Ray Pride

The base of Main Street in Park City, Utah: another Paris Hilton sighting, she's cavorting with her parka agape, pale blue hoodie reading: "CLUB SANDWICHES NOT SEALS."

Top of the hill, top of Main Street a few minutes later, it's the first screening at Slamdance, the ten-year-old competitor to twenty-year-old Sundance, of Chicago-made, long-in-the-works "Nightingale in a Music Box."

Glam and swag and artfully dealt branding thrive amid the serious and not-so-serious offerings for the estimated 40,000 visitors to this mountainside resort town an hour or so up the hill from Salt Lake City. Ashton Kutcher's brought Demi as well as the abominable time-slip "The Butterfly Effect" to Sundance.

There's a sturdier and stranger slice of scientific surmise playing here, however: playwright-turned-filmmaker Hurt McDermott and art impresario-turned-producer Leigh Jones have brought their Chicago-made "Nightingale in a Music Box" to Slamdance, which, with eighteen features programmed to Sundance's 137, and more than 2,800 submissions to Sundance's 2,485, is actually the more competitive festival. "Nightingale" debuted last fall at the Mill Valley Film Festival after a handