LOCATIONS LURE HOLLYWOOD : TRADE SHOW ATTRACTS GLOBAL NOTICE.

Byline: Janet Weeks Daily News Staff Writer

The upcoming ``Jurassic Park'' sequel, ``The Lost World,'' will undoubtedly look like it was shot in some remote tropical jungle, a place far enough from civilization to accommodate rampaging dinosaurs.

It wasn't. In fact, ``The Lost World'' really isn't very lost at all. The film was shot in rural Humboldt County, a redwood empire within the borders of California.

And Kathleen Gordon-Burke, director of marketing for the Eureka/Humboldt County Convention & Visitors Bureau, wants everyone to know that. Even if filmmaker Steven Spielberg doesn't.

Gordon-Burke manned one of 303 exhibition booths set up Friday at Locations '97, a three-day trade show sponsored by the Association of Film Commissioners International.

The extravaganza, held in a cavernous hall at the Los Angeles Convention Center, is aimed at enticing filmmakers to spend money in a variety of far-flung locales.

The exhibitors represented 30 countries - from Djibouti to France - and dozens of American cities, counties and states.

About 5,000 people - producers, directors, location scouts and others - will have visited the show at the Los Angeles Convention Center by its close Sunday, said spokesman Justin Newby.

At her booth, Gordon-Burke wore a shirt with ``The Lost World'' logo on front and the words ``Not Costa Rica, close to Eureka!'' on the back.

She said the filming of ``The Lost World'' pumped money into the local economy, but not as much as it would have if Spielberg had allowed locals to disclose the location of the super-secret set.

``They wouldn't let us tell anybody,'' she sighed.

Now that filming is finished, however, she's trumpeting Humboldt County's dinosaur connection to the world.

``It's going to be phenomenal for tourism,'' Burke said of the film's May opening. (Humboldt's other big tourist attraction is the annual banana slug race in August.) ``It's going to be the best thing that ever happened to us.''

Of course, sometimes it's a mixed blessing to have Hollywood come to town.

Take North Dakota. In their dark comedy ``Fargo,'' brothers Joel and Ethan Coen portrayed the state as snow-covered and out-of-touch - so remote that the characters spoke a seldom-heard dialect that came off as comical.

Not exactly the kind of publicity an isolated region craves. But Dawn Charging of the North Dakota film commission said the proud folks of her state took the jabs with a smile.

``We found the film amusing because we all know people who have that dialect and those behaviors,'' Charging says. ``But not everybody ends every sentence with `Oh-yeah-sure-you-betcha.' And we have three other seasons than winter.''

To bring attention to the Plains states, commissioners decorated the Montana-Dakotas booth with a log fence, cowhide-covered sofas and an American Indian flute player dressed in traditional garb.

``We're one of the last frontiers,'' Charging said.

This is the 12th year of the Locations convention and its third year as an independent event. In the past, it was connected to the American Film Market trade show. Since branching off, the number of exhibitors has grown 68 percent, Newby said, reflecting increased competition among film commissioners anxious for a piece of the entertainment industry pie.

Among the places represented for the first time was the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific territory administered by the United States.

In a speech Friday directed at film industry representatives, Gov. Froilan Tenorio brought up two of the Marianas' big selling points.

``Our minimum wage is much less than what you'd have to pay in the United States. And our tax structure is the absolute lowest under the American flag,'' Tenorio said.

Indeed, places like the Marianas may be getting into the game at a good time. Increased movie production in Los Angeles, credited to streamlined permitting services, has caused a shortage of soundstage space that is sending filmmakers elsewhere.