Los Angeles area’s 40-odd location companies try to match real-life sites with those described in scripts. They bird-dog neighborhoods and study huge books of wide-angle color photos in quest of a perfect match. Example: One scout recently examined photos at Real to Reel Inc., a Los Angeles location agency, hoping to find what he called “a 1947 kitchen” for a work-in-progress titled “Roswell,” about tales of UFOs landing near Roswell, N.M.

And whenever on-location shooting won’t work, filmmakers rely on back lots and sound stages such as those at Universal Studios Hollywood, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Corp. in Burbank or Santa Clarita Studios.

Or they turn to recycled locations such as the National Park Service’s Paramount Ranch, deep in the hardscrabble hills of south Agoura and the setting for 1930s films such as “Adventures of Marco Polo” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” Amid rickety facades that hark back to the wild, wild West, CBS-TV’s “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” dominates production so much nowadays that Alice Allen, who issues permits to do film or TV work at the Paramount Ranch facility, quips, “The doctor is in residence here.”

It’s not by accident that the three valleys--especially the San Fernando Valley--turn up on millions of big and small screens across America, sometimes with a presence as indelible as John Wayne swaggering to an Oscar in the 1969 motion picture “True Grit.”

More movie-making and television production occurs in the Valley than in any other single area of Los Angeles, author Richard Alleman writes in “The Movie Lover’s Guide to Hollywood”--the Valley accounting for about one-third of film and TV production in all of the city, says Hollywood film historian Marc Wanamaker.

“First, you had many studios in the Valley--then came the studio ranches and all the other locations,” says Wanamaker, now at work on a history of U.S. motion-picture studios.

With their craggy hills, sprawling desert, crowded urbanscape and assorted foliage (which enables filmmakers to shun, if they need to, Southern California’s patented “palm tree” look), the three valleys have offered filmmakers virtually unlimited choices.

The busiest location? Griffith Park, according to some location scouts and librarians at the Hollywood-based California Film Commission. It’s the setting for portions of feature films such as “Hoffa,” “Poetic Justice,” “Dave” and “Jurassic Park,” as well as TV’s “MacGyver,” “The Wonder Years” and “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” among many others.

“It’s unbelievable how much filming goes on there,” says Czechoslovakian-born Paul Pav of North Hollywood, whose credits as a location manager include “Lethal Weapon 3,” “Poltergeist” and “Ghostbusters.” “In Griffith Park, you’ve got New York, you’ve got the South, you’ve got whatever you want.”

Another site rich in motion-picture lore is the Van Nuys Airport, the setting for portions of the 1942 Warner Bros. classic “Casablanca.” But stories about filming of the famous scene in which Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, as World War II lovers, say goodby at a foggy Moroccan airstrip are shrouded in a fog of their own.

While some published accounts say filming took place at the Van Nuys Airport (then known as Los Angeles Municipal Airport), others describe the location variously as the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport and Glendale’s old Grand Central Air Terminal, now part of an industrial park. Actually, historian Wanamaker says, Bogart and Bergman bade farewell on a Burbank sound stage, with the takeoff created by special effects and a miniature plane.

Another film historian, Dick Mason of Warner Bros., chuckles at the confusion. “Embellishment is the name of the game among people in this business,” he says. “Everyone exaggerates.”

Elsewhere, a private house in Arleta served as a set in “Back to the Future,” while Chatsworth’s Iverson Ranch provided scenes for the spectacular chariot race in 1959’s Oscar-winning “Ben-Hur,” for other films such as “Julius Caesar” and “The Robe” and for TV series such as “Bat Masterson” and “Zane Grey Theater.”

And the Santa Clarita Valley takes pride in its remote but high-profile Vasquez Rocks (“Battlestar Gallactica,” “Star Trek,” “Charge of the Light Brigade” and Steven Spielberg’s upcoming “The Flintstones”), while hundreds of Antelope Valley residents recall the winter night in 1992 when they watched parts of an abandoned, half-completed residential tract on Lancaster’s outskirts go up in flames after filmmakers received permission to burn 10 houses for a fiery scene in “Lethal Weapon 3.”

