Twenty seven models at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood kick off the promotion for 27 Dresses, which opens Jan. 18.

Berliner Studio/BEImages / John Sciulli

If you happened to turn the corner behind Providence City Hall during a couple of very hot days early last June you would have suddenly been transported to the trendy SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan.

Three New York City Yellow taxicabs were parked along the narrow street. Pushcarts loaded with beads and bangles lined the sidewalk. And across the street, in a storefront that had been empty only a few days before, elegant bridal dresses filled the window.

Of course, the big trucks loaded with movie equipment that were parked around the corner, the bright lights and movie camera inside the shop — not to mention (if you were lucky) a brief glimpse of actress Katherine Heigl in the store — would have tipped you off that you were not in Manhattan, but in the latest outpost of Hollywood East. Heigl was in the pretend bridal shop looking for the perfect gown in the movie 27 Dresses.

For the always-a-bridesmaid-but-never- a-bride romantic comedy — which was to open Friday but has been rescheduled for Jan. 18 — the movie crew spent most of June shooting scenes from Cumberland to Charlestown . . . which doubled for scenes that were set in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey.

One day the lobby of the Rhode Island Convention Center was turned into a terminal at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Another day some of the Newport mansions were used to shoot scenes set in a posh Manhattan hotel. The Dean Studio sound stages in Cumberland, a former warehouse, were turned into Heigl’s New York apartment. Almost overnight, a vacant storefront in Fox Point became a New Jersey hardware store with the filmmakers working both inside and out.

The fashionable Butterfield home furnishings store on the newly resuscitated Westminster Street downtown plays a fashionable home furnishings store in 27 Dresses, in a scene in which Heigl’s character, Jane, helps her sister, Tess, played by Malin Akerman (of the Farrelly Brothers’ remake of The Heartbreak Kid), register for her upcoming movie wedding.

Over on North Main Street, traffic was snarled on the several days the movie crew shot scenes at the Mills Tavern and the XO Steakhouse, both of which played swanky Manhattan restaurants.

Kelly Adams of Pawtucket, the XO bartender, recalls that the film crew came in on a Saturday and Sunday to add their own props to the restaurant’s dÉcor, right down to the graffiti on the outside walls which actually had been painted on removable material. “When they finished they just peeled it off,” said Adams, adding that the moviemakers also added fake stained glass plastic sheets to the front windows. “A lot of the things they put up for the shot were kind of funky, like our restaurant, and we worked around their props on Sunday.”

XO, normally open seven days a week, was closed on a Monday so the film crew could take over. “A lot of their props were left on the sidewalk and so they had security in front of the restaurant for three days to make sure no one touched them.”

Days before filming began, some of the real restaurant staff had been given the option of providing head shots to the movie crew in case the filmmakers needed people to fill in as waiters and bartenders in the scenes being shot. But Adams said that in the end nothing came of it and the film crew used professional extras to fill in on those background roles instead.

Kathy Oberacker, property manger for Westlo Management which has the Peerless Building, said not only did the movie crew set up the dress shop on the Eddy Street side of their building, but also filmed a Goth wedding scene in space behind the shop.

They shot other scenes in one of the loft apartments in the Peerless Building while one of the actors stayed in one of the furnished apartments during production.

Other locations included the Ninigret Conservation Area in Charlestown, the Beacon Diner on the South County Trail in East Greenwich and St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Pawtucket, where a wedding set in the 1980s was staged. Church secretary Rae Murdock said the movie crew was at the church for about a week and she peeked in several times to watch the actors work. “It was great and I intend to see the movie,” she said.

A Rhode Islander who was intimately involved in the movie shoot said the filmmaking went flawlessly; at the end of a month’s work, the movie crew moved to the real New York City to shoot background scenes.

The movie’s director, Anne Fletcher, a former choreographer who had a surprise hit when she directed the romantic dance film Step Up, said the movie crew “found little gems” of sites that could easily double for New York City in Providence. Recalling the Eddy Street bridal salon, she laughed and said, “here we were sitting in chairs in the middle of the street. If this were really New York City, you couldn’t do that.

