Location, Location, Location.

It’s not easy being famous, and nor is it easy if your house is famous. Benny Tatton, location manager of Outrageous Fortune, talks to Margo White about the perils of too much attention.

After six long ratings-busting series, the house in which the Wests lived has become one of the most recognisable pieces of real estate in the country, a sort of Southfork; only rather than a mansion set on an expansive ranch in Dallas, it’s a brick-and-tile located in West Auckland.

Nice back yard, great deck, terrific views over the city and so typically Westie … the country became very fond of it. “Yeah, that house did really grow as a character,” says Benny Tatton, location manager for Outrageous Fortune. “As Clay [Ercolano, the production designer for the series] always said, the house has its arms open. It was welcoming. It really does invite you in. From the moment you pull up into the driveway, there’s a stairwell that takes you to the front door, when you stand on that property it really draws you in.”

And as Benny points out, this hasn’t always been such a good thing, at least not once Outrageous became the most popular series in local broadcasting history and as house-spotting fans struggled to distinguish the difference between private property, and the stuff of television soap. Much of the time it meant the owners had to put up with run-of-the-mill and mildly irritating attentions of people who wanted to get their photo taken in front of the house, but sometimes things turned nasty.

“There was one night, on series three, the owner called me and said, there’s someone here Ben that I don’t know what to do with and I’m scared,” says Tatton who immediately drove over and, finding a carload of guys who “were high as a kite”, promptly called the police. “I’d been there a couple of times and chased people off, just told them that this is private property, it isn’t a set, you can’t come here and that would be fine. But this night they were volatile and I felt nervous for my safety, so God knows how the owner felt.”

“But you know, she didn’t want to make a fuss; the owner felt torn,” he says. “She had signed up for this, so she didn’t feel that she had a right to call up police and make a fuss about people coming onto her property. That was sort of the tone of the whole relationship; she was always so accommodating, but by series three, it was quite apparent that we had to do something as part of our commitment to her.”

As a result, South Pacific Pictures put a security company on 24/7 emergency call out – and the service has occasionally been called on. Tatton still isn’t quite sure why the owners still went and agreed to series four. “Essentially it came down to our relationship, and they knew that I would do whatever it took to keep them safe. But by that stage it was so popular anyway, it didn’t matter whether we were there or not. The Wests lived in the West’s house, and it was their castle and people wanted to see it… I don’t know how we got series five and six. It was the pure heart of the owners.”

Tatton has a broad smile, a direct way of looking at you and easy-going manner; qualities that would undoubtedly be useful for a location manager, for whom getting in the door is a fundamental part of the job. He initially trained as a bricklayer, and then a builder, getting his first introduction to the film and television industry when a friend pulled him in to work as an extra on the music video, the Decepticonz “Stop, Drop and Roll”. He didn’t really enjoy dressing up as a cadet and dancing in front of the cameras, but was intrigued by the army of people running around behind them. “Because there’s no money in music videos everyone is working for nothing and really really hard. So I got my brother to fill in for me as the extra, so I could give the guys behind the scenes a bit of a hand.”

He must have been useful – the producer encouraged him to enroll for film school. He took himself off to South Seas Film and Television School and although he left halfway through the year – “no money coming in and the bills were piling up” – he says it was worth it. “It’s really work-based and attitude-based. The work load itself is huge, and they really get it into the student’s head that if you’re not willing to put in 60 hours a week you’re not going to fly.” Some time later, he got a small job working as general gopher on a television commercial. “It was about being on set, helping out anyone who needs help. I’ll always be in debt to that job. I haven’t stopped working since.”

He spent a couple of years running, not sure whether he would go into the grip or the locations department, eventually gravitating toward the latter. His first management role was on series two of Outrageous, just as it was becoming seriously popular.

Of course while the popularity of the series made things difficult for the owners of The House, it also opened plenty of other doors. Literally. “I could go around west Auckland and say who I was and who I was working for and instead of having to convince them, people would go, ‘please film here’.” But that didn’t lead to plain sailing either. “A lot of fans would want us to film, but wouldn’t understand that they couldn’t use their house for the day, or that they would have 40 crew members here. They just wanted to see Robyn Malcolm or Tammy Davis, but wouldn’t be listening to me in terms of what it actually meant. A couple of times I got caught out… let’s just say it wasn’t the best thing to get the biggest fans.”

Overall, it was a great ride, though, and a hell of a learning curve. “Nobody could have expected that it would become a cult show. I think SPP as a production house learned heaps, in terms of management, and I learned more than I would have on any other show. Outrageous had such a broad fan base, really well-to-do Herne Bay mothers to down and out street kids.”

Thousands will lament that it’s all over, the owners of a certain two-story brick and tile, and you can assume their neighbours, won’t. “It’s kind of bitter sweet for them,” agrees Tatton. “They never did it for the money; the money always went to their grandkids, taking them on trips away or anything to help them, and that essentially sums them up.

“But I’m really stoked that I’m really close to the household. We became really personally close, just because of the amount of time we had to spend together outside the filming. We’ve been through a lot.”