“Out here, we think we can offer just about any kind of location,” says Stephanie Abrahamson, director of the Antelope Valley Film Assn. “And if you want it, we can give you 360 degrees and not a human in sight.”

But today, pitching Southern California to filmmakers is a tough sell as Los Angeles struggles to remain the world’s “movie capital” in the heat of competition from Canada, New York, Florida, Illinois and other venues.

Permits issued by the city for on-location filmmaking declined 20% between 1990 (the peak year) and 1992, according to a report in Location Update, a monthly trade magazine published in Los Angeles.

The problem stems from not just a flagging economy but what some call a “user- unfriendly “ climate in some neighborhoods.

“L.A. residents, by no means in awe of an industry shoot, don’t like the inconveniences it brings--parking problems, late-night noise, trespassing,” Location Update reports.

For his part, location manager Pav says the prospect of Hollywood pitching camp in the neighborhood “goes both ways.”

“Some people will slam the door--or they’ll send their dogs after you,” he says of his own scouting forays. “On the other hand, some keep sending you pictures of their house with a note: ‘Please! Use my house!’ They know it can be lucrative--especially when the economy isn’t so good.”

Even on that squeaky-clean block of Van Nuys’ Orion Avenue, on-site filmmaking has drawn mixed reviews from residents since the camera vans first rolled into the neighborhood 21 years ago for a network TV film, “Go Ask Alice” (Andy Griffith, William Shatner and Julie Adams).

“For a while, we thought it was overdone--people were out here shooting at 3 and 4 in the morning, for months at a time,” says Jean Austin, a retired Hollywood hairdresser who adds that she has lived on Orion Avenue for 30 years. “Sometimes you have to say, ‘Enough!’--as much as we’re all trying to keep filming in L.A.”

A few doors away, Keith and Marilyn Mullins contend that filmmaking on Orion Avenue is far more blessing than curse.

“It’s always welcomed,” says Keith Mullins, adding that their house served as a set for “Go Ask Alice” and for Great Western Savings’ TV spots featuring Dennis Weaver. “The film companies do everything they can so we’ll want them to come back. Especially today, we don’t want to lose them.”

Now, with Mayor Richard Riordan and newly appointed “film czar” Cody G. Cluff of the Los Angeles Film Commission leading the charge, the city has served notice that it intends to regain its filmmaking glitter.

The applause is loudest among entrepreneurs such as Jim Thompson, president of Real to Reel Inc., and others who’ve staked their futures on Valley-area and other filmmaking within the “30-mile zone,” a radius from La Cienega and Beverly boulevards, beyond which production in Southern California is more expensive because of added labor costs.

“Cities such as Toronto and Chicago have hurt us tremendously,” says Thompson, 40, who also is publisher/editor-in-chief of Location Update. “But there’s a feeling now that everything will turn around again--and that a lot of business will come back to L.A.”

For now, Hollywood keeps calling with fistfuls of cash--and the Griffith Parks, the Orion Avenues, the Vasquez Rocks, the East Palmdale Boulevards and the Paramount Ranches endure on the silver screen and in living rooms across the land.

For that matter, so does the work of Paul Pav, Real to Reel Inc. and all those other location scouts who keep scouring the neighborhoods and poring over those thick photo books in search of that perfect “1947 kitchen” and other sites.

They work with a painstaking zeal that continues to remind the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys that, yes, they ought to be in pictures--and in a way that keeps saying to them: “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

Where Real Becomes Reel

A sampling of on-location and studio sites in the San Fernando, Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys:

SAN FERNANDO VALLEY

Academy Plaza Theatre, 5200 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

Films: “Martial Law II.”

TV: “Dark Justice,” “Jake and the Fat Man,” “Sisters.”

“Back to the Future” House, 9303 Roslyndale St., Arleta.

“Brady Bunch” House, 11222 Dilling St., North Hollywood.

Brand Library and Art Center, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale.

Films: “The Other Side of Midnight.”

TV: “Fall Guy,” “Mission Impossible,” “The Six Million Dollar Man.”

