Ray Pride

The weather is miserable.

It's a Friday night in late July, and I arrive at the dot of 9pm for a compilation of corporate video bloopers and sinister training films programmed by Milwaukee Avenue's Heaven Gallery. I've been to several showings there, especially rooftop screenings, which have been packed with an enthusiastic audience. On this particular night at the door, the usually sunny curator Doug Lussenhop wears a glum look. I look around and see his gallery partner as well as his girlfriend. No one else showed. "Maybe Sunday night will be better," he says with a resigned shrug.

The technology is there, but are the audiences? In the next couple weeks, the Chicago Underground Film Festival takes over several screens at the Landmark Century, and much of the work will be shown as projected video. With readily available technology, video projects (which, inaccurately, I'll describe as "films" from here on) can be made for next to nothing, and projected off of DVDs or digital video in alternative spaces across the country. I've been invited to several screening series held at lofts on the Near West and Northwest Sides, and when I ask, do you want publicity, the answer is "No." They're content with their word-of-mouth crowds of friends.

The weather is miserable: that is one of the key truths about why there has never been a filmmaking culture here the way there is in New York City, or Los Angeles, or the Bay Area. A historical disdain for filmmaking under the rule of the first Mayor Daley, and an allegedly corrupt production system have also prevented the talented from staying in a city they might love, but one that cannot pay them a living wage for what they want to do with their lives. In informal conversation with a few dozen local filmmakers, and those who have left Chicago, big-budget moviemaking is considered as dead as it ever was. Local financier Tom Rosenberg's Lakeshore Productions has made its last two pictures in Montreal, including a Josh Hartnett thriller that was once entitled "Wicker Park." Producing-directing team George Tillman and Robert Teitel are shooting "Barbershop 2" in Chicago right now, but although they make Chicago-centric pictures, their main office remains in Los Angeles.

It's a risky business, to use the title of the film remembered most for Tom Cruise having sex on the El. It's a matter of money. And it's not just Chicago. A former Chicagoan who now works on the production end (and doesn't want his name used) offers this analysis: "I know Illinois has taken steps to give tax breaks to producers to lure more business back into Chicago and I bet and hope that will help." Yet Los Angeles is under the gun of terminal runaway production as well. "It seems to me L.A. is now where Chicago was ten years ago, relatively speaking," he says. "Walk into any studio and you will walk through empty stages. Universal, Fox, Sony, and these companies are making huge movies. But in Canada, Australia, Prague. At an international carpenter's union meeting, a Canadian business manager was complaining to the L.A. business manager that all the movies were going to Prague, chasing that cheap labor force." What's the end result? "Next thing you know all movies will be made in the People's Republic."

It seems one of the key reasons movies get made in the States today is when stars have enough power to dictate location, that is, if they're New Yorkers or Los Angelenos. "Chicago was so blessed by John Hughes and Andy Davis," he continues, "What a combination. With the Canadian dollar rate of exchange and the kickback refunds the provinces and the Canadian federal government provides, a big-budget movie can save five to eight million bucks. What studio exec can defend the contrary position? Unless Washington takes steps to protest these actions as unfair trade practices it's hard to see much changing."

Mike Genett, a screenwriter and recent exile to Los Angeles who several years ago produced an award-winning short, "Big Canyon," observes, "People with decent scripts leave because they can't get them optioned, bought, or produced in Chicago. Filmmaking is risky capitalism and in Chicago, those who engage risk do so with hog bellies, not scripts, actors and directors. The movies that continue to be made there are personal, some of them good." Noting the consistent but unique example of Kartemquin Films, which has made movies like "Hoop Dreams" and "Stevie" for over thirty-five years, he concedes, "There are some documentary people who are good but they're not subject to the same conditions, the same economy. A few small underground filmmakers live in Chicago but their stuff is different. Their audience will never be other than underground. Their movies will never be seen in theaters, not even what remain of the small, indie theaters. I am interested in narrative pictures but also in audiences beyond seventeen people in a Wicker Park loft on a Friday night. I want to tell stories to more people than that."

Curator, screenwriter (and sometimes Newcity contributor) Sergio Mims doesn't even seek the solace of the Wicker Park loft. "The reason why filmmakers eventually leave is not only because L.A. is where the business is, but also because of a lack of support. And I'm taking about emotional, not financial support," he says. "It's very lonely to be a screenwriter or a filmmaker when most people don't give a shit about what you do. Ever try talking to anyone here about screenwriting? First of all, try to find anyone here who is serious about screenwriting. I stress the word serious because I'm talking about someone who has several scripts under their belt and not some unreadable piece of shit that they wrote ten years ago that's collecting dust on a shelf, and who understands the process and work that it takes to write a screenplay. Mainly what you find are a lot of would-be `pretend' screenwriters, but no one who's really serious about the craft. That's why people flee to L.A. For some support and understanding."

