I live in Gotham City today

Remember the Christian Bale Batman movie a couple summers ago? The sequel, The Dark Knight, is currently filming in Chicago. I don't typically follow filming schedules or movie location news, but today, this Major Motion Picture was filming in my neighborhood!

There were a couple dozen movie trailers parked on the basketball courts at Ben's school. The extras holding area and lunchroom was in the annex where I pick Ben up from school each day. I took a couple pictures with my cell phone of a Gotham Police Department cop car parked near the school. The main event was filming inside an apartment on a nearby side street.

Apparently the school gets a hefty check for renting out the property to Hollywood, and has done this before. (This is how the school was able to afford a digital music lab, where Ben had music class in kindergarten.) No wonder movies cost so much to make! Not only are they hiring actors and renting locations, but then there are the dozens of people getting paid to loiter at any given time. (Is it boring to be on the crew?)

Now I'm hankering to see this movie for $10 when it comes out next July, and I'm hankering to take my kid even though it'll be PG-13 and violent. I wonder how much of the movie will be identifiably in Chicago, and how much it'll be convincingly Gotham.

Oh! A woman we were talking to on the sidewalk said she'd seen Gary Oldman heading to his trailer earlier. I don't know which other stars have been haunting my neighborhood today. Maggie Gyllenhaal? Heath (Brokeback Mountain) Ledger? Christian Bale??

Edited 6/20 to add: They used their GPD squad cars a few blocks away, under the El tracks; video over here. I Googled up other posts about the local filming and saw what appears to be a stuntman in the Batsuit on the back porch stairs of the apartment where they were filming, and video from my neighborhood a few hours before Ben and I gawked there. There was also some murky footage from the wee hours purporting to show Gary Oldman in the back courtyard of that apartment in a dark suit, but I couldn't make him out.