what hospital is tv show er based on
In 1974, author Michael Crichton wrote a screenplay based on his own experiences as a medical student in a busy hospital emergency room. The screenplay went nowhere and Crichton focused on other topics. In 1990, he published the novel Jurassic Park, and in 1993 began a collaboration with director Steven Spielberg on the film adaptation of the book. Crichton and Spielberg then turned to ER, but decided to film the story as a two-hour pilot for a television series rather than as a feature film. Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment provided John Wells as the show's executive producer. The script used to shoot the pilot was virtually unchanged from what Crichton had written in 1974. The only substantive changes made by the producers in 1994 were that the Susan Lewis character became a woman and the Peter Benton character became an African-American, and the running time was shortened by about 20 minutes in order for the pilot to air in a two-hour block on network TV. Because of a lack of time and money necessary to build a set, the pilot episode of ER was filmed in the former Linda Vista Hospital in Los Angeles, an old facility that had ceased operating in 1990. A set modeled after Los Angeles County General Hospital's emergency room was built soon afterward at the Warner Bros. studios in Burbank, California, although the show makes extensive use of location shoots in Chicago, most notably the city's famous "L" train platforms.