Friday: Chicago is Dhoom-ed!

click images for larger view

[Saturday December 21 update] Despite mixed reviews,  at 36 crores Dhoom3 broke the Indian boxoffice opening day record for.  It also set a new record for the North American opening of a Bollywood film, taking in over $1 million from 236 theaters, nearly doubling the per-screen average for Anchorman2 and Hobbit/Smaug.  

It was late summer 2012 when Bollywood director Vijay Krishna Acharya's helicopter buzzed  my Marina City balcony as he was tearing through Chicago filming the 3rd installment of the blockbuster Dhoom franchise with Indian superstar Aamir Khan.  At a reported 100 crore, it's a big-budget production for India.  Converted to U.S. Dollars, however, that comes out to just slightly over $20 million, but I'm sure Michael Bay is wracking his brain as to how Dhoom 3  managed three months of Chicago location shooting for what his Transformers:Age of Extinction probably spent just on ear plugs.
Dhoom 3 feasted on Chicago's rich architecture for its backdrops, from Millennium Park to the roof and lobby of the County Building, to the Broadway Bank lobby and Union station arcade, to the requisite car and motorcyle chases on lower Wacker and leaping a raised bascule bridge, speedboats racing down the river,  a dance number choreographed around a Cesar-sized version of Rahm's raised middle finger, and flipping cars like McDonald's flips burgers at Dearborn and Randolph.  The trailer promises spectacular stunts,  a circus, magicians, a beautiful aerialist (as in Wings of Desire), Odd Job's - or maybe John McCabe's -   bowler, and an ecstatic musical finale on the great lawn of Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion. 
Today, Friday, December 20th, the world finally gets to see what it all adds up to, as Dhoom 3 debuts simultaneously on 4,000 screens in India and another 700 worldwide, including the AMC River East, where, if their website is to be believed, it will have no fewer than three midnight shows.

It's the first Indian film to be shone in IMAX.  It's nearly three hours long.  It's in Hindi.  I'm not sure there'll be subtitles, but Chicago needs no translation.

Read More:

Buzzing The Bridgehouse: Dhoom3 Films in Chicago

Buzzing the Bridgehouse: Hollywood Star goes behind the Camera at Wabash Avenue Bridge for Dhoom 3

click images for larger view

Marina City residents hoping to sleep in Saturday morning got an unexpected wake-up call, courtesy of a Eurocopter N350SC helicopter which made an early morning appearance low on the Chicago river over the Wabash avenue bridge.

N350SC is a motion picture veteran, co-starring with Bruce Willis in Live Free and Die Hard.

photo courtesy Warner Brothers

 . . . Alan Arkin and Anne Hathaway in the Steve Carrell vehicle Get Smart . . .

© 2006: Geffen Records

 . . . and, emblazoned with the singer's name, in a music video for Nelly Furtado's Say It Right.

On Saturday, however, mounted on the N350SC's was a Spacecam steadicam pod . . .

  . . . as the copter took shots including actors standing on the approach to the bridge, as actors portraying Chicago's finest (or moonlighting police officers) stood at their squad cars, guns drawn.

The crew remained safely tucked away on east Wacker behind Harry Weese's Seventeenth Church of Christ Scientist.

The State Street bridge raised and lowered several times in the course of the filming, which appears to be for the Bollywood action sequel Dhoom 3: Back in Action,  starring Katrina Kaif, Abhishek Bachchan and Aamir Khan, the later two who turned down luxury hotel suites in favor of renting apartments so they could come home to their families during the three-month shoot in Chicago.

"Don't get me wrong," commented N350SC when asked on the transition from supporting actor to part of the crew, "I love being in front of the camera.  But in movies you're never, ultimately, in control of your own performance.  You're at the mercy of the cinematographer, the editor, the director.  So, no, I don't buy into all those people saying I'm washed up.  Now, I'm the one taking the pictures.  I'm the one pointing the camera, the one in control of the artistic vision.  Except for the pilot.  And the cameraman sitting next to him.  I have to go now."