UC Davis emergency medicine physician Erik Laurin says the "best room in the hospital" is the resuscitation room, "where the most critical patient outcomes are determined."

Now he has a critical role in showing off that room to a television audience. Not for a news program or other show, but for the UC Davis Health System's latest advertising campaign, which will include a pair of TV spots, one 30 seconds and the other 15 seconds.

The theme of the ad campaign is the precious gift of life and how medical breakthroughs and new knowledge developed at UC Davis benefit the lives of everyday people in the region and around the world. The tagline is "A Gift for Advancing Medicine."

For the ads, various-sized boxes wrapped in UC-blue paper and tied with UC-gold ribbons represent UC Davis breakthroughs. The creative team planned to show the gift boxes with people who benefited from such breakthroughs — people such as a boy riding his bike out in the country, and a woman resting at home.

The creative team also planned to show UC Davis physicians, nurses, educators and researchers at work, advancing medicine, in such setting as a "resus" room, a laboratory and a lecture hall.

Filming started Tuesday morning and was scheduled to conclude Friday. Kaboom Productions is filming the ads for the Y&R advertising agency. The advertising could be seen on television by the end of the year or in early 2008.

A two-day casting call two weeks ago drew about 200 people, about a third of them UC Davis Health System employees. Some, like emergency physicians and graduate student researchers, had been invited. Others answered an open casting call for other roles. About a dozen health system employees made the cut.

"It's a fun life experience," said Wendy Foster, a project coordinator in cardiology, after her meeting with the casting director.

Dateline interviewed a number of the health system employees who tried out, and most, like Zakeya Warner, said they had never done anything like this before.

"It's something different," said Warner, a patient record abstractor at the Cancer Center. "I've seen the other commercials, but I didn't know they were employees."

Indeed they were — all those doctors and researchers and others from the health system and the main campus, all in white coats, standing in a field with a UC Davis water tower behind them. The theme of that ad campaign was "There's an Entire University Behind Every Doctor," and the tagline was "The Best Minds in Medicine — and Then Some."

The ads are a project of the health system's Public Affairs and Marketing department, which demands authenticity in health system advertising. So, if a scene calls for a doctor or a professor, then the health system finds one to play the part, News Service Manager Carole Gan said.

"Why would we want to re-create something with actors when we have the best in the nation right here?" she asked.

In the resus room scene, the creative team plans to film the gift box in an emergency medicine physician's hands, perhaps handing the box to a patient. So when Laurin and other emergency docs went in for their auditions, the casting director paid special attention to their hands.

"I never had my hands photographed before," said Laurin, describing still shots of the fronts of his hands and the backs of his hands.

Under an alternative scenario, the box will sit on a ledge behind the "actors": one doctor and two emergency room nurses. "We will do our usual critical patient assessment," Laurin said by e-mail. "We'll use our stethoscopes, penlights, etc., and they'll film whatever they want to include in our two seconds of fame!"

If the producers use only his hands, Laurin will get $309 — the Screen Actors Guild minimum for extras. If his face is shown, and he is recognizable, he gets $567 — plus residuals.

The casting director snapped digital photos of every tryout's face and whole body, then videotaped a minute or so of chitchat, during which she asked the tryouts to state their name and tell what they do at UC Davis.

Each tryout's time with Kristen Beck, an independent casting director from San Francisco, lasted less than two minutes. "Just to see the way they are, you can kind of tell pretty quickly," Beck said.

Among those trying out was Karen Geyer, who appeared in a TV spot more than 25 years ago. She was a student at Michigan State University at the time, and she worked part time as a bank teller. The bank was making a commercial, and Geyer played — you guessed it — a bank teller.

"I just did my job and they filmed me doing it, and they put it in the commercial," she said. "It was fun to have people call up and say, 'Hey, I saw you on TV — you were the bank teller!"

She figured that was her one shot at television fame.

Flash forward to 2007. As a health system employee — she is an executive assistant in the Office of Medical Education — she qualified for the open casting call.

And while she did not get selected, she said: "It was fun either way."

Gan said using health system employees in the commercials is a way to build pride in the institution.

Krista Keachie, a third-year medical student, explained what brought her to the open casting call: "I thought I would try something different out of the typical med student day.

"I think it would be awesome to get the opportunity to represent the university to the community at large."

Ryan Davis, a 2002 graduate of UC Davis, said he once appeared "for a split-second" in a KCRA-TV news report from the MIND Institute lab where Davis works.

He was hoping for longer screen time in the health system's new spots – but did not get chosen.

Emergency physician Laurin was looking forward to the filming and seeing the ads on TV: "Hopefully I can make UCD proud."