San Diego- Behind a guard post and a greenery-covered chain-link fence, along a strip of nondescript commercial and industrial buildings in Kearny Mesa, lies a world unknown to most San Diegans.

Here, on this 11,000-acre lot of sound stages and film sets, telenovella stars Bo Derek and Morgan Fairchild might bump into men with guns from the SWAT team or the military, who are training at a mock Iraqi village.

The actresses are the real thing – but so, surprisingly, for a studio lot, are the guns and the men licensed to carry them.

This is a world where drama comes packaged in two ways. At the same time low-budget TV series and movies are being made here, peace officers and troops are also being prepared for real-life trauma in a safe but realistic setting.

Everyone knows what Hollywood is and what it stands for. But few local people outside the entertainment industry and law-enforcement community are probably aware that San Diego has its own version of Tinseltown on Ruffin Road, complete with a 24-hour, old-style diner.

Most people also are probably unfamiliar with its creator, a bearded man named Stu Segall who drives around his back lot in a golf cart – San Diego’s very own studio mogul.

Friends and associates describe this 63-year-old father of two as a savvy businessman who has high standards but knows how to stay within a small budget. A man who is kind-hearted, down-to-earth and playful but who demands loyalty and friendship in return for his own. A man who is fiercely patriotic and recently created a niche business that is lucrative and allows him to give something back to his community and his country.

Stu Segall’s TV series include lots of camp, some quality. From top: “Silk Stalkings,” “Renegade,” “Veronica Mars” and “Fashion House.”

There’s a reason the general public doesn’t know much about this complex character. Despite his success in an industry that thrives on promotion, Segall has remained intensely private.

If someone created a movie set that was a metaphor for Segall and his life, it wouldn’t be his bustling Kearny Mesa back lot. Instead, it would resemble the unmarked commercial building he owns in North Hollywood, operating behind brick walls, opaque windows and razor wire. Quietly, privately and protectively.

He has repeatedly refused media interviews to discuss his company, Stu Segall Productions Inc., most recently for this story.

“I don’t feel comfortable doing it,” he said in a very brief phone conversation.

Insiders say Segall has done well enough for himself that he doesn’t want or need publicity. He lives alongside other affluent La Jollans, behind a high wall at the end of a long private driveway, away from prying eyes.

But his back story can be gleaned from the public domain, public records and court documents, which show that Segall came from humble beginnings and built his empire through hard work and a savvy business sense, without ever earning a college degree.

His was a different kind of education. He got his start by directing, producing and distributing pornographic movies, and gradually moved into more mainstream, low-budget movies and TV series.

The first series to come out of his studio here was “Silk Stalkings,” starring Rob Estes. Segall later produced “Renegade,” a series starring Lorenzo Lamas, and the TV movie “The Perfect Husband: The Laci Peterson Story.” He is currently filming “Veronica Mars,” starring Kristen Bell, and two telenovellas, “Fashion House” and “Desire.”

Despite Segall’s attempts to keep a low profile, San Diego Film Commissioner Cathy Anderson says his presence has had quite a noticeable effect. He not only helped put the city on the map for television and movie production, she says, but he also has pumped $700 million into the local economy and created hundreds of jobs since his studio opened in 1991.

“We have passed San Francisco (as a preferred location) … and it’s because of Stu,” Anderson said. “Stu trained us, basically, with the work he brought, and he challenged us.”

People who know Segall personally say that his driving force makes him the antithesis to others involved in the entertainment industry.

“He didn’t go into the movie business to get famous,” says Rob Dunson, who worked under Segall for 11 years and is now the film commission’s director of television. “He came into the movie business to make money. … Fame won’t pay the bills.”

Born December 26, 1944, Segall has come a long way from Swampscott, Mass., a small fishing town where the lobster pot was invented in 1808.

Partway through high school, Segall left Swampscott for Los Angeles, where his first job was driving a forklift at a Culver City warehouse.

After graduating from Hamilton High School in 1962, he attended community college in Santa Monica. He worked briefly as a photographic color technician and three years as a private detective.

He landed his first job in the business in 1970 as an assistant makeup man. Within a matter of months, he had started his ascent into the business of making “low-budget” movies, which he defined as those done for less than $100,000.

Around 1973, Segall moved into hard-core pornography, which he continued to produce and/or direct until 1985. During the mid-1970s, Segall also started producing other types of low-budget movies, such as the horror film, “Drive-In Massacre.”

Segall conducted himself quietly and anonymously even back then, producing or directing adult movies under the alias of “Godfrey Daniels,” a euphemistic expletive that legendary comedian W.C. Fields often muttered in his movies.

Some of Segall’s films starred well-known porn stars such as John Holmes and Marilyn Chambers, who got her start as a model, posing with a baby for boxes of Ivory Snow detergent. She went on to star in “Behind the Green Door” in 1972, among a select few “porno chic” films that crossed over in mainstream movie theaters. Chambers’s 1980 film with Segall, “Insatiable,” is considered an adult classic.

Recently, Chambers described Segall as “a great guy. He’s a wonderful man; he’s doing wonderful things.” But she declined to be interviewed because she didn’t think it “would enhance his image.”

“Stu and I talked, and it really wouldn’t be to his best interest,” she said politely.

Segall married his wife, Wendy, in 1983, and a year later, he moved into television production with the more mainstream “Hunter” series, a cop show starring Fred Dryer that was filmed in San Diego. It was through this show that he met writer and producer Stephen J. Cannell.