Calabasas Golf and Country Club, 4514 Park Entrada, Calabasas.

Films: “Calamity Jane,” “Carousel,” “High Noon,” “National Velvet,” “Show Boat,” “Stalag 17.”

CBS Studio Center (formerly Republic Studios), 4204 Radford Ave., Studio City.

Films: “Lake Placid Serenade,” “Murder in the Music Hall,” “The Fighting Kentuckian,” “The Lady and the Monster,” Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and John Wayne Westerns.

TV: “Burke’s Law,” “Falcon Crest,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Gunsmoke,” “Hawaii Five-O,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Lou Grant,” “My Three Sons,” “Newhart,” “Rawhide,” “St. Elsewhere,” “The Doris Day Show,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Rifleman,” “The Rogues.”

“E.T.” House, 7121 Lonzo St., Tujunga.

El Portal Theater (home of Actors Alley), 5269 Lankershim Blvd., North Hollywood.

Films: “Last Action Hero,” “Mr. Saturday Night.”

TV: “Beverly Hills 90210.”

Grand Central Air Terminal, 1310 Air

Way, Glendale.

Films: “Hollywood Hotel,” “Sherlock Holmes in Washington.”

Grant High School, 13000 Oxnard St., Van Nuys.

TV: “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Casualty of Love,” “Life Goes On.”

“Gone With the Wind” House, 727 Kenneth Road, Glendale.

Actually, this antebellum-style mansion did not appear in the film but inspired the set design of Tara. The house appeared regularly in the TV series “Flamingo Road.”

Griffith Park, Los Angeles.

Films: “Alien’s Return,” “Body and Soul,” “Caddyshack,” “Dave,” “Hoffa,” “Jurassic Park,” “Poetic Justice,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” “The Terminator,” “Union Pacific.”

TV: “Batman,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Beverly Hillbillies,” “Bonanza,” “CHiPs,” “The Bionic Woman,” “The Colbys,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “Three’s Company.”

Iverson Ranch, 1 Iverson Lane, Chatsworth.

Films: “Ben-Hur,” “Hopalong Cassidy” series, “Julius Caesar,” “Jungle Drums of Africa,” “Rifles of the Khyber Pass,” “Son of Paleface,” “Stagecoach,” “Tarzan and the She-Devil” (and others in the “Tarzan” series), “The Flying Deuces” (Laurel and Hardy series), “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Road to Bali,” “The Robe.”

TV: “Bat Masterson,” “Rin Tin Tin,” “The Big Valley,” “The Rifleman,” “The Virginian,” “Zane Grey Theater.”

Lake View Medical Center, 11600 Eldridge Ave., Lake View Terrace.

Films: “Another 48 Hours,” “Beverly Hills Cop III,” “Dying Young,” “Heart Condition,” “Mr. Jones,” “Postcards from the Edge,” “Road House,” “Ricochet,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

TV: “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Melrose Place,” “Sisters,” “Unsolved Mysteries.”

Malibu Creek State Park (formerly Fox Ranch), 1925 Las Virgenes Road, Calabasas.

Films: “How Green Was My Valley,” “M*A*S*H*,” “Planet of the Apes.”

TV: “M*A*S*H*,” “Roots.”

Mission San Fernando, 15151 San Fernando Mission Blvd., San Fernando.

Films: “Our Silent Paths,” “Rose of the Rancho,” “The Battle of Elderberry Gulch,” “Two Men of the Desert.”

TV: “Dragnet,” “Falcon Crest,” “Having It All,” “Knight Rider,” “Loose Cannons,” “Remington Steele,” “The Greatest American Hero,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Love Boat.”

Monteria Estates, on Winnetka Avenue, north of Devonshire Street, Chatsworth.

TV: “Jake and the Fat Man,” “Murder, She Wrote.”

Orion Avenue, 6200-6300 block, Van Nuys.

Films: “Big Trouble,” “La Bamba.”

TV: “All My Darling Daughters,” “CHiPs,” “Dallas,” “Falcon Crest,” “Go Ask Alice,” “Shameful Secrets.”

Paramount Ranch, 2813 Cornell Road, Agoura.

