Rail to Reel

For tonight's shoot, crews are filming Affleck, who plays the congressman, riding to work on a train that suddenly stops in a tunnel. The crew is renting two rail cars for $1,000 an hour, for at least 10 hours.

(Location manager Carol Flaisher admits that in real life, members of Congress rarely ride Metro. "But this congressman, he's a real man of the people," she said.)

Unlike producers who shoot in Baltimore's subway and pretend it's Washington's, E. Bennett Walsh, a producer for "State of Play," said filmmakers have no plans to head north if they hit a Metro rule.

"To shoot any other subway, you would know you're not in Washington," he said.

Plenty of moviemakers do use Baltimore's system as a stand-in.

In "No Way Out," a thriller from 1987, Kevin Costner is chased into a fictitious Metro stop marked "Georgetown," slides down an escalator and runs into a train. In the 1997 thriller "Shadow Conspiracy," Charlie Sheen guns his motorcycle down a "Metro" station's steps. In 1985's "The Man With One Red Shoe," part of the chase scene is on the subway. All those shots were filmed in Baltimore.

In recent years, Metro has become more accommodating, said John Latenser, location manager for "The Invasion," shot in 2005. For the first time, Metro allowed crews to film during the day, between the rush hours. In another breakthrough, Kidman was allowed to hop the fare gates at the Cleveland Park Station -- on one condition. A transit police officer telling Kidman she couldn't do so was added to the script. (After all that, the scene didn't make it into the movie.)

But Metro refused to compromise on filming Kidman jumping from the train and running on the tracks. So off the crews went to Baltimore.

"We knew to a certain extent that we could fake it in Baltimore," Latenser said. (Fake is right. Seat cushions are the wrong color. Seat backs have the wrong handles. The fronts of Metro trains are not blue.)

The Metro scenes lasted four minutes at most. Three days of shooting at the Cleveland Park Station cost about $11,500 for labor and overhead. Three days in Baltimore, with six times as many people and the rental of prime movers, flatbed trucks, rail cars and a crane, cost more than $77,000, said officials with the Maryland Transit Administration, which operates the Baltimore subway. "You get to do more up there, so you end up spending more," Latenser said.

For the movie "Step Up 2 The Streets," Baltimore allowed filmmakers to shoot dancing in a moving train. "That is definitely stuff that is not allowed in Washington," Latenser said. "We had dancers standing on backs of seats doing back flips."

Maryland transit officials say they don't mind being the understudy. They have the same rules banning eating and drinking, but they figure moviegoers will use common sense.

"By no means do we view this as an endorsement to do risky acts," said MTA spokeswoman Jawauna Greene. "Art often imitates life but it certainly doesn't dictate how people live their lives."

Staff researchers Meg Smith and Rena Kirsch contributed to this report.