Some years later, Cannell said he offered to subcontract with Segall to make a low-budget show to fill the time slot that CBS was holding open for talk-show host David Letterman’s switch from NBC in 1993.

That show was “Silk Stalkings,” which premiered in 1991, and Stu Segall Productions was born.

But before Segall could set up shop, he had to find some space for one.

In 1990, Anderson, then the commission’s television director, tried to woo Segall into choosing San Diego over other cities he was considering. She pitched him on the public school system, the low number of rain days here and other factors that could help keep his budget down.

At the time, she said, production companies would film pilots in San Diego, but they’d never shoot a whole series.

Once Segall set his sites on San Diego, he hired Dunson, who, like many other people Segall has hired over the years, worked his way up as he learned the business. Dunson, who started as a location scout manager and left as a producer, described Segall as a “dream maker.”

“I never thought a kid from Ohio would get to direct and produce,” he said. “… Nepotism is rampant in this industry.”

Among the inexperienced workers Segall has hired and trained are half a dozen homeless people he met on the street or recruited through a program he set up one year at St. Vincent de Paul Village.

“It was a payback-to-society type of thing,” Father Joe Carroll said. “He thought it was a good career for people who wanted to work.”

Cannell said many of his employees have gone on to bigger jobs in Hollywood. “There are people all over town that started there,” he said.

“He’s very supportive of his employees and people,” Cannell said. “But on the other hand, if you ever cross him, you’d better tear up his telephone number. … He’s a good friend, but he expects the same from you.”

Dunson said Segall always set a high standard for his workers, starting early in the morning, staying late into the night and working weekends.

As he and Segall would edit scenes shot earlier that day, Segall would say “That’s wrong, that’s bad, that’s great,” Dunson recalled. “That’s how I learned.”

Sometimes Segall would yell at him, but ultimately, Dunson said, he would see that his boss was right.

Segall has been known to let employees go when they don’t perform well enough. But Dunson said Segall also takes care of his workers, such as flying them to family funerals and holding their jobs until they return.

“In the movie business, that’s unheard of,” he said.

Even employees he has fired speak highly of him. Ron “Fury” Fioravanti, who was let go after a female employee accused him of sexual harassment, described Segall as a “production manager’s dream.”

Fioravanti said Segall even paid for $70,000 worth of attorneys’ fees after she sued them both in 1995.

The woman, Carolyn Matteo, whom he also fired – twice – didn’t have the same experience. Her attorney, Michael Crosby, said Segall “has a nice-guy kind of thing (about him). He makes a good first impression. But I think what our case ultimately was about, and my reaction as well, (was) if you didn’t do what he wanted, he would turn on you with a vengeance, just like he did on Carolyn.”

With more than 40 credits for feature films, TV movies, series and episodes under his belt, Segall is not only setting a trend by filming telenovellas, he is also setting a new, fast pace for filming in San Diego by producing two of them simultaneously.

Segall’s studio here started as a non-union shop, which kept costs down, especially when compared to shooting in Los Angeles. Segall finally signed with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 495 in 2003.

Segall’s Web site says he also owns a 15,000-square-foot complex in North Hollywood, which houses facilities for sound recording, post-production, writing and casting. It says he also has a separate corporation, Baja Norte Studios, which produces “film and video content in Mexico.”

Segall expanded his businesses beyond entertainment about five years ago.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attack in 2001, Segall’s studio experienced a slowdown, but he soon found a way to put the excess studio capacity to good use, said Kit Lavell, executive vice president of Segall’s Strategic Operations Inc.

“He’s a genius,” he said.

Around the same time, Lavell said, agents with the Drug Enforcement Agency, which is headquartered nearby, showed up at the studio because they’d heard shooting. A tour of the grounds led to that agency training there, and, as word spread, other agencies as well.

In September 2002, Segall incorporated Strategic Operations, which provides tactical training to the military, complete with “hyper-realistic” special effects, pyrotechnics, medical makeup and actors to stage attacks, sucking chest wounds and traumatic amputations.

The company, which offers a range of programs, can charge up to “a couple hundred thousand dollars” to train 1,000 marines for 10 days at the studio, Lavell said.

The studio’s heavy peace-officer presence is perhaps most obvious in the parking lot of Segall’s Studio Diner, which at times is full of police cruisers. Segall leases studio space to the San Diego Police Department’s SWAT team, which is headquartered and trains on the lot, for about $1,000 a month.

“He’s created a special pricing for us because that’s just how he is,” police spokeswoman Mónica Muñoz said. “He wants to do what he can for people.”

But Segall often declines recognition for his accomplishments and good deeds.

When he donated money and other resources to the Jewel Ball, a high-society charity event in La Jolla for which his wife, Wendy, was chairwoman this year, organizer Vicki Eddy said he wanted to remain “very quiet” about the extent of his generosity.

San Diego County Crime Stoppers officials said they practically had to beg him to come to a ceremony in May to accept the Betty Peabody Award for helping law enforcement and the military over the years.

Eddy, the president of Las Patronas, which puts on the Jewel Ball, said Stu and Wendy Segall are optimistic, giving and well-liked, but shun the public spotlight.

“(Stu) is the most phenomenally creative person I’ve ever met,” Eddy said. “He has one idea after another. He’s incredibly intelligent, he’s so funny, and I think what a lot of people don’t know about Stu is that he is one of the most generous community givers, but he is very quiet about it. He doesn’t like a lot of attention.”