Shirley MacLaine, 90, is filming a new movie in Atlantic City’s iconic Ducktown neighborhood

ATLANTIC CITY — In her signature oversize sunglasses, the 90-year-old movie star Shirley MacLaine sat in an alleyway in Ducktown, Atlantic City’s most famous neighborhood. Eccentric and durable, she fit right in.

On Arctic Avenue on Monday evening, between Georgia and Mississippi Avenues, home of the White House Sub Shop, Hollywood was giving the place the close up it always feels it deserves: filming a new Brad Furman movie called People Not Places with MacLaine as its star.

MacLaine plays “a sprightly woman in her twilight years who strikes up an unlikely friendship with a local homeless man, while struggling to mend a troubled relationship with her son,” according to the film’s official description.

But first, as annoyed detoured traffic snaked around the congested inner part of town, the crew had to make it rain with hoses. Naturally, just as it came time to roll the cameras, the sun came out. They’ll fix it in the post-edit.

Atlantic City has been the backdrop for a handful of movies, most famously Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (where a lemon-freshened Susan Sarandon and Burt Lancaster famously had lunch in what’s now the bar at the Knife & Fork Inn), and most recently for the Netflix feature film Army of the Dead, in which zombies were filmed inside what’s basically a zombie casino floor: the closed Atlantic Club casino.

MacLaine was helped across the street into the Formica-Freitag Bakery, formerly Formica, creators of Atlantic City’s famous bread, to await the shot. Icon, meet iconic.

Her costar, Stephen Dorff, dressed as a person who is unhoused, wandered around the street looking like he was practicing his lines, daring to peer over the police barricades..

The director, Furman, grew up in Lafayette Hill. His mother, Ellen Brown Furman, wrote the script. The family would vacation at a beach house in Ventnor.

At the White House Sub Shop, the staff grumbled over the loss of business. The shoot helped “not at all,” they said, as the block of Arctic between Georgia and Mississippi was closed off all day. One staff member grudgingly gave a plastic knife to the crew member who wanted to cut his sub.

Neighbors peeked out of their homes, impressed by the stardom, but lamenting their cars being trapped on the block, narrating into cell phones every small thing that happened. (”She’s getting into a car.” “They’re making it rain.”)

The women inside Pancho’s, another iconic food shop on this block of Arctic Avenue, peered out of their shop.

The owner of Setaara, the nearby Afghan-French place closed on Mondays, watched from a nearby alleyway. A man passed by the crew with a slice of cake from Las Delicias De La Negra Mexican, the new restaurant on the block.

Mostly, though, it was crew members on folding chairs waiting for, well, it was hard to say. There was a lot of waiting.

The street was wet, but the car wasn’t. More hoses! MacLaine wanted the car parked closer to the curb. Dorff needed last-minute hair spray to make his hair look more greasy. He practiced what looked like some sort of scuffle with another cast member near the car out of which MacLaine would emerge when the brief moments of actual filming began.

Was this the moment MacLaine actually meets Dorff, as she exits the car in front of Formica’s and he’s scuffling with someone? Some other bit of plot deeper into the movie? Why is she going to Formica’s in the rain, in a car? Could she need an Atlantic City roll that badly? Tomato pie? From a distance, you could hear MacLaine’s briskly delivered lines cut through the evening air, and things suddenly got tight, focused, dramatic. She’s a star.

On Arctic Avenue, the sun shone through the fake rain.