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In reading about a Pahrump showing of the movie "Lady Magdalene's," I was reminded of what movie making in Nevada was once like.

"Lady Magdalene's" stars Nichelle Nichols, who portrays the madam at a brothel where a Homeland Security Officer is investigating an al-Qaeda plot. It has achieved a small benchmark in film history - it's the first movie whose distribution rights were put up for bid on EBay, with a starting bid of $1 million, though it's uncertain whether the gambit succeeded.

Last week's report in the Times, as well as earlier Times reports on the location shooting, described the way a Pahrump home was converted into the brothel and Front Sight Firearms Training Institute played the role of a terrorist training center in Afghanistan.

When I was growing up in Nevada, film location shooting was enough of a big deal, and the state's population still small enough, that it got everyone talking, and everyone kind of pitching to help, as happened in Pahrump last year.

One summer when I was a shoeshine boy in my father's downtown Reno barber shop, I walked over to Virginia Street to watch the filming of "The Misfits." A significant percentage of the town's population was there watching. There are actually snapshots of the filming in Reno family scrapbooks.

The house in which I grew up had been the location of part of a John Forsythe movie called "Captive City." My bedroom provided the site of a key scene.

There are Las Vegas residents who still tell stories of hanging out with the cast and crew (including Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis) during the filming of "My Friend Irma Goes West" in Las Vegas, as well as at the later premiere.

The Valley of Fire filming of 1966's "The Professionals" brought locals into contact with some of the biggest names in show business - Lee Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Jack Palance, Robert Ryan, Claudia Cardinale. Even the 1964 production of "Viva Las Vegas," starring Ann-Margret and Elvis, saw some of that.

A few years ago when I was writing a Nevada Historical Society Quarterly article about a vaudevillian and character actor born in Virginia City named Hobart Cavanaugh, the newspaper reports of the 1946 filming of one of his movies in Reno seemed so wonderfully small town and charming. It was in the days before celebrity had become stifling and dangerous. The movie was "Margie," a college comedy starring Jeanne Crain in the title role and Reno as a small town in Ohio.

The Maple Street home of the Raggio family (grandparents of the current Nevada Senate GOP floor leader) served as Margie's home. Residents mingled easily with the stars--Crain, Cavanaugh, Hattie McDaniel, Conrad Janis, Alan Young, and the hundred members of the film crew.

The movie company spent two weeks in town, hired local college students to haul snow from Mount Rose to Reno for winter scenes, rented old cars and bicycles from residents to create an early 20th century feel.

This kind of thing in Nevada movie production is much less likely to happen these days. In 1983 Gov. Richard Bryan convinced the Nevada Legislature to create a new state film division to get serious about attracting location shoots to the state (as well as other productions, such as television commercials and industrial films).

What had been a hit and miss activity became an industry in Nevada. As a result, the charm of earlier film shoots largely vanished. It is not uncommon for the public to be barred from publicly owned-sites rented by film companies for shoots, such as schools, parks, or stadiums. The state has certainly gained from the accelerated efforts to lure filming to Nevada, but something has also been lost.

Where the informality of earlier years is most likely to survive is in independent productions and in smaller communities. "Lady Magdalene's" was both.