Legend of the Seeker has tied up all five of Auckland Film Studios’ soundstages. Photo / Supplied

Legend of the Seeker has tied up all five of Auckland Film Studios’ soundstages. Photo / Supplied

While most Auckland businesses have spent the past year with the recession blues, the city's film production industry — our so-called Westywood — has been quietly prospering, partly thanks to the man who gave us Hercules and Xena.

In showbiz, glamour is just another special effect. On-screen and on the red carpet, the business is one of alluring fantasies and luminous stars. Off-screen - in, say, a warehouse in Auckland's drab, industrial suburb of Mt Wellington on a wet October morning - film and telly look much like factory work.

American TV producer Rob Tapert is walking me - at speed - through a soundstage converted from this particular warehouse, one where he's shooting parts of his latest TV fantasy series, the sword, sand and sex epic Spartacus.

I am, apparently, the first New Zealand journalist to get this tour. And while I was grateful to Tapert - the guy behind Hercules and Xena and husband of Lucy Lawless - for bothering to make the time, it is, as one often finds on film and television sets, rather less fun than you imagine.

I wasn't really expecting the Roman-era sets to include a huge fake colosseum, or a row of crosses along a mock Roman highway from which crucified actors might shout the immortal line "I'm Spartacus".

Nor, for that matter, did I expect to wander into some full-frontal sex scene - which is, reportedly, what the show features.

However, I was just expecting a little more than, well, a bloody big tin shed containing a large circle of sand with a raised, wooden viewing platform on one side of it, all surrounded by green-coloured, ceiling-to-floor screens hanging like great curtains from the roof.

There are other, more detailed sets across three different tin sheds, he tells me, including the interior of a mocked-up hilltop villa, but it all seems pretty low key considering the dosh being spent.

Tapert is making the 13-part series for a large US pay-TV network called Starz Entertainment - it has 48 million subscribers - for a reported budget of more than US$26 million ($34 million). That budget has clearly not being spent on enormous, Ben Hur-like sets.

Nor is it being used for the main reason so many overseas film and TV producers supposedly come to New Zealand: for lots of location filming in our exotic, pristine outdoors.

The Spartacus shoot, which ends its nine-month course next month, has, in fact, never gone outside, Tapert says. A very large part of it is being created - including, yes, a huge, fake colosseum - not on camera but on computers at DigiPost, a post- production facility in Epsom.