HYDE PARK — Hyde Park is about to become the backdrop associated by TV viewers across the country with some pharmaceutical company, but the question is, which company?
Chelsea Productions, which has shot national TV commercials for Subway, Mazda and the NFL, was on South Shore Drive and 55th Street on Wednesday and planned to return Friday to finish shooting a commercial for a pharmaceutical company.
“It’s a commercial, it’s not a TV show or a film,” location manager Liz Goldsmith said.
Though Goldsmith herself grew up in Hyde Park, she wouldn’t reveal the client, even to a fellow Hyde Parker, but crew on the set confirmed it was for a drug company.
On Wednesday evening the crew was setting up a close-up shot of an older white couple in an outdated ‘90s Buick Roadmaster station wagon in front of the luxury cooperative at 5490 S. South Shore Drive.
The older white couple wouldn’t appear to rule out any drug on the market with an advertising budget large enough to include a commercial.
But what does the old Roadmaster hint at? High blood pressure? Erectile dysfunction?
By early afternoon, word had spread around the neighborhood that the filming was for a drug commercial and the jokes started about what diagnosis Hyde Park could best portray.
"Anxiety," quipped the doorman outside 5490 S. South Shore Drive. "Depression," chuckled the bike shop owner around the corner.
Maybe the answer will be revealed when filming resumes Friday at 56th Street and Kimbark Avenue if film crews unload the side-by-side tubs from those Cialis commercials.
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