OCEAN CITY – Building services director Michele Fabiano and her staff were pressed into service – once 24 hours straight – during the filming of a Shirley MacLaine movie at The Shores, a UMC Community on Bay Avenue.
MacLaine and Hollywood stars including Mercedes Ruehl and Stephen Dorff were at The Shores June 20 and 27-30 filming “People Not Places.” The movie had its own large crew, but from the director on down, that crew needed Fabiano and her staff for a range of duties from parking to props to the electrical rooms in case fuses were blown during the production.
It was tiring, but “an incredible opportunity to be part of,” Fabiano said. When they weren’t working in a support capacity, a number of the staff members became extras in the movie.
“Residents and staff had the opportunity to be around iconic actors, Academy Award-winning actors,” Fabiano said, noting MacLaine (Oscar for 1983’s “Terms of Endearment”) and Mercedes Ruehl (Oscar for 1991’s “The Fisher King” 1992), along with Stephen Dorff (1998’s “Blade”).
“It’s just an incredible experience just to be around that,” she said.
Because of makeup, she didn’t initially recognize Dorff.
“When you watch these actors, (Dorff) played a homeless man and you’re looking at him and he looks familiar. These actors are playing supporting roles and you don’t realize (who they are) because they’re in costume or they grow their hair out. That’s what this guy did. It was unbelievable.”
Fabiano said it also was “unbelievable” for the staff and residents to be part of the movie. “What a great opportunity for people who grew up with (MacLaine’s) movies,” she said. MacLaine is 90 years old. Many of the residents of The Shores are in or around her age.
“What an experience for people who, in that generation, grew up watching her movies, to be able to see that.”
One resident got MacLaine to sign the cover of a magazine she had featuring the star.
Fabiano said her staff was there “for anything that happened.” That included air conditioning issues when a bird flew into one of the cooling towers.
“We were helping to find props. My guys were there for trash removal.
They filmed in our locked-down memory unit so we had to turn alarms on and off,” she said. “We have 19 electrical rooms in that building so they need to know where the electric was run in case we blew fuses. There were a lot of safety issues going on” and they had to be there to provide access.
On a more basic note, she said, “With 50 people in the building, the bathrooms have to be cleaned, trash needs to be taken out.
“My staff and I were there for most of the time, really. Some of us worked all day and stayed until the middle of the night. There was one day we worked over 24 hours and then it rained at 5 in the morning. It knocked some of the phones out in Ocean City and it flooded so I was stuck there for another six hours or so,” she said.
“Then some of us got to be extras when they needed people to fill in.
I personally got to walk in a scene past Shirley MacLaine and smile at her,” Fabiano said.
She liked the view behind the scenes, watching the different crew members work on aspects just with light or sound. “There is somebody who does everything. We even helped when they needed a prop for something. We turned a carbon monoxide detector into a buzzer. They needed another room to film in so the director scouted the building with me and we found something else and turned it into a place for a scene. That was interesting too.”
One of the perks for Fabiano was getting to chat with the movie’s writer.
“For me as a fellow writer, I was able to sit with Ellen Furman, the writer, and talk about the process of writing and seeing your work come to fruition and the whole process of what is going on behind the scenes. That’s the art itself too,” Fabiano said.
“The residents got such a kick out of it. You don’t (normally) have people from Hollywood come in to film in your building. It was definitely something for our residents at UMC Communities to experience.”
“It was fun. We had a great time. Now is the aftermath. Everyone is trying to clean up the building and get some rest and wait for the movie to come out,” she said. “Everybody will be anxiously awaiting for that.”
One other aspect her crew handled was printing photographs from the filming for the residents, including many with the residents in scenes with the stars. “They were overjoyed,” she said.
The filming was a special treat for the residents.
“You go into community living and … the staff becomes your secondary family, and you fall into the rhythm of activities, and then you have something like this happen,” she said. “Can you imagine?”
– By DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
Photos courtesy of The Shores. At top, staff members at The Shores post with actor Stephen Dorff, center, made up to look like a homeless man.