San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
‘Contagion’ cast, crew reflect on Candlestick Park scene as mass vaccination sites open.
San Francisco actor Sarah Kliban is in the Candlestick Park scene in “Contagion” very briefly. All her lines were cut, but you can see her in a palepink beret getting interviewed by Jude Law, who plays a fringe bloggerturneddemagogue and false prophet in the 2011 pandemic film, part of which was shot in San Francisco.
Metal partitions corralling crowds lead to the stadium’s entrance, then the home of the 49ers. The film’s almost over, and a traumatized population is in line to get vaccinations. Inside, a helicopter and armored vehicles guard the field as patients receive shots (up their noses!) in tents.
Now, as mass vaccination sites open in the Bay Area — at Oakland Coliseum, Moscone Center, City College and especially Levi’s Stadium, the Niners’ current home field — Steven Soderbergh’s thriller looks all the more prophetic.
That’s in retrospect, of course. At the time, for many involved in filming, including Kliban, a pandemic felt like a distant possibility.
“For some stroke of fortune, there was a big delay, and Jude Law and I got to be next to each other for a very long time,” Kliban recalls of the shoot. “I started asking him about the production. He said that they had done a lot of research and spoken to a lot of epidemiologists or virologists.
“Meanwhile, everybody’s wearing masks around us,” she continues. “They’re taking them off to talk to people or have their snacks or water. I was given a mask as well — not a satisfactory mask compared to 2021! It was weird to see all these people in masks.”
Kliban also recalls asking Law whether anything the medical experts said scared him.
“He said one of the biggest things is he went out and immediately bought masks for his entire family,” she says. “Guess what I did: I went and got some for my mom and me.”
She still had those N95 masks when wildfires struck
the state; she used them then.
“Steven wanted everything to look organized, but still a little hazmatted,” recalls Rocky Capella of Nevada City, who was stunt coordinator on the film’s San Francisco locations, of the Candlestick scene. At that point in the movie, he notes, vaccination “had never been done before, so it’s got to look a little unorganized, but trying to be organized.”
The location team first considered shooting at what was then AT&T Park, recalls location manager Jonathan Shedd of San Francisco.
“It became pretty clear to me that it was going to be problematic,” he says. “That is sacred ground to that groundskeeper, and we had a lot of big vehicles, heavy things.”
Candlestick would be easier for other reasons; they were filming in February, which meant they wouldn’t have to squeeze in between two 49ers’ home games. It also meant not dealing with downtown San Francisco.
San Francisco actor Josh Pollock was in another medicinerelated scene earlier in the film, at a riot at a pharmacy (which was custombuilt in an empty building in the Financial District). In the film, the vaccine hasn’t been developed yet, but the pharmacy is offering a snakeoil treatment championed by Law’s character.
Pollock, who’s credited in the movie as “coughing man,” performs his character’s raison d’etre, prompting a San Francisco Chronicle reporter (played by Monique Gabriela Curnen) to say, “Cover your mouth, please?” Coughing man’s response: “F— off, lady.”
Then the tense crowd learns the pharmacy has run out of doses.
“At one point someone pointed a camera at four of us: ‘The situation is they’re all out of medicine. We’re going to film you reacting to that for 15 to 20 seconds,’ “Pollock recalls. “They just happened to use the one smidgen of that where I yell, ‘This is bulls—!’ — which I was really happy with, because that was a secret tribute to the comedian David Cross. There’s a particular sketch on his old show, ‘Mr. Show,’ where he yells that in a particular way, so I tried to ape that.”
From those two lines, Pollock likes to take credit for the PG13 rating.
“There are two swear words in that film, and they are both delivered by me,” he says.
(Both Pollack and Kliban say their residual checks have increased dramatically this year — from, say, $2.62 to $48.88 in Kliban’s case — suggesting many more people are watching the film since the pandemic hit.)
Rehearsing the pharmacy scene made the possibility of a pandemic feel real, Capella recalls.
“It felt like everything that we were doing really could happen,” including the upset crowds trampling each other, breaking windows, he says.
For Dean Backer of Oakland, who served as set decorator, in charge of things like flooring, furniture and wallpaper in the film’s San Francisco locations, a quieter moment made art seem like life.
“I remember on Potrero Hill, where we put up remembrance photographs on chainlink fences,” he says of a scene that takes place well into the movie, after the disease has already claimed many victims. “So we were taking pictures of our crew and our family and friends, creating these fake memorials. That became very real. You see all your friends or relatives or kids up there, and it’s like, what if this really happened? This is what it would look like, this feeling of helplessness and the inability to do anything.”