The Sheridan L platform. You can't see the actors in this shot because of the lights

I've been living on a movie set the past week. Sorta.

As I was walking out of the Sheridan red line stop in my neighborhood going home from work, I noticed a lot of trucks and lifts around the station. Since it seems like they always do work on that particular set of L tracks, I chalked it up to construction and just kept walking. I continued my night like the usual Tuesday, going home and making a quick dinner before meeting up with my Bible study. As I'm walking home later on that night I see the trucks by the stop and a lot of lights on. Thinking it's just construction lights for workers to see, I head straight for home, dead tired from the day. However, as I walk into my apartment, my roommate Jared says "Did you see them filming that movie down at the Sheridan stop?"

Below the train platform where they were filming

What?

I proceeded to immediately put my jacket back on and Jared and I walked straight down to the L stop to see what was going on.

We get down there and they were indeed filming a movie. Jared had found out via the Internet that it was for the third installment of the Meet the Parents/Meet the Fockers saga: "Little Fockers." We walked up to where a small crowd of people were gathered on the street corner, blocked off by tape and security guards from going across the street and getting in the way of the cameras...

...or the two actors shooting a scene at that moment: Robert DeNiro and Ben Stiller.

They were shooting a scene from a movie on my street. It was pretty surreal seeing that happen in front of me. After watching them shoot the same scene over and over again, I realized it was late and that Universal Studio's temporary takeover of my neighborhood didn't stop me from having to wake up early and go to work the next day.

The movie took over the blocks most of this past week. There were actors' and directors' trailers, large trucks of camera equipment, and security guards around the place pretty much 24/7. I went back down on Wednesday night for some more action and saw Ben Stiller shooting another scene up on the southbound L platform. Thinking I was clever by staying out of the way, I traveled up to the northbound platform across the way thinking I would outsmart the crowds below and watch the movie being filmed. However, they had security on that platform too. Despite filming the trains were still running on their normal schedule. The policy ended up being if a train came, you had to either get on it or leave the platform.

Long story short, I was kicked off the train platform.

It was still cool though for those few minutes to see something like that happen without having to travel to LA. And it was probably for the best I was kicked out of the Sheridan stop early that night. I still had work in the morning.