Making the Scene

What the heck is going on at Sepulveda Basin?

One day, a lowlife with a gun is shooting at a rap artist in the tunnels beneath a sewage treatment plant. A few days later, ninja assassins are rappelling down a wall and crashing cars on an adjacent access road.

Not long ago, a maniacal police chief at the plant’s administration building dispatched a cyborg killer to execute a kick-boxing Secret Service agent.

Then there was the problem with the exploding coconuts during the “Bio-Dome” experiment.

What’s happening is good old-fashioned movie magic. But it is taking place in a most unlikely location: the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, a Van Nuys facility that treats about 80 million gallons of sewage a day.

In a testament to Hollywood’s resourcefulness, the plant and adjacent Japanese Garden have become one of the hottest film sites in the city, particularly for low-budget sci-fi movies, monster flicks and action films.

In the past two years, the location has been used 99 times for filming and still-photography shoots, according to the Entertainment Industry Development Corp., which issues filming permits in Los Angeles.

The plant and garden, built to demonstrate the positive uses of reclaimed water, are booked almost once a week on average, a pace that Donna Washington of the development corporation called “pretty busy, especially for a city location.”

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Only a few other city-owned sites, such as Griffith Park and City Hall, are more popular. The reason for the garden’s popularity: The location is cheap and versatile.

For only $300 a day, film crews have access to 6 1/2 acres of serene, picturesque greenery, miles of spooky underground tunnels beneath the sewage plant and use of the plant’s futuristic administration building.

“The price is right,” said Bill Monroe, a location manager for Royal Oaks Entertainment, which has filmed at the Japanese Garden several times, including part of a karate-action flick called “Memorial Day.”

“If you are a low-budget company, you are out there for only $300.”

In the past few years, the site’s popularity has increased as word of its versatility and the bargain fees spread among location scouts, Washington said.

Similar locations elsewhere can cost up to $3,000 a day, but Mayor Richard Riordan has demanded that the city keep filming fees low at its facilities to help the entertainment industry thrive in Los Angeles.

Workers at the garden also try to accommodate the film industry, but they are careful to make sure that the filming doesn’t cause too much wear and tear on the delicate vegetation or disrupt the three or four daily garden tours. For that reason, a landscape architect stands by to monitor all filming.

“We give them little reminders here and there to keep them from trampling things,” said Patrick Rigney, assistant landscape architect at the garden.

Not long ago, Rigney said he got nervous when a crew brought a panther to the garden without notifying garden administrators. But he said there have been no other problems with filming there.

Unfortunately for Rigney and other workers at the garden, popularity does not mean extra money for the facility. All the permit fees go to the city’s general fund.

The garden, designed by Koichi Kawana, includes weeping willow trees and meticulously groomed dichondra that surround peaceful, koi-filled ponds.

The garden has been used for backdrop scenery in car commercials, instructional videotapes for tai chi and even erotic, adult-oriented films such as “Making Love III” by the Playboy Entertainment Group.

“Nudity has been filmed here,” Gene Greene, the garden’s head landscape architect, said matter-of-factly. “But we don’t allow lewd or illicit activities. We have checked with the vice squad to make sure no laws are broken.”

The adjacent administration building, with its shiny glass-and-steel facade, is often used to portray an ultramodern laboratory where controversial experiments go awry, leading to disastrous results.

The building portrayed the “Bio-Dome” in a comedy with Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin that spoofs the Biosphere experiment of a few years ago. At the end of the movie, the crew launched a huge fireball out of the building entrance to simulate an exploding coconut that was detonated by a stir-crazy scientist in the movie.

The building was also cast as a futuristic police headquarters in the movie “Cyber Tracker,” about an android that is ordered to kill Secret Service agent Don “The Dragon” Wilson.

Beneath the treatment plant lie miles of dark, pipe-lined tunnels that are often used to film the all-too-common underground chase scene where the hero gets cornered by mutant monsters or vengeful villains.

The tunnels were recently used for such a scene in the upcoming “I Got the Hookup,” by rapper Master P. In the scene, Master P and his crew are running through the tunnels when they confront his nemesis, who takes a shot at the rapper just before angry guard dogs chase the lot of them away.

Clearly, many of the films shot at the garden won’t soon be vying for honors at the Sundance Film Festival.

For the most part, the movies are low-budget efforts that go straight to video. Some titles: “Kraa! The Sea Monster,” “Squids,” “Psycho Sushi,” “Metalbeast,” “Invisible Mom” and “Twilight of the Goulds.”

Such small-screen series as “Murder, She Wrote,” “Baywatch Nights,” “Power Rangers” and “Star Trek Deep Space Nine” have also been shot at the garden.

Although Greene oversees much of the filming, he doesn’t worry about the quality of the films or TV shows shot there.

“I will not judge what is good or bad,” he said. “We just ask them to respect the property and leave it in the state they found it.”