Then there are filmmakers like Jennifer Reeder, whose dry, sharp new feature about Midwestern alienation in an unnamed city, "Tiny Plastic Rainbow," is one of the highlights of this year's Chicago Underground Film Festival. Reeder came here to attend graduate school in the School of the Art Institute's video department. "Not many schools offered a video degree. I thought it was radical and wanted some! I wanted it all!" she jokes. Her earlier work, notably her "White Trash Girl" series, was more experimental, but she insists, "Even my more abstract pieces have a narrative über-structure." She was in Los Angeles when we talked about her work. "Feature length is ambitious. I am working on revisions for a conventional feature-length script and it is a beast but I am loving every moment of it." She'd gone for a hike the night before and the couple behind her were talking about an episode of "Friends" they'd been working on. "That wouldn't happen in Chicago," she says. Of her feature debut, she's written, "I am a single adult living alone in the city. I have a lot of friends and most of them are medicated. They seem unable to shake a constant sense of sadness and worry despite financial security and an active sex life. This is both sad and stupid."

A handy metaphor for being a Chicago filmmaker? Among local work I've seen this year, the singular Chicago twenty-first century filmic image, whether Jim Fotopoulos' purposefully crude black-and-white 16mm or Reeder's blanched digital video cotton candy, is about alienation. This, a whispered poetics of loneliness and a cheap yet satisfying metaphor for filmmaking as well, loneliness, the wistful artiste holding a weatherman-like finger up against heartless Prairie indifference.

"I think if you are a young person and want a career in the film business you ought to think twice," the producer says. "It's hard, grueling work, the hours are long and there is no guarantee you will get much work, no matter what you do, when you are in your fifties. In fact the odds are against it. If you love movies, enjoy them in a movie theater."

And yet there are filmmakers like Fotopoulos, whose prolific output continues with several contributions to CUFF, including another black-and-white 16mm feature, "Families," continuing his deeply personal goal "to X-ray the soul of a person." Fotopoulos works fast and cheap, befitting the modest potential audiences for his explorations. Referring to feature work, Genett says, "Filmmaking is expensive and no infrastructure exists. There are no banks, insurance companies, lawyers, agents, managers [in Chicago], and all the other paper pushers that unfortunately accompany such risky business. These may seem to firebrands like unnecessary bloodsuckers but try renting a camera package without at least a few of them. For God's sake, Cassavetes had to deal with this, so why wouldn't I? So right there, if you're in Chicago, you're in a hole."

What filmmaking infrastructure that does exist in Chicago is service-oriented. A production coming in from out of town with millions to spend would get a hand from the Chicago Film Office and the unions and what remain of the equipment-rental houses. Local independent film is not economic, so does not qualify for that support. Notes Genett, "An independent film is not an investment opportunity. It's a blast furnace that incinerates any and all resources thrown its way."

That's the sad fact of the industry. Then there are the movies that show around the city at the different venues and festivals like CUFF, that are at a remove from commerce in the best possible way. Instead of bitching, people are making movies, small wonders like local editor Sean U'Ren's delirious, apocryphal "Light of Other Days," which has moved me tremendously in half-a-dozen viewings. A personal narration of a sorrowed life is read atop home-movie footage from the 1950s, and it is false and utterly authentic, dreaming a different dream atop the images another eye has collated. The touching, seemingly autobiographical story attached to the images is made up. When history fails you, what to do? Tell stories.

Bill Siegel, who co-directed the documentary "The Weather Underground" now playing at the Music Box, may have the healthiest outlook. After attending Columbia University for grad school, he worked as a researcher on a project that became the Ali documentary, "When We Were Kings." But he wanted to come home. "Filmmaking is one of the things I do in my life, but it isn't my whole life. When I moved back here after living in New York City for a couple years, I knew that I was leaving a place where I'd have a better chance of making a living as a filmmaker, but coming back to a place where I could live life at a price I could afford and at a pace that moves at the speed of sanity. Chicago is so soulful, the stories and emotions and lives in this place are so full-blooded and powerful and real. I fell in love with Chicago a long time ago and I have always felt welcomed and encouraged to give something back."

(2003-08-20)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Richard Linklater's exhilarating, wildly entertaining 1993 youth-culture memory piece of self-discovery through teenage rituals is less geographically specific than the paranoiac Austin, Texas, of his earlier "Slacker," yet more culturally detailed, capturing 1976 America with loving, ethnographic precision
(2003-08-13)

Act your rage
Terror, scorn, anger, let's bring them together now and consider Peter Mullan's magisterial "The Magdalene Sisters," a sustained howl against affront and dishonor
(2003-08-13)

Educational Eden
Michigan Avenue's the city's prime brand extension
(2003-08-13)

Short Runs
This week's limited screenings
(2003-08-13)

Tip of the Week
(2003-08-05)

Short Runs
(2003-08-05)

L.A. confidence
(2003-08-05)

Tip of the Week
(2003-07-30)

The Oh No show
(2003-07-30)

Short Runs
(2003-07-30)

Tip of the Week
(2003-07-23)

Leaving Navy Pier
(2003-07-23)

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