Elginites to walk white carpet, look for themselves on screen in movie ‘Contagion’

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Updated: November 30, 2011 12:27AM

ELGIN — When you see a TV commercial or promotional trailer for the Hollywood movie “Contagion” and you see Matt Damon’s character angrily shouting, “What happened to her?”, you’re seeing a bit of Elgin. And if you go to see the Warner Brothers medical thriller after it opens in theaters on Friday, chances are you’ll see some Elginites, too.

At least 10 Elgin-area residents — and possibly scores — filled out crowd scenes as “extras” when “Contagion” filmed scenes in this area last December and June. And many will be reuniting at the Marcus Elgin Theater on Friday as Books at Sunset owner Judi Brownfield stages a gala premiere party starting at 6:30 p.m.

Brownfield said everyone is invited to the premiere and is encouraged to come dressed in medical scrubs or even patient pajamas. A large delegation of employees, dressed to suit, is expected to come from Sherman Hospital, whose old building on Elgin’s east side was the main local location used for the filming. As they enter the theater, “patients” and former extras will walk a white carpet as an ambulance and hearse standby and “Elgin Today” host Jeff Myers does Joan Rivers-style interviews.

“We’ll have a few patients staggering down the white carpet with hallucinogenic symptoms,” Brownfield promises.

All this extra for the extras comes for the price of the movie ticket. Brownfield suggests that those attending order their tickets in advance, either in the theater lobby or online, so they’ll be able to devote attention to the premiere events before the movie screening begins at 7:40.

‘Wanted: An empty hospital’

Director Steven Soderbergh’s 3D drama — about a deadly bird flu-like disease that spreads around the world as doctors search desperately for a cure and chaos replaces law and order — is far from a minor-league production. Besides Damon, the cast includes Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Lawrence Fishburne. Almost all, including Soderbergh, have won or at least been nominated for Oscars. At least Damon, Paltrow and Fishburne are known to have participated in the Elgin-made scenes.

Elgin was hardly the only location used. Filming began in Hong Kong in September 2010, then moved on to London, Geneva (Switzerland, not Illinois), Atlanta and San Francisco. But the Chicago area — sometimes playing the role of other locales — was one of the main focuses of the production as it continued through last fall and winter.

And Elgin had one thing that not many other Chicago-area locales could boast — a large, modern, essentially intact but largely vacant hospital. Since Sherman moved into its new building in 2009, the east-side campus’s newer parts have been converted to an urgent-care center and doctor offices. But the filmmakers were able to use much of the rest of the complex to pose as the University of Minnesota Medical Center, near where Damon’s character lives in the Minneapolis area.

Most of the local extras portrayed patients and staffers waiting or working inside the hospital when Damon’s wife (Paltrow) is brought in, stricken by the mystery disease. Staying for three days, Soderbergh and company also filmed people going in and out of the hospital’s entrances and staged one scene of driving through downtown Elgin.

According to the movie’s press notes, Paltrow’s character is the disease’s first known victim. So the Sherman scenes from December probably come very early in the movie.

The crew then returned to Elgin in June to shoot two more days of hospital scenes with Fishburne, who plays the deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

Other scenes were shot at O’Hare and Midway airports; a school in Wilmette; Chicago’s Henry Ford Bridge; a highway in Waukegan that is supposed to be the Dan Ryan Expressway filled with a convoy of National Guard troops; and a National Guard armory in Chicago, which was turned into a huge ad-hoc infirmary filled with plague victims.

‘Act annoyed’

Dave Ham, a 39-year-old Elgin shipping clerk, said that for his big brush with stardom, Soderbergh instructed him to ad lib acting angry and annoyed.

Like many of the extras, Ham said he heard about the need for such people through Dennis Stewart of Streamwood, whose daughter, Erin Stewart, was working for the Los Angeles-based Rich King Casting agency. Ham worked one day from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and, like many of the extras, found himself in the background of a scene in the hospital’s emergency room as Damon’s character learns that his wife has died. And like the other extras, Ham isn’t sure whether he ended up visible in the movie or landed on the digital version of a cutting-room floor.

“From what I can see in the movie trailer, my part comes right before that scene in the trailer where Damon hears his wife has passed,” Ham said.

“I’m in the background, talking to four people. The director said I should just be complaining about some situation that would make me angry because the doctor’s not seeing me.” So while the focus of attention is on Damon and his bad news, Ham says, he is there in the background, “complaining about how my wife is pregnant and she’s desperately ill and I’m starting to feel sick too and we’ve been there a long time with nobody taking care of us!”

“The first time they shot the scene, I had my back to the camera. I saw Matt Damon walk behind me, so I thought, ‘For the next take, I’m going to reposition myself so I can get more camera time,’ ” Ham said.

‘Oldest person in the room’

Cable newsman Myers said he and Lords Park Zoo activist Laurie-Faith Gibson-Aiello also were in the background when the “your wife is dead” scene was shot.

“The director looked over us and decided I was the oldest person in the room, so he set me in a wheelchair,” says Myers, who admits to being in his late 50s. “He said, ‘Just look sick.’ So I thought back to my memories of Ronald Reagan in his later years, teetering and doddering, and tried to act like that.”

Myers hopes being in the wheelchair will make him stand out from the crowd of angry, impatient sick people.

Myers said he also worked as an extra last October when “Contagion” filmed at an office building in Naperville, which Soderbergh used to portray the World Health Center in Switzerland.

Gibson-Aiello said she also worked for one day in November at Midway Airport, filming one scene that was supposed to be in Chicago and another scene that included a sign saying, “Welcome to Minneapolis.” In one, Gibson-Aiello stood behind the character played by Winslet as she grabbed luggage off a carousel and spoke with an assistant. In the other scene, Gibson-Aiello was sitting at a table while Paltrow’s character sits at the airport’s bar and talks on a cellphone.

The veteran

Pete Garlock from the Elgin Area Convention and Visitors Bureau kicked off the last two Elgin Short Film Festivals by showing scenes from movies in which he appears as an extra — “Fred Claus,” “The Dark Knight” and “Public Enemies.” In the latter, Garlock played the man walking out of the Biograph Theater with his date right in front of John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and the infamous Lady in Red seconds before Dillinger was gunned down.

With such a resumé, Garlock had to be an extra in “Contagion,” too. “I’m in the scene where Matt Damon’s wife has died and he’s leaving with his little daughter through the crowd,” Garlock said. “But I’d be shocked if you can see more than the bottom of my legs.”

“It was a great day — fun stuff,” Myers said of his time in the wheelchair behind Matt Damon. He said he also worked as an extra in the classic Bill Murray film “Groundhog Day,” shot in Woodstock in the 1980s.

But neither experience could rival his biggest brush with Hollywood glamor. When Chicago-based Towers Productions was making a documentary for cable TV about the sinking of “the Christmas ship” on Lake Michigan, Myers notes, he was one of the actors used to recreate the tragedy as the narrator tells what is happening — “and I actually got to drown in that one.”