Films: “Adventures of Marco Polo,” “Broken Lullaby,” “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “The Santa Fe Trail,” “Thunder Below,” “Wells Fargo.”

TV: “Bat Masterson,” “B.J. and the Bear,” “CHiPs,” “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” “Helter Skelter,” “The Cisco Kid.”

Pioneer Church, at Oakwood Memorial Park, 22601 Lassen St., Chatsworth.

TV: “Matlock,” “The Last Precinct,” “The Long Journey Home.”

“Scarecrow & Mrs. King” House, 4247 Warner Blvd., Burbank.

Sepulveda Veterans Affairs Medical Center, 16111 Plummer St., North Hills.

Films: “Altered States,” “Dave,” “Switch,” “The Crackerbox,” “Water Dance.”

TV: “Knots Landing,” “National Lampoon’s High School,” “Rape of Dr. Willis.”

Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, 6100 Woodley Ave., Van Nuys.

Films: “Red Sun Rising,” “Rising Sun,” “Twins.”

TV: “Murder, She Wrote,” “Hart to Hart” sequel.

Universal Studios Hollywood, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City.

Films: “Abbott and Costello” series, “Animal House,” “Back Street,” “Dracula,” “Earthquake,” “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial,” “Frances the Talking Mule,” “Frankenstein” series, “Imitation of Life,” “Jaws,” “Ma and Pa Kettle” series, “Magnificent Obsession,” “On Golden Pond,” “Psycho,” “Sherlock Holmes,” “The Sting,” “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

TV: “Cagney & Lacey,” “Message From Nam,” “Switch.”

Van Nuys Airport, 16217 Lindbergh St., Van Nuys.

Films: “Casablanca,” “In the Line of Fire,” “Last Action Hero.”

TV: “Message From Nam.”

Van Nuys High School, 6535 Cedros Ave., Van Nuys.

Films: “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (also filmed at Sherman Oaks Galleria).

TV: “Life Goes On,” “The Wonder Years.”

Walt Disney Co. Studios, 500 S. Buena Vista St., Burbank.

Films: “Bambi,” “Dumbo,” “Mary Poppins,” “Old Yeller,” “Song of the South,” “Swiss Family Robinson,” “The Shaggy Dog” series, “Treasure Island,” “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.”

Warner Bros. Ranch Facility (formerly Columbia Ranch), 3701 W. Oak St., Burbank.

Films: “Christmas Vacation,” “High Noon,” “Lethal Weapon” series, “Lost Horizon,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “The Three Stooges” series, “The World According to Garp,” “You Can’t Take It With You.”

TV: “Bewitched,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Partridge Family.”

Warner Bros. Studios, 4000 Warner Blvd., Burbank.

Films: “All the President’s Men,” “Annie,” “A Star Is Born” (Judy Garland), “Auntie Mame,” “Casablanca,” “East of Eden,” “Giant,” “House of Wax,” “King’s Row,” “Mildred Pierce,” “My Fair Lady,” “Private Benjamin,” “Rebel Without a Cause,” “The Jazz Singer,” “The Music Man,” “The Shootist.”

TV: “The Waltons.”

SANTA CLARITA VALLEY

Lindsey Studios, 25241 W. Avenue Stanford, Valencia.

Films: “Beverly Hills Cop III,” “Mighty Ducks II.”

TV: “Highway to Heaven,” “Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “thirtysomething.”

Magic Movie Studios of Valencia (formerly Valencia Studios), 26030 Avenue Hall, Valencia.

Films: “Judgement Day,” “Lethal Weapon 2,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Star Trek” sequels, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” “Two Jakes.”

Six Flags Magic Mountain, 26101 Magic Mountain Parkway, Valencia.

Films: “National Lampoon’s Vacation,” “Rollercoaster.”

TV: “Step by Step.”

Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park, 10700 W. Escondido Canyon Road, Saugus.

Films: “Battlestar Galactica,” “Charge of the Light Brigade,” “Flash Gordon,” “For the Boys,” “Gunga Din,” “Star Trek,” “The Flintstones.”