DALE HAWES

By Dale Hawes

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  As noted in my biography, I worked for a few days on the film, "The Fugitive" (1993). I was just a background extra for this film but I have a few stories I thought people would find interesting.

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   I played one of the orderlies at Cook County Hospital where Dr. Richard Kimble was sneaking around disguised as a janitor, looking for some medical records in order to find The One Armed Man. 

   The location those scenes were shot at was actually not the real Cook County Hospital. Those hospital scenes were shot in an old abandoned high school on Chicago's south side, not too far from The Museum of Science and Industry. The basement floor of the high school was the jail set where Dr. Kimble was handcuffed at the beginning of the film and an upper floor was dressed to look like the hallway of the old hospital. 

   You may remember the scene in the chaotic ER room when Julianne Moore misdiagnosed the boy with chest pains. In haste she asked Dr. Kimble to take the boy to an observation room but Kimble knows better. He checks the boy's X-ray, catches the mistake and takes the boy into an elevator where Dr. Kimble changes the boy's paperwork and then rushes him directly into surgery, saving his life. The elevator that was used to transport the boy was actually a set built in the entranceway of the boy’s washroom. No one had cleaned that washroom after the building was abandoned so the elevator that Harrison Ford and that poor kid had to act in absolutely reeked of old urine. The doors of the elevator were opened and closed manually by two stage hands pulling on ropes while hiding inside the filthy bathroom. We all felt sorry for those guys. The operating room was actually on the same floor as the rest of the hospital set. The smell of pee was so strong in the bathroom that you could smell it in the hallway too. It was disgusting! The set looked much like a real hospital but they didn't do much to clean the floors or walls before filming. But apparently that wasn't too far from the state of the real life Cook County Hospital. The real Cook County was a publicly funded hospital. It's where people went when they didn't have insurance. The hospital was located in the middle of the ghetto and was known for being a real crappy place. I was talking to one of the other background extras who was actually an employee of the real Cook County and he stated that the set looked much like the actual hospital with one exception... it was too clean. Today the old Cook County Hospital is no longer in service.

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   When I got the call to work on this film, I was excited to work on it because I had heard Harrison Ford was the lead. I was a huge fan of Mr. Ford because my all-time favorite movie at that point was Star Wars (1977). Here is the story of the closest I got to Harrison Ford;

   During my days on the production I befriended a small group of fellow extras and we spent much of the time together. There were 3 of us in this group. One time, we were getting tired from standing too long and were needing a place to sit. Harrison Ford was sitting on a crowded bench killing time in between shots. A few people sitting to his left got called away to work so they got up to and left empty spaces to sit. All of us headed for the empty seats. I was the last one in line marching towards the bench. After my two friends sat down, there wasn't any room left for me to sit. I just stood there for a minute looking pathetic. Harrison saw this happen and seemed to take pity on me. He got up to allow me space to sit and then wondered over to talk to the director. He did this without saying a word. That was nice of him. I couldn't believe one of my favorite actors acknowledged my existence at all. It made my day.

   But all hero worship aside, the thing that impressed me about Harrison Ford was that he wasn't the kind of actor to run off to his trailer in between takes. He was always on set getting involved and doing whatever he could to help the production along. Everything from being in perpetual discussion with the director to actually helping crew members out. I've never seen this kind of dedicated to the day’s work from another celebrity before or since.

   My first glimpse of Mr. Ford on the first day I was on the set was a surprise. He walked by me and I didn't recognize him. Somebody actually said under their breath, "That's Harrison Ford." It took me a few minutes to recognize him in the crowd. He was standing around like he was just another extra. In my defense, it may have been hard to recognize him because his hair was dyed black for this scene as per the story.

 

   Harrison and the director, Andrew Davis, would both watch the video playback after every take. Being able to watch a take just after it had been filmed had never happened on a film set before this production. In the old days movies were all shot on 35mm film and no one saw the takes until the film was developed at the lab and then viewed the next day. This was called, watching the dailies, and the dailies were generally screened for the director while the rest of the crew was at lunch. Historically, the only one who saw the shot before that was the cinematographer looking through the viewfinder during filming. By the later 1980s they installed a small video camera in the film camera's viewfinder so the director could watch the shot on a video monitor while it was being filmed. But “The Fugitive” was the first production to videotape the image recorded by the video camera inside the viewfinder. This allowed everybody to watch the take directly after it had been filmed. Today watching the take right after it's been filmed is common place because no one shoots on film any more. Back then, I remember a suitcase filled with the 8mm videocassettes containing all the previously shot scenes, ready for the director watch at any time. Andrew Davis was able to edit the movie on paper while he was shooting it. 

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  I only worked a few days on the hospital scenes but while there I had heard that the scene that takes place during the St. Patrick's Day Parade was shot in stealth. Instead of staging a fake parade and having to build floats, hire extras and block off a city street, they simply shot at the actual, real life, St. Patrick's Day Parade in Chicago. They hid the cameras and placed them away from the action as Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones ducked and dodge their way in and out of the parade playing a game of cat and mouse. No one at the parade recognized either actor or knew a movie was being shot. I heard the police saw the actors encroaching on the parade and ran after Harrison Ford to remove him from the event. They too did not know a movie was being shot. I guess other crew working on the film intervened and stopped the police from taking Mr. Ford to jail. Maybe I don't have to feel bad for not recognizing him when I saw him since a whole parade missed it as well.