Reality’s drawing room

Watch reality shows for any length of time, and an unmistakable feature starts to recur. No, not public humiliation or base greed, but prime Los Angeles real estate.

Over and over, various unscripted trials and rejections are carried out with a background of gazebos, fireplaces, grand staircases, marble floors, soaring ceilings and stunning views. The mansions are all over Los Angeles County, from Encino to Brentwood to Silver Lake. The shows using them include such stalwarts as “American Idol” and “The Bachelor,” newer hits like “Last Comic Standing” and “The Swan,” and such harder-to-classify hits and misses as “For Love or Money,” “Mr. Personality,” “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance,” “Who Wants to Marry My Dad,” “Average Joe” and “Mad Mad House,” among many others. One new show this fall, Fox’s “The Complex: Malibu,” calls for yet another mansion.

Watch with the sound off, and they all start melding into one big reality show: “This Insanely Fancy House.” With people getting voted off the kitchen island.

With every new show, a call goes out to location scouts and agencies to find the most incredible mansion yet. Agencies like Sunset Locations, which has handled at least 15 reality shows in the last year, are constantly in the field trying to find new places that will top the last. (In L.A. even homes have agents.) A manse-owner might receive a dozen calls from different sources regarding the same show. The rental prices range from $5,000 to $15,000 a day for shorter shoots, to $60,000 to $150,000 a month, not including the owner’s relocation fee, for shows that stick around longer.

Yet even though everyone’s trying to find the most unusual house out there, they all seem to be using the same shot list for their scenes: pulling up to the huge front door in a limo. Standing on the wrought-iron balcony pondering one’s fate. Walking the immaculate grounds pondering one’s fate some more. Playing pool in the game room. Primping in the dressing room. Everybody in the hot tub. And enough aerial shots of the whole spread to create a topographical map of L.A.

The houses are so ubiquitous that the reality shows themselves talk about it. At the opening of “My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance,” host Claudia DiFolco walked down a broad marble staircase and said, “This spectacular estate is the kind you might find in any ordinary reality show.” DiFolco then set up the action: “But as you’re about to find out, what will take place here at this mansion is anything but ordinary.” Sure, that’s what they all say.

In some cases, the house seems to help persuade the contestants to stay for the indignities heaped upon them. Randy, “Big Fat’s” unwitting fiancee, looked truly overwhelmed as she wandered around her surroundings. “I’ve never really been in houses like this,” she exclaimed. “This is a $10-million mansion -- everything is perfect.” By the time she was told the real purpose of the show -- to trick her family into believing she’s marrying an oaf -- she seemed seduced by the beauty of her surroundings.

The locations aren’t just used so the audience can see how the other .001% lives. These over-the-top settings are actually quite practical. As Robert Mendel of Robert Mendel Locations says, there’s a formula for the kinds of shots that the shows need, “because they’re largely shows about people yakking.” They require a lot of visual stimulation to keep people interested. “You have to have a really tall staircase, not because you want to watch some lady walking down the stairs but because you want to put a camera way up at the ceiling and have it sweep down, and have a dramatic, bird’s-eye view on a wide angle lens that makes you feel like you’re 50 feet in the air, when you’re actually only 20 feet in the air,” Mendel says. All that swooping and craning requires a certain type of house.

Don’t bother the neighbors

The shows also need isolation from neighbors, so that the lighting and movement required of a 24-hour surveillance show won’t disturb them. Six bedrooms are usually required to house the contestants. There has to be room to feed a crew of up to 100 people and to store tons of equipment. And producers often require a separate space -- a basement, pool house or garage -- to use as their command center.

Then there are the less practical reasons. According to J.D. Roth, an executive producer of NBC’s “For Love or Money” -- which returned to the air June 7 -- these aren’t reality shows, “they’re dramas. To make it dramatic you have to have scale and production value and all these things to make these guys contemplate these huge moral dilemmas. And it starts with the house.”

