Will Smith warmed up a crowd of about 1,000 extras huddling under the Brooklyn Bridge to shoot a scene for "I Am Legend" as the thermometer hit 11 degrees Thursday night. "So he grabs the microphone from the first assistant director and breaks out into a spontaneous rap, leading into a quick rendition of his hit ’Summertime,’ " one actress said. "More than 1,000 extras sang along at the chorus. It was a pretty great moment, everyone was definitely warmed up by it." The movie features Smith as the last uninfected man on a planet swarming with vampires. The bridge scene, full of helicopters and ferries, is a flashback showing everyone in Manhattan trying to evacuate by getting past a military barricade onto an East River barge. Smith is running for his life with his wife, played by Salli Richardson-Whitfield, and their daughter, played by his real-life offspring Willow. Will Smith is still one of the nicest guys in Hollywood.

Maybe it was home-state spirit. The man whose rags-to-riches story is told in the movie The Pursuit of Happyness spent its opening night speaking at a company party in Wisconsin.

Michael Riggs, the CEO of JHT Holdings Inc., in Kenosha, said he arranged through a talent agency for Chris Gardner to be the inspirational speaker at the company’s Christmas party on Dec. 15.

But with all the recent attention on Gardner and the new film starring Will Smith, Riggs doubted Gardner would make it, especially because the movie was premiering the same night.

He was wrong.

"He said, ’I could have been in Rome or with the world’s biggest star, Will Smith. But I heard there was a company in Kenosha that had been doing great things, and I’d rather be here with fellow Wisconsinites’," Riggs said.

Gardner, a Milwaukee native, was a homeless, single father in California before becoming a millionaire business executive, the story told in the film based on his autobiography.

He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel his recent fame hasn’t changed him much, and that he still keeps his "day job" heading a Chicago-based brokerage firm.

"I got up this morning and put my pants on the same way and it felt comfortable," Gardner said.

"This all isn’t about me, the movie or the book. This is for us, for everyone who had an opportunity to become negative and decided to go the other way.

"For every father who had to be a mother and every mother who had to be a father, and everyone who had a dream who was told it couldn’t happen."

Will Smith Will Smith was at the LA premiere of MI3 last night to support his good friend Tom Cruise. Will is sporting a new look, but it makes him look so old. I don’t like it. Will has a new movie he just signed to do, which is a typical Will Smith action flick: Set in post-apocalyptic New York, "Legend" is about the last healthy man following the release of a virus that decimates the population. To survive, he must battle mutants that wreak havoc during the night. Sounds like a standard movie, but Will always seems to make it better. Where is his wife?

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