These beleaguered Philly-area hospitals may be the backdrop of your next Apple TV+ or HBO show

Inside Suburban Community Hospital, the sound of gunfire pierced the quiet, a fistfight erupted in a nearby elevator and a woman lay dead in a bloody pool on the third floor.

Anthony Grippo, the Montgomery County hospital’s facilities and maintenance staffer, walked briskly by the dead woman. His heart jumped when her arm shot out and her fingers clasped his pant leg.

“She scared the ... out of me,” Grippo said.

The “dead woman” was an extra in a Ridley Scott project for Apple TV+. The fake gunshots and elevator scuffle also were part of Sinking Spring, a coming-soon crime drama about two Philly friends and grifters who pose as DEA agents to rob drug houses. Of course, things go horribly wrong in the show featuring a biker gang, FBI agents in pursuit — and a hospital shootout.

Over four days in February, an Apple TV+ film crew shot scenes in sections of the East Norriton hospital that are no longer in use. Several floors are empty at the hospital due to financial and staffing trends that have endangered small hospitals nationwide. Suburban has cut some services and staff in recent years, citing changing patient demand in Philadelphia’s competitive regional health care market.

However, Suburban’s owner, California-based Prime Healthcare Foundation, has found a creative use for the unoccupied floors at the hospital and at its sister facility, Lower Bucks Hospital: Rent out space to Hollywood production companies. Next month, an HBO crew plans to film scenes for a new miniseries at Lower Bucks Hospital.

It’s a classic tale of a mismatched couple who unexpectedly fit; a marriage between financially strapped community hospitals with fewer patients and an increased demand for original content on internet streaming platforms competing for more viewers.

“It’s a shame when any industry is struggling,” said John Galloway, a Hollywood location scout and Sinking Spring site manager who lives in Yardley, Pa. “But it’s great to be able to go into an actual hospital and film, as opposed to building it on a sound stage.”

Hospital spokesperson Michelle Aliprantis said the relationship boosts staff morale. Apple TV+ paid some staffers to work on Sinking Spring, which stars actors Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura.

“It was amazing how they transformed an empty hospital floor into a movie set,” Aliprantis said. “If someone got off on the wrong floor, they would have thought there was a murder in our hospital. That’s how real it looked.”

Production companies pay a location fee that can range from a few thousand dollars a day to $50,000 a day to rent out a sports stadium.

Aliprantis declined to reveal exact figures, saying she didn’t want “to deter any film companies from giving us a call” and the price is negotiable.

She offered ballpark figures: Generally, the Prime hospitals charge $2,000 to $4,000 a day to small, independent film companies. A movie or television show with an extended time frame or more than 20 crew members pays $12,000 to $16,000 a day. The hospital will hold equipment for crews on non-filming days for $5,000 to $6,500 daily.

“We want them to come to the hospital, so it’s not a back-and-forth battle situation. It’s always a very friendly negotiation,” Aliprantis said. “We want to make everything as easy as possible.”

In his four years working in maintenance and facilities at Suburban, Grippo had never seen the hospital’s third floor so … alive. “It usually feels like a ghost town. It’s just a bunch of empty rooms,” he said. “It was nice to see the floor being used.”

The hospital had shuttered its third-floor maternity ward years ago. Last year, the hospital closed its 15-bed psychiatric unit for seniors on the first floor and laid off about a dozen nurses and therapy professionals.

Suburban’s fourth floor, which once held an acute patient rehabilitation unit, is also unoccupied.

Later this summer, Prime Healthcare plans to further downsize Suburban, turning the facility licensed for 126 beds into a micro-hospital with an emergency department and at least 10 inpatient beds. The change will likely provide more opportunities for film companies, Aliprantis said.

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Lower Bucks Hospital in Bristol is also bringing back to life, for HBO’s purposes, an old intensive care unit on its second floor. In real life, the hospital had to relocate ICU beds a few years ago, after a massive storm caused extensive flooding. The hospital didn’t have money to immediately fix the damage.

In recent years, production crews have also used Lower Bucks Hospital to film pharmaceutical commercials, true crime documentaries and docudramas.

Aliprantis said she can’t reveal any details about the forthcoming HBO production. But The Inquirer has an inkling. Hint: A big star was recently spotted at Delaware County’s courthouse.

Rudi Fischer, another location scout and Sinking Spring site manager, first met Aliprantis about six years ago when he was looking for a location to film a hospital scene for HBO’s Mare of Easttown, starring Kate Winslet. Fischer ultimately picked the shuttered Community Hospital in Chester City to film the scene.

Fischer said Suburban Community Hospital is an ideal shooting location, because the unoccupied floors are already set up with medical equipment and beds, which are hard to find and cumbersome to move. “When we tell the art department that they can actually use the beds that are in the rooms, their faces light up,” Fischer said.

Suburban generally keeps unused floors ready for prime time in case of an emergency. In the early days of COVID, for example, patient overflow reactivated floors, Aliprantis said.

Fischer said he dreams of one day using Suburban to film an ongoing medical drama, like ER, which ran 15 seasons and starred George Clooney and Julianna Margulies.

“I’d love to have that conversation where a show is basically set there, and we could work something out where there would be two completely opposite things working harmoniously together and both profiting from it,” Fischer said.

Eric Ennis, Suburban’s public safety supervisor, said it was cool to learn things from one another. For instance, in Hollywood parlance, a “Foley” is a sound artist, whereas in a hospital, a “Foley” is a catheter, or thin plastic tube that drains urine from the bladder.

During the filming of Sinking Spring, the rest of the hospital ran as usual, with only minor adjustments.

Ennis said he did a safety walk-through prior to the filming and discovered that sound from the third floor, like fake gunshots, traveled to the below floor, which was occupied by patients. He asked nurse administrators if they could relocate those patients to quieter rooms.

“Patients generally like to decompress by 8 p.m. at night and go to sleep, like anybody else,” Ennis said. “They really don’t want to be underneath a movie production set, making loud noises.”

As scenes unfolded upstairs, the hospital’s emergency department didn’t skip a beat. In fact, when a crew member had a severe allergic reaction to a cookie, the production company’s on-site medic sent him to the ER, where he was quickly injected with epinephrine and monitored. Same with a set designer who cut his finger.

“He went downstairs to the ER, got stitched up and was back on set within an hour or so,” recalled Chris Noll, Suburban’s emergency preparedness coordinator.

There were other perks, too. When one of the characters in Sinking Spring had a scene in which he receives physical therapy for an injury, a real physical therapist at Suburban offered guidance to the actors to ensure authenticity.

During the production, a circus-like tent was set up in the hospital’s parking lot for crew meals, along with movie trailers, electric generators and Porta-Potties.

Hospital staff, who helped work on the television drama, said the best part was joining the crew for meals, catered by a California company known in Hollywood for gourmet fare like salmon, pork belly, shrimp tempura and Chilean sea bass.

Grippo started his morning maintenance shift as always, servicing the hospital’s boilers. By evening, he was running around trying to find a working nurse call button that the film crew needed for a scene.

“I felt like the maintenance man to the stars,” he said.