He chose a newly built castle-like estate atop Mulholland Drive to suit those aims. Roth says that when the lights are on at night, the house and grounds can be seen from planes as they land at LAX.

For Kent Weed, co-executive producer for Fox’s “The Swan,” which returns Oct. 25 with a new group of self-described ugly ducklings who underwent major transformations, the setting “is about elegance and bigger-than-life things and a dream-fulfilling type of look.”

To that end, Weed picked a grandiose, 30,000-square-foot Greco-Roman-classical mansion in the Holmby Hills, built in the mid-1990s and featuring double grand staircases in the entry. “I know the girls feel so much better being in this elegant marble room with the grand stairways and huge ceilings,” Weed said of the contestants.

Weed was also an executive producer of Sci-Fi Channel’s “Mad Mad House,” in which five people who practice alternative or “alt” lifestyles (vampirism, primitivism, etc.) hosted 10 conservative guests and judged their ability to tolerate differences. “The house is one of the characters in the show,” Weed said, adding that they wanted a place with an eclectic, somewhat Gothic look. They found it in the Paramour estate in Silver Lake, which was built in 1923. The production built buttresses outside the front entrance and attached vines to the outer walls to add atmosphere. It’s all part of the fantasy inherent in reality shows.

So what possesses people who possess such incredible homes to rent them out to reality shows? “Money,” Eric Shore quickly responds. Shore is an interior designer who designed his multimillion-dollar home at the top of Doheny in the Hollywood Hills. A location scout rang his gate bell and offered a huge sum of money for its use in this summer’s Joel Silver reality series for NBC, “Next Action Star,” which debuted June 15.

Like others in the business, Shore refused to offer specifics on how much he was paid, but suffice it to say it’s more than chump change.

Shore added that he agreed only because he felt good about the people involved and that it presented a unique opportunity. He and his partner were moved to a house of their choosing, but he visited regularly to watch the proceedings. “It was an adventure,” said Shore. “I loved it.”

A matter of pride

In addition to the money, some homeowners relish the chance to show off their homes. Xorin Balbes, owner of Temple Home design firm, worked diligently for more than a year to restore his house in Los Feliz to its former glory. It had been built in 1927 by silent star Madge Bellamy but is known as the Talmadge estate for subsequent owner Norma Talmadge. Balbes uses the money from film shoots to cover some of the expenses of restoration for this and other homes. But that’s not his only reason for renting them out. “After I restore them, it’s also a joy for me to share them,” he says. The exquisite 1927 Italianate villa was used for the finale of “Celebrity Mole” and for an upcoming ABC show tentatively titled “The Institute.”

Balbes echoes other homeowners when he says he didn’t care much what the show was about. “The most important thing that matters to me is how they’re going to care for my property,” he says. “Above and beyond that, as long as it’s not porno, it’s totally fine.”

Dana Hollister’s Paramour is a professional location for innumerable projects, not just “Mad Mad House,” and all of the money is funneled back into its upkeep. “We needed an irrigation system, so we did it,” she says of the “Mad” shoot. Hollister points out that this kind of filming can go a long way toward saving historic buildings that otherwise would fall into disrepair. “You really can’t get any funding for these things,” she says. “If it weren’t for filming, this house would have long ago been bulldozed down.”

Whenever filming takes place in the house, Hollister lives in a converted stable on the grounds. However, she was on hand to watch Art the modern primitive “alt” get suspended from the ceiling with hooks in his skin.

“Seeing it in real life is off the charts. We were shivering, it was so icky,” she recalls, while making it a point to note that Art was one of the nicest guys she’s ever met.

Hollister found the whole experience of living amid a reality show set to be a trip in itself. “You wake up in the middle of the night and there are two grips outside your door, there are people in your kitchen, they’re everywhere,” she says of the experience. “I was living in the ultimate reality show -- because I was watching all this surreal reality going on that’s not even real. It’s all layers of existence.” She may have another show there -- and another rental.