“We shot some street scenes and you’d get a couple of the neighbors coming out and asking questions, but they were very respectful.” She added that the City of Providence was “very helpful” in setting up location sites and blocking off parking spaces for the movie crew’s platoon of trucks.

Lynne McCormack, director of the Providence Art, Culture and Tourism Department, said that once filming sites are chosen by a movie company’s location scout, “we do most of the hands-on work,” assisting the movie crew through the city’s Film Squad. They tell the movie crew whom to contact in the Police Department to get streets closed; alert neighbors that a movie will be shooting on their street which could possibly disrupt their lives; make sure “everyone in city government knows where the movie crew will be shooting” in case people call in with questions. McCormack called it “constituent diplomacy.”

Becki Trujillo, the movie’s executive producer and one of only a handful of people from the West Coast working on 27 Dresses out of a crew that ranged from 120 to 150 people, said filming in Rhode Island went “pretty smooth.”

She added that one of the reasons the film was made in Rhode Island and not New York City was to take advantage of the state’s tax credits program, which allows movie and TV companies that spend at least $300,000 in the state a 25-percent tax credit for every dollar spent here on food, lodging, equipment, rentals and salaries. Those credits can then be sold by the producers to wealthy taxpayers looking to reduce their Rhode Island personal income taxes.

In 27 Dresses, Heigl’s Jane is a woman who has been a bridesmaid 27 times without being a bride herself. Jane, a selfless woman, has spent her entire life trying to make other people happy . . . and she has 27 bridesmaid dresses to prove it. One night when she is shuttling between wedding receptions in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Jane captures the attention of a newspaper reporter named Kevin, played by James Marsden (most recently on screen as the prince in Enchanted and TV disk jockey Corny Collins in Hairspray), who believes that a story about this “wedding junkie” will be his ticket off the bridal beat.

Jane finds Kevin’s cynical attitude counter to everything she holds dear. Yet things become more complicated for her with the arrival of her sister, Tess (Akerman), who immediately snares the heart of Jane’s boss (Edward Burns), the object of Jane’s longtime crush.

In the movie, he’s the head of an eco-conscious sportswear company, Urban Everest, whose offices were set up in the Hope Artiste Village, the 660,000 square-foot former home of Hope Webbing in Pawtucket. The Urban Everest “office” was just down the hall from a room that had been hung with gauzy curtains and was later to be the site of a “Hindu-Jewish wedding” in the movie.

In one of the scenes shot at Hope, Heigl’s Jane helps Burns’ George select a tie. The scene was shot again and again, as movie crews often do, sometimes with the camera closer to Heigl and Burns for a medium shot, sometimes farther away.

In real life, Heigl, who plays Dr. Isobel “Izzy” Stevens on the hit ABC series Grey’s Anatomy and had a blockbuster summertime movie in writer-director Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up, is not always the bridesmaid, although she has been a bridesmaid in two weddings. One of them was for her sister, who was married in October, with Heigl as her maid of honor.

But Heigl herself walked down the aisle Dec. 23 in Park City, Utah, marrying longtime sweetheart, musician Josh Kelley, who popped the question last summer, a little more than a year after the 29-year-old Heigl was cast in his music video for “Only You.”

The singer’s 2005 tune “Katie’s Song” was a direct reference to Heigl.

In 27 Dresses, many of the weddings are played for laughs, including one in which Heigl’s bridesmaid dress so resembled the hoop skirts of Gone with the Wind, “I felt like Scarlett O’Hara,” she said.

But there were no hoops or Goth dresses or Hindu saris for Heigl’s own wedding. She wore an Oscar de la Renta gown, walking down the aisle to a song composed by Kelley, according to OK! magazine, which had been granted exclusive coverage of the private nuptials.

In this case, real life imitated reel life, only better.

mjanuson@projo.com