From Real to Reel : Van Nuys: Assistant Principal Joseph Walker of Grant High has connections in Hollywood. When producers need a school setting, they come to him.

Meet Joseph Walker--Grant High School’s assistant principal, disciplinarian . . . and Hollywood agent.

As the Van Nuys school’s designated liaison to the entertainment industry, Walker is the man who holds the keys to a sprawling suburban campus that has already starred in numerous television series, small-screen movies and feature films.

When location managers scramble to transfer Grant’s look from real to reel, it’s Walker they have to deal with.

Not that he drives a hard bargain or gets finicky about the roles the school is offered. In fact, Walker welcomes nearly everyone who rings him up hoping to schedule a shoot. Filming revenues, after all, add up to tens of thousands of extra dollars every year for the campus, which suffers from the same budget woes afflicting all Los Angeles public schools.

And it’s easy money: $1,500 net for each day of filming.

“Do you know how much . . . that is in candy sales?” Walker says with a laugh.

Last year, Grant generated a $38,000 windfall by making itself available to camera crews. Its earnings represented nearly one-sixth of the entire income from filming received by all of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 625 schools.

Walker does not actively solicit business. After all, no agent worth his salt makes his client look too desperate.

But while other campuses can turn to aggressive booster clubs to raise extra cash, Grant has come to count heavily on filming proceeds to help fund student activities and programs, from the annual homecoming parade to new band uniforms.

“We aimed for $38,000 and we made $38,000” last year, says the jovial, bespectacled Walker. “This year we’re aiming for $24,000. With the recession on, I’m aiming for a little less.”

Still, budgeted at exactly $24,080 in the student body ledger, filming is the school’s second-biggest projected fund-raiser, only slightly behind the $25,000 officials expect to rake in from soda sales.

Credit four things for Grant’s magnetic attraction to filmmakers: its proximity to Tinseltown; the complete absence of telltale California palm trees on campus; its red-brick, non-stucco architecture, and most of all, say some in the entertainment industry, an administration that smiles upon film-crew visits and eagerly accommodates their needs.

“For us to land at a school that welcomes us and works with us, that’s the best,” says Pam Carter, location manager for the ABC family drama “Life Goes On.” “It’s the most important thing to have an administration understand your needs and then to fulfill your needs.”

“You’re selling cooperation,” Walker says. “That’s all it is. There’s no magic to it.”

Grant’s continuing relationship with “Life Goes On” has been one of the most lucrative for the campus, which is used so often that it has become the “home set” for episodes that call for the show’s teen-age leads to be in school, according to Carter.

The show has filmed in just about every campus location imaginable--even a men’s room.

The series, now in its fourth season, remains a good source of revenue for Grant even though savvy producers have realized that the studio, Warner Bros., would save money by recreating the school on its own sound stages, eliminating the need to go on location for simple shots.

“We took the measurements, we took pictures and we took the design . . . and rebuilt Grant High School on our stages,” says Carter, who is on a first-name basis with administrators and knows their home phone numbers so she can schedule shoots or request setups on a moment’s notice.

“We have exact Grant corridors, lockers. We have the great big hall staircase coming down. We’ve duplicated the color of the tile, the interior classroom window design, the layout and a portion of the exterior quad.”

But the series still returns to Grant to shoot most exterior shots. “Let’s say it’s a long shot with 100 students milling around. We want the real thing,” Carter said.

To location managers on the lookout for telegenic sites, the quad--a long, grassy area studded with pine trees--is ideal for scenes that supposedly take place somewhere in the Midwest or on the East Coast.

“It’s the lack of California vista,” Carter explains. “I can lay snow down out there, and it works. If you put our lead character, Becca, and her friends in overcoats, bundled up, walking from class to class or walking across the quad, it’s believable.”

Last week, the 39-acre campus doubled as a New York school for an upcoming TV movie chronicling the recent case of the “Long Island Lolita,” a story that Hollywood quickly snatched up.

Starring Alyssa Milano (“Who’s the Boss?”) and Jack Scalia (“Dallas”), the movie--tentatively titled “Casualty of Love”--tells the tale of Amy Fisher, the teen-ager who in May pleaded guilty to shooting her alleged lover’s wife.

“The big thing is to find a place with no palm trees around it,” says Rhonda Baer, the movie’s location manager. “This is supposed to take place in Long Island, and this place has no palm trees and no Spanish roof. It doesn’t look like Los Angeles.”

The cast filmed three hours one evening for a scene that lasts about a minute and a half. Long before the rest of the crew arrived, set decorators and production assistants touched up a downstairs corridor, tacking up a bulletin board, filling an empty trophy cabinet, even putting up a Grant cheerleading poster they borrowed from the floor above.

Despite the initial absence of filming equipment, Grant students who strolled by between classes seemed to know instantly that the hallway had become a movie location. A few of them stopped only long enough to inquire what the title of the production was.

“The kids are rather blase about it,” says Principal Bob Collins. “They don’t even look anymore. They just walk over the wires and go to class.”

Student body President Alison Atikian agrees.

“We just pretty much ignore it. It’s kind of an inconvenience to us actually,” she says. “But we do get excited sometimes when they ask for extras.”

Or when they’re filming “Beverly Hills 90210,” which has enough teen-age heartthrobs to set off campus fire alarms.

“I knew a lot of people who were hanging around the trailers trying to see someone,” Alison recalls.

Grant, the alma mater of actor Tom Selleck, has been popular with studios for several years. But during Walker’s tenure as assistant principal, the school has begun exploiting its Industry appeal more thoroughly. Now the campus is one of the top filming moneymakers in the entire school district.

Until two years ago, each school was permitted to make its own arrangements with film companies and charge fees at its own discretion, which at Grant, Walker says, amounted to about $2,000 a day.

However, to impose some order on the process--and to answer complaints of unfairness from schools that were not in demand for filming--the Board of Education adopted a uniform fee schedule in July, 1990, that is still in place now: $3,000 per day, plus extra charges for certain hours. Half, or $1,500, is earmarked for the school, with $750 going to the district’s general fund and $750 distributed among non-participating campuses.

Thus, last year’s $38,000 take means that Grant garnered $76,000 overall, with the rest allotted to the district’s general fund and other district campuses.

There are restrictions on filming, however. For example, Walker demands to know the subject matter of a movie before he approves a request.

“I don’t want the campus to be the sequel to ‘Behind the Green Door,’ ” he says, referring to a notorious adult film.

And anyone who wants the fullest cooperation should come prepared with something to munch on.

“The food that they serve on these film catering trucks is the most exquisite, delicious food in comparison to cafeteria food,” Walker says, laughing. “We look forward to that more than anything else.

“We’ll put up with anything if we can eat at their truck.”