Television Locations

"E ntertainment Tonight" will air its 2,000th show on Friday. Although thumped by critics since it debuted on Sept. 14, 1981, the syndicated program has survived. Entertainment reporters are now as common on TV as weather reporters, in part because of "ET," which has remained television's leading news show devoted solely to the entertainment industry. Last September, at the start of its eighth season, "ET" introduced a new format, with glitzier graphics, strobe-light pacing and two new features--its opening Inside Story and the ET Insider, a gossip-column-style commentary by co-star John Tesh.

NEW YORK - At Ripley-Grier Studios, a cramped rehearsal space on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, girls dressed in leotards dart in and out of the lobby to and from dance lessons, pretending not to notice the mighty star in their midst. Tony-winning actress Kristin Chenoweth - all 4 feet, 11 inches and 91 pounds of her - sits patiently alongside the stage mothers , waiting for a pianist to arrive. If, like the aspiring performers around her, Chenoweth is a little anxious, it's with good reason: Less than four months after a freak accident on the set of "The Good Wife" left her with a litany of head and body injuries, she's returning to the stage.

Well off the Interstate 90 freeway about an hour outside Seattle, a forest of towering pine trees nearly swallows this small, sleepy town and provides perfect seclusion for the 800 or so people who live here. But on one unseasonably sunny afternoon recently, dozens of curious outsiders quietly lined the main street, which stretches a whole block in length, to witness a showdown.

It's only a matter of time before local film and TV buffs experience a sense of deja vu around Los Angeles. That place looks familiar. Did you see it on the way home from work, or when you checked in with your favorite characters? Could be both. Most productions not filmed on studio lots are shot within the 30-mile zone (known as the TMZ) from Beverly and La Cienega boulevards, with some locations more popular than others.

As teen-agers in Pasadena, Ron Stephan and his high school buddies would climb the cliffs rising from Arroyo Seco and play Batman. The imposing brick mansion at the top of the bluff--known as Wayne Manor in the "Batman" television series--was their backdrop. For years, Stephan and other area residents pointed to the home just south of the Colorado Street Bridge, showing off the fictional home of the caped crusader and his young ward, Robin, to friends and tourists.

Fade in. Exterior, day. Jerry's apartment building. Jerry's fellow tenants are coming home from a shopping trip. "Ayudeme con los Pampers." "Mira, no tengo llave." "Ay . . . ni yo tampoco!" Laughter up. Applause. Yada, yada, yada. * I have seen "Seinfeld" twice: Once, because everyone else in the home where I was a guest was watching it, and a second time when I was chained to a wall in an Argentine prison. OK, I lied about the prison. All I'm saying is, I wasn't struck by sitcom lightning.

"Where are all the single horny men?" the warm-up man, Mark Wolberg, yelled to some 3,000 of San Diego's young, restless and media-hungry gathered around the post-modern stage in the sand. It was the moment of truth for MTV's 1994 "Spring Break" programming, taped for the first time on Mariner's Point in Mission Beach for seven days, ending Monday.

It looks like "Risky Business" minus Tom Cruise. A Malibu couple has left for the summer and, in their absence, their estate has been overrun by a slew of teen-agers and twentysomethings. They've painted the white house a multicolor melange of purple, orange, red and turquoise and turned the tennis court into a parquet floor, complete with movable basketball hoops. The once barren back yard now has an above-ground swimming pool and a sand volleyball court.

Brent Hershman, an assistant camera operator on "Pleasantville," a modestly budgeted comedy for New Line Cinema starring Oscar nominees Joan Allen and William H. Macy, had put in a grueling 19-hour day on the Long Beach set of the film. The father of two small children, Hershman was headed for his West Hills home about 2 a.m. on March 6, exhausted from the day of filming that had started at 6:30 a.m.

With her halter top and baseball cap, sing-song voice and thigh-slapping laugh, Debbie Allen's behind-the-camera style isn't likely to remind anyone of John Huston or Cecil B. DeMille. As she wipes the sweat from her bare shoulders and jokes with the cameraman about her girlish figure, sings out commands punctuated with "honey," and hugs visitors to the set with unrestrained delight, she looks more like a cute, rambunctious water girl than she does a serious director.

Twenty-five years ago, Sony Corp. invented a device that allowed people to take high-quality audio with them anywhere they went. It was the Walkman, and it changed consumer electronics forever. This year, Sony will bring to the U.S. a device that allows people to take high-quality video with them just about anywhere. It's called Location Free, and its saga illustrates how incredibly difficult it has become to invent, sell and sustain a new concept in personal electronics.

Film and television production on the streets of Los Angeles dropped 13.4% in July from a year ago, a drop stemming from earlier uncertainties over Hollywood labor outlook. Although studios settled union contracts with actors in July and writers in May, production is expected to take months to return to normal levels. That's because studios initially accelerated production as a hedge against possible strikes, then cut back after those projects were finished.

For Pasadena, a Rose City by any other name not only doesn't smell as sweet, it stinks. That's the growing reaction to a cost-saving decision by producers of the new prime-time soap opera "Pasadena" to substitute Canada's Vancouver as a stand-in when production starts Monday on the Fox network show. "It's very ironic and unfortunate," said Ariel Penn, Pasadena's filming and special events chief.

Across the road from the brand-new opera, a historic building on the banks of the Danube River has been converted into an unusual spectacle: a four-story replica of a portion of the Warsaw ghetto. It is late February and workers are finishing putting in a plaza and street of real, inches-thick cobblestones, the kind of detail that is affordable in such low-production-cost locales. The story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising is a difficult one, at best.

This must be hell. That's what it looks like in Red Hook, amid the abandoned industrial buildings and brick warehouses: the dumping ground for old mattresses, rusted oil drums, a stripped and burned Mercedes-Benz and whatever useless trash that's been tossed vicariously out a car window. It's Brooklyn's junkyard district, a place God has forsaken, where the Manhattan chic wouldn't be caught dead. Nothing grows here, especially not in the winter, except maybe a few weeds.

Much of the CBS drama "The Fugitive" is shot in Seattle and nearby towns, and Wednesday morning the production got a jolt--a 6.8-magnitude jolt, to be exact--as the Pacific Northwest was rattled by an earthquake that as of Thursday had caused an estimated 250 injuries, one death and billions of dollars in damages. Many said the toll could have been worse had the quake's epicenter not been buried in solid rock 30 miles beneath ground.

The rebellious black stallion had finally let Jimmy Smits mount him and the six child actors playing Cheech Marin's brood were primed to pay their father a tearful goodby when the first raindrops fell. A clap of thunder sent the cast and crew of Turner Network Television's made-for-TV movie "The Cisco Kid" running for the cover of an adobe house in this mountain village, their sixth location in as many weeks.

The Mammoth Mountain Ski Area says it successfully objected to plans to use Mammoth Lakes as the name of the locale in the recent TV movie "Volcano: Fire on the Mountain" after finding the script "offensive and exaggerated." After discussions between representatives of the ski area and producers at Davis Entertainment Co. of Century City, the name of the setting for the ABC film was changed to Angel Lakes, both parties confirmed.

It's been a rough morning in Paterson, N.J. Three men have been shot downtown, and Deputy Mayor Alan Levine is struggling to say something positive about his city. Here's what he comes up with: "Remember when Big Pussy smashed the car into a bike rider, and Beansie got run over and they chased a guy down the street with a gun? All that was great for Paterson. It made a lot of people in New Jersey very proud."