How about a palm reader's house?

You can check that one off too if you've ever enjoyed a bed and breakfast at Manoa Valley Inn.

Ever partied into the wee hours at Pipeline Cafe?

If you have, then you've been to not just one, but two raucous night spots featured in Fox's "North Shore."

With three network television series shooting here this year, audiences here and on the Mainland have been getting a eyeful of O'ahu's human, natural, even supernatural environments. (That's not even counting the cable hit, "Dog the Bounty Hunter.")

And thanks to the magic of set design, you'd have to be truly psychic — or at least one of the handful of film and TV location managers in the state — to identify the various state, city and private properties that have appeared on ABC's "Lost," NBC's now defunct "Hawai'i," and the nearly defunct "North Shore."

Over the last few months, Hawai'i viewers may or may not have recognized the abandoned military complex at Diamond Head doubling as an Iraqi prison camp during a recent flashback scene in "Lost," or the SoulLenz Gallery on River Street dressed up as a warehouse used by a murderer in "Hawaii," or the King Kalakaua Building in Downtown Honolulu guest-starring as a police station in "North Shore."

(Viewers may also recognize the King Kalakaua Building from its appearance in "Hawaii Five-0" and the TV movie "Blood and Orchids.")

"Watching for locations on TV is like watching a game show to me,' " says "North Shore" location manager Stephanie Spangler. "I've been in this business long enough that I can tell almost all of them."

Spangler herself has scouted and managed a wide variety of locations for "North Shore," the nighttime series about life in and around a posh Hawaiian resort.

Much of the action takes place at the fictional Grand Waimea Hotel, an on-screen amalgamation of some real- and not-so-real-life locations. The grand lobby area is built on a set at Diamond Head Studio, pool and bar scenes are shot at Turtle Bay Resort, and other hotel grounds areas are shot at Lanikuhonua, the Campbell Estate's beachfront property at Ko Olina Resort.

And while the basic premise of the show calls for romance and intrigue played out before a backdrop of sun and surf, storylines have brought the production to numerous locations around the island, from the Makapu'u Point Lighthouse to Dillingham Airfield to Jameson's By the Sea.

The show spent part of the past week shooting at Kekaulike Mall, where they converted Golden Jade Jewelry into a bail-bond office.

"To get that all in one place is unusual," Constantinau said. "If we only had one or the other, a lot of productions might choose to shoot elsewhere."

Perhaps no show has made better, more creative use of the island's different looks than the survivor drama "Lost."

In the show, Hawai'i doubles as a mysterious, supposedly deserted island with long isolated beaches, wind-scarred ridges and dense rain forest.

The now-famous crash site is located on a narrow strip of beach at Mokule'ia. The cave where the survivors take shelter is a set built in the old Xerox Building on Nimitz Highway.

In "Lost," the backstory of each of the main characters is revealed through flashbacks. And given the international mix of those characters, finding suitable locations to serve as their countries of origin takes some creativity.

Producers tapped the Kathy Muller Agency to help find houses similar to those you'd find in England, Australia, South Korea and New York. Set designers even turned one private residence in Nu'uanu into a New Orleans hotel.

Other "Lost" locations include the Downtown art gallery Studio 1 (now closed), which appeared as Melbourne Walkabout Tours, and the Hawai'i Convention Center, which doubled as the Sydney International Airport.

" 'Lost' is an interesting show because it can showcase the diversity of Hawai'i," Constantinau said. "You have Charlie in England, Jack and his father in New York, Sayid in Iraq. You really begin to think out of the box."

"Hawaii," the cop drama set in Honolulu, had quite a different challenge, as producers took it on themselves to try to depict a Honolulu darker and seamier than the travel ads.

With the main police-station set housed at the old Hopaco site in Mapunapuna, the production roamed the island, shooting extensively in the Downtown and Chinatown areas, Kaka'ako and other urban sites.

Unfortunately, authentic settings didn't translate into high ratings, and the show was canceled in October.

First on the scene

Ali'iolani Hale became a Nigerian palace in the 2003 action movie "Tears of the Sun." Advertiser library photo • Nov. 20, 2003

Manoa provided one of many locations for ABC's "Lost," a drama which has made creative use of O'ahu's urban and rural settings. Advertiser library photo • Sept. 29, 2004

In the TV series "Lost," the airplane's crash site was staged on a remote section of beach at Mokule'ia on the North Shore. ABC

Location managers have to consider the potential impact of planting 150 people and a caravan of trailers at a location for days or weeks. They have to think about permits and parking, portable toilets and, potentially, PO'd property owners.

No one knows this better than siblings Stephanie and Randy Spangler.

Randy Spangler broke into the business with "Hawaii Five-O" nearly 35 years ago and has managed locations on most of the major television productions that have come through Hawai'i since then.

He gave Stephanie Spangler her first break with a Bowery Bank commercial starring Joe DiMaggio in the 1970s. Since then, Stephanie has established herself as a must-get for commercial, TV and film productions that pass through the state — no small feat for a woman in what is still a male-dominated industry.

"Because my brother and I were the first ones doing this in Hawai'i, we were the guinea pigs for most every place and every new thing that has come along," Stephanie Spangler said. "We've had our share of hard experiences and lessons learned. But it's also been a treasurable experience discovering pockets of unique places on the Islands and watching the enchantment of the people unfold."

