Valley Praised as Hollywood’s Biggest Backlot

When C. Robert Holloway, a film location scout, looks at the Valley, he sees not suburban sprawl, but a location with a thousand faces.

Holloway has about 28,000 Valley sites for filming catalogued in the vast files of his Los Angeles firm, including brooding Tudor mansions in Tarzana and cornfields in Pacoima.

“Our file on the Newhall Ranch is as thick as the Sears Roebuck catalogue,” Holloway said, ticking off different “looks” available at the Newhall Land and Farming Co.’s 38,000-acre working film ranch in Valencia.

The Valley’s busiest location, the Newhall Ranch routinely books several production companies a day and makes nightly appearances on network TV. Pete Toby, location manager for “The Fall Guy,” schedules shoots on the ranch--home to 3,000 head of beef cattle that can be rented as bovine extras--about every two weeks.

The Newhall Ranch is so attuned to industry needs that its roads have no lines down the middle, allowing film companies to paint their own yellow or white stripes to match earlier footage.

“We ask them to use tempera paint so that it will wash off in the rain and we can start with a fresh road,” Newhall locations manager Weldon Sipe explained.

Convenient to the Burbank, Universal and Disney studios and with more empty parking spaces than the Westside, the Valley is Hollywood’s biggest backlot.

Without a photogenic coast or a glamorous image, the Valley is not the star location the Westside is, but it gets steady work nonetheless. Just how much is hard to pin down.

But last week Warner Bros. was filming a feature, “Pee Wee’s Big Adventure,” at the San Fernando Mission. Stunts for CBS’s “Scarecrow and Mrs. King” were shot at the Van Nuys-Sherman Oaks Recreation Center. The NBC soap “Santa Barbara” was in Studio City’s Franklin Canyon. And exteriors for CBS’s “Trapper John, M.D.” were filmed outside a Woodland Hills hospital, said Denise Wheeler, who runs a Van Nuys business that arranges permits for film makers.

“We go to the Valley because it’s less congested and there are so many wonderful looks out there. The Valley is full of surprises,” Holloway said, countering popular wisdom.

“The only thing it doesn’t have is skyscrapers to match New York City,” he said. Instead, it has Warner Center, with its gleaming commercial monoliths. “We’ve done things there where you see a reflection of a helicopter in one of the mirrored buildings, dramatic reflections-of-the-sun sorts of looks, cities of the future.”

‘Middle America’ Aura

Woodland Hills and other parts of the Valley, he said, have a “Middle America” aura especially popular with makers of commercials who want to avoid the palm trees and yellowed hills that scream California.

Holloway recalled combing the Valley for such a location, for a Purina Cat Chow commercial. As he explains, those cats can’t actually cha-cha-cha but they are trained, and they won’t perform if they sense the presence of animals that have not been trained with them.

“I can’t tell you the miles we have driven to find the perfect front porch, only to find that the neighbors have cats so we couldn’t use it.”

Although some call the Valley faceless, Richard Vane, who frequently scouts for Steven Spielberg’s firm, Amblin, described it as malleable. Locations without landmarks or distinctive style are easier to “dress” to meet the needs of a script.

“Many portions of the Valley are nondescript so you can seem to be shooting New York or Ohio and still be near the studios,” he said.

Vane was the location manager for “E.T.” and recalls how Spielberg was looking for a tract-house paradise, reminiscent of the Phoenix suburb where he grew up. He found it in Porter Ranch, where he especially liked a certain high vantage point where, Vane recalled, “you could look down a road and see houses one after another, all looking more or less the same.”

Although pleased with the neighborhood, Spielberg was not able to find a specific house that met his needs. “The house was supposed to be the end of civilization and the beginning of the wilderness,” Vane said. Spielberg finally found the perfect house--a tile-roofed twin to those in Porter Ranch--in Tujunga.

“When you watch the movie, Elliott and Michael come out of the house in Tujunga and bicycle down the road in Northridge,” Vane explained.

Reasonable Fees

Unlike film-phobic Beverly Hills and Pasadena, the Valley does not have sky-high permit fees or burdensome restrictions that discourage filming. The permit for filming in Beverly Hills costs $640.47 per day and comes with a ban on night shooting, among other provisions. A Los Angeles city permit, good for most Valley shoots, is $100 and allows all-night shooting with the mermission of neighbors.

There are exceptions, as Wheeler, who has to know them, points out. A house at 4222 Agnes St. in Studio City became such an industry favorite that the neighbors got the Los Angeles City Board of Public Works to limit filming in the neighborhood to once a month, and at the house to every other month. Toluca Lake requires that neighbors be notified 48 hours before filming begins, that cast and crew be bused in so their parked cars will not clog the streets and bans eating in public view.

For film makers, one of the virtues of the Valley is that most of it lies within the studio zone, a charmed circle of territory radiating 30 miles from the corner of Beverly and La Cienega boulevards.

When working within that zone, union cast and crew members are expected to get to and from work on their own, at their own expense. A foot outside the zone, the company is responsible for transportation, hourly compensation to the cast and crew for their travel time and other costs.

There are an increasing number of parking lots and condos to shoot within the zone but fewer and fewer open spaces, without telephone lines and intrusive evidence of civilization. “This is the last, biggest chunk of land within the studio zone under one owner,” Newhall Ranch’s Weldon Sipe said.

Newhall is big enough that several companies can shoot there at once, out of sight and sound of each other. Sipe said Newhall’s most requested location is the airstrip at Indian Dunes, built for the old “Black Sheep Squadron” series. Newhall also has desert areas, patches like jungles, and lakes that can be filled and emptied as needed. The African sequence in “Under Fire” was filmed on the ranch, as was the Vietnam sequence for “The Twilight Zone” during which Vic Morrow and two child actors died.

Cattle graze on its rolling hills; Sun Oil pumps on the property, and some of its acreage is devoted to raising walnuts, garbanzo beans and other crops. Without these sources of income, Newhall could not afford to devote so much valuable real estate to movie making, Sipes says.

Once, he recalled, a “Dynasty” set was built on top of a producing oil well.

“The house was made so that it actually split in two, so on a moment’s notice, if they had to service the wellhead or there was a problem, you could actually pull the building apart and drive a truck in.”

Sipe would like to build his inventory of permanent sets, which now include a Mexican or Southeast Asian village, depending on how it is dressed. To do so economically, he often asks production companies to build their sets of higher-grade materials and leave parts of them behind in exchange for a break on location fees.

Although often annoying to neighbors, camera crews on local streets are a welcome sight to those worried that California is losing entertainment dollars to other states.

As Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Sepulveda), a member of the Motion Picture Council, points out, “runaway production” to New York, Florida and other states hits the Valley especially hard.

“There are superstars who live in the Valley, there’s no doubt about it . . . but what the Valley’s got tens of thousands of, literally, are the people who make up the industry. They are those folks you see at the end of the trailers--the grips, the camera people, the set designers, the lighting people, the technicians, the folks who can’t pick up and move when productions go out of state.