Movie a bright spot for locals

There were several Denzel Washington sightings last week. He was in town shooting a new film, “Unstoppable,” about a couple of guys trying to stop a runaway train that is tearing through the central Pennsylvania countryside.

Some of us got to parade around as extras in a Hollywood movie for the nonunion

rate of $100 a day, a good lunch and all of the cookies, coffee, and fruit you could consume. If you know anything about making movies, it is mostly hurrying up to wait. It gives you a chance to talk to people you wouldn’t otherwise encounter.

We were in Tyrone, a town with its own version of a runaway train. Like many Pennsylvania towns, it has lost thousands of jobs. Factories have closed, others have cut back shifts, many relocated to Wisconsin, China. Economists debate whether or not the country is in an actual depression. Be that as it may — some of us are in hard times.

Ed told me he was laid off after working at the same factory for 31 years.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking at the sky. “I just don’t know.”

I asked Ed if he had considered relocating to find work.

“I have lived here all my life, just like my father before me,” he said. “I wouldn’t know where to go. But my boy is thinking about Arizona.”

Mary worked on farms all her life.

“I take care of cows. Don’t have a veterinarian’s license or anything. But, I helped bring a bunch of calves into the world. It’s good hard work but I like it.”

She hasn’t been able to find a job in her line of work for two years.

Dave made a mistake 12 years ago. He was 17. A felony on his record makes finding permanent work difficult.

“When the agency sends me out on interviews, I tell them to do the background check first. Might as well cut to the chase, no sense wasting each other’s time.”

Eartha is a single mom who got her daughter through college. She managed to nurture her child’s dreams while scrapping to make ends meet.

“She wants to go into hip-hop. I say let her. She has her degree to fall back on.”

Marie patched her life back together after her husband left her for a stripper. One of the few professional actors on set, her eyes sparkled when she told me that she was going to be on the TV show, “The Good Wife.”

“I am going to be one of Mr. Big’s (actor Chris Noth) dalliances. Wait until my cheating husband sees who I hook up with, on national television no less.”

We never saw Denzel up close. His train was too far away. But a couple of hundred of us plan to have a reunion when the movie opens next November. We are going to have a red carpet party at a theater in Altoona. Maybe by then we will have a real reason to celebrate.

Charles Dumas is an associate professor in the School of Theatre at Penn State and writes monthly. He can be contacted through his blog, “Under the Baobob,” at www.centredaily.com/opinion/ blogs.