The siblings alternate being location manager on every other episode on "North Shore." For Stephanie, each cycle begins with a close reading of the script and visits to potential locations with the director, assistant director, set designer and others.

"You have to have a lot of creativity," Spangler said. "You have to figure out what the director wants to see, and you have to look at things very strangely. What might be a dump site or a school could be a church or a police station."

Next comes the tedious business of applying for permits, drawing maps and arranging for parking, security, traffic control and other needs. After that is the actual on-site management of each location, often a never-ending parade of niggling detail work. During a recent shoot at Lanikuhonua, Spangler and assistant location manager Randy Paty had to comb the grounds looking for a pair of missing trash bins.

When Spangler and her brother first started, getting a permit to film a TV show was relatively easy. But as the local industry developed, so too did state and city bureaucracies, to the point where a simple permit could take weeks to secure.

Today, with hundreds of productions making requests each year, most of the process — including, in some cases, extensive coordination between agencies — is overseen by the state and county film offices. Despite limited resources, the film offices are usually able to turn around permit requests within a couple of days, a necessity given the tight shooting schedules most productions are under.

Constantinau said her personal record for getting a permit approved is seven minutes.

Still, approval is by no means automatic. Constantinau said she carefully balances the needs of the production with the impact on the community and the ability of the production to manage and control the shoot.

Perhaps the most complicated request Constantinau got this year was for a chase sequence that "Hawaii" producers wanted to shoot in Waikiki. The all-day shoot went off without a hitch, but it took carefully orchestrated traffic and crowd control, a small army of police officers and production assistants, and a Herculean exercise in time management to pull it off.

Treading lightly

Spangler says Hawai'i residents are particularly understanding and accommodating when a film production rolls into their neighborhood. Still, she says, location managers need to be extremely sensitive to the impact of disruptions inevitable when trucks, crews, actors and extras converge on a location.

Spangler got an early lesson while filming a commercial with Victoria Principal in Lanikai. The permitting process was vague then, she says, and the permit she got, apparently initially, wasn't enough to satisfy officers from the Division of Conservation and Resource Enforcement, who were called in by a disgruntled resident. The resulting flap made front-page headlines the next day.

"Everything turned out fine, but it was a trial for me," Spangler said. "The next day I took potted orchid plants and boxes of candy around to all the neighbors and made my apologies."

These days, Spangler and her assistants make it a point to visit with residents before shooting begins in their neighborhood. Sometimes they have to smooth feathers ruffled by previous outside productions.

"It's an island," said Paty, the assistant location manager. "Most of us are born and raised here. We're not trying to come in, make a buck and leave. When we go to a location, we try to leave things better than we found it because we want to be able to come back."

Mutual benefits

That belief seems to be shared by all of the series shot in Honolulu this year.

Theresa Wery, owner of Manoa Valley Inn, would love to have the folks from "Lost" come back to shoot again.

Wery said the crew displaced her furniture, painted her living room walls and trampled her flower garden. But it was no problem because they came back the next day to repaint the walls, put the furniture back in place and replant her garden. They even let her keep the screen door they built for the scene.

It certainly didn't hurt that the production paid Wery a location fee for three days prep work, shooting and clean-up. They also reimbursed her guests for the inconvenience.

Wahiawa Middle School teacher Paul Stader actually lives full time on a production set. His three-bedroom home near Sunset Beach doubles as character Frankie Seau's house on "North Shore."

To minimize the inconvenience of moving things around every time the show needed to shoot a scene at the house, Stader moved his belongings to an outside shed and let the production design crew set up permanently in the house. He keeps the back bedroom for himself so he can do his own work while the crew is filming.

The house itself used to serve as an officers quarters at Schofield Barracks during World War II and was moved to its present location in the 1960s.

"It's just a funky old beach house," Stader said. "The crew has been great about fixing things up and repairing things if they need to be repaired."

The crew even built extra supports for the beachfront lanai, where much of the shooting takes place.

And Stader certainly doesn't mind using the new furniture that the production set up in his house.

"It's been fine," Stader says. "It hasn't been an inconvenience at all."

Ronen Zilberman, owner of SoulLenz Gallery, was a little more ambivalent about the use of his space for TV productions. Both "Hawaii" and "Lost" have used the gallery for filming. Though he said it was a good experience, he wonders if Honolulu really needs all this attention.

"Everywhere in Chinatown and Downtown, you see a truck belonging to some television production," Zilberman said. "It's not what Chinatown is.

"It's good for me," he said. "But (with) the attention that comes from these big pictures, what kind of people are coming to Hawai'i and what is their impact?"

Zilberman said location fees make opening up his gallery to TV productions a good financial decision.

The location fees network TV productions negotiate with landlords and community associations are generous, but TV productions typically spend less than larger film and commercial productions.

Without specifying an amount, Jed Roa, vice president and general manager of the Pipeline Cafe, said the location fee the club received from "North Shore" was worth shutting down for a day.

Roa said the shoot started at 5 a.m. and lasted until midnight.

Despite the cosmetic changes, the show still used the "Pipeline Cafe" sign and identified the club by name in one scene.

Employees and patrons gathered at the club to watch when the episode aired.

"It was really cool," Roa said.