O.K., you’ve scrimped and saved and bought your dream house in Malibu, but one day you wake up and realize the next $5,000 house payment is going to be tough to meet.
Solution?
Rent your house as a location set to the film and television industry.
Depending on a production company’s budget, and the time it’ll need a home for, you could possibly make that mortgage payment for the next three months at least.
To get on that favored list that production companies turn to in time of need, Malibu Locations Etc., Inc. is the place to go. Operated for more than 13 years by Malibuite Diane Klein, Malibu Locations has more than 1,000 of its 4,000 listings for shooting locations right here in Malibu. Other locations listed in the company’s directory range from close to Agoura all the way down toward the Palisades.
Some homes are rented for as short a time as one hour, others for weeks at a time. Rates vary from $1,000 on up to $35,000 a day. If a homeowner lucks out, a house could be rented out for a series that lasts years and years, and the production company will have to keep coming back to shoot new footage year after year.
Klein, true to Hollywood tradition, fell into her corner of show business by accident. “I was a housewife living in Malibu when a location scout came to my door asking if we would like to rent our home for a TV show called ‘Stingray,’ ” she explains.
Klein agreed, and the rest is history. She started a business to put Malibu’s homes on the film market as locations and now has four employees at work at her Point Dume office on Pacific Coast Highway, across from Zuma Beach.
“Not every home is suited for filming,” says Klein, “though we have a wide variety — from Wild West type log homes to ultra modern.”
Similar to film commissions in many states, Malibu Locations offers a wide variety of look-alike settings so that Malibu can double for New England, with Cape Code houses; Arizona, with rocks and sagebrush; or even Italy or Greece, with hilltop marbled mansions overlooking the sea.
The way the business works is simple: A location scout working for a photographer, movie director or producer calls Malibu Locations and describes what they are looking for. Klein then has her staffers pour through their 4,000 locations to see if they have anything that fits. Photos are then e-mailed or Fed-Exed to the potential clients and an offer made. If the homeowner accepts, the contracts are signed.
Inevitably, the contract includes a provision to “return the house back to its original state,” which could include repainting, carpet cleaning, etc.
“Sometimes,” says Klein, “the film company needs a wall to be a different color. They can repaint it, doing a professional job, and if the homeowner decides they like the new color, it is not repainted.”
However, “rarely is that done,” says Klein. “Though, we frequently have the vegetation altered, with plants added or subtracted.”
The owner does not have to worry about permits — the film company gets those from the city. All the homeowner does is sign the contract with the film company and the film company handles the paperwork. Liability insurance is also obtained, with policies over a million dollars covering all potential exigencies.
Since parking is a at a premium in Malibu, and movie companies require trucks to haul cameras, tracks and cranes, off-site parking locations are sometimes set up to transfer talent and workers to and from the actual shooting location.
Besides parking, another problem peculiar to Malibu is bathrooms, or lack of them. Since a feature film crew could easily number 60 people and most homes in Malibu use septic tanks, the demand on bathrooms could easily exceed capabilities, so porta-potties are brought in.
Klein knows the location-rental business from both ends — her own two homes in Malibu are listed in her data base as well as the home of her daughter and all are and frequently rented. One of them, her home on Broad Beach Road, was used so much for the television show “Diagnosis Murder” that the film company went to the trouble to build a duplicate of the main room on the production lot set. Other TV shows that have used Malibu locations found by Klein are: “Baywatch,” “V.I.P.” “Columbo” specials, and a feature called, “Are You Talking to Me?”
Occasionally, a filmmaker will find a stretch of Malibu land that is the perfect setting, except that the ideal home for the movie doesn’t exist there. “In that case,” says Klein, “they build it.”
She cited a recent movie with Robert Redford and Demi Moore where an actual house was built on the beach, though it was not structurally built well enough, or to code, to be allowed to exist as a house after the filming, and was torn down when filming was completed.
A downside to the riches gained from renting out a home? A whole family can be displaced for the duration of the film shoot.
“They go to hotels, condos, friends’ homes, whatever they can work out with their allotment,” says Klein, of options that homeowners have for temporary living quarters. “Sometimes they have children or animals to move as well, and it all has to be worked out.”
The usual “lead time” from when a home is signed for and filming starts is one week, though sometimes for a still photo shoot, it’s as little as one day.
Klein has a few “won’t dos,” and one of them is renting to X-rated movie producers, though her staff all said that Playboy is acceptable as far as still photography.
For interviews of celebrities, Malibu homes are sometimes rented as a backdrop. “Sometimes celebrities don’t want the pictures to be shot in their own homes,” said one Malibu Location employee. “They want to preserve their privacy, so they rent a nearby home to double as their home.”
Terrie Stone, a resident in the Las Tunas Canyon area, says that she has listed her home with Malibu Locations for five years, including to a Japanese music video producer and for a backdrop for clothing catalog models, and has been happy with the way it worked out each time.
“They left the house better than the way they found it,” she says.
In most cases, she was able to re-occupy her home the same evening as filming, the rentals being jobs that could be shot in one day.
David Percelay, a local producer whose ultra-modern ocean view home is on a hill near Paradise Cove, has rented his home several times for filming.
“I always take out the irreplaceable things first and put them into storage,” he says. “But I have full confidence in Diane’s company because they are local Malibu residents, and know our concerns. There are companies in Hollywood or the Valley I wouldn’t work with.”
Being in the film industry himself, he realizes the availability of rentals is vital: “My business wouldn’t be able to work if we weren’t able to rent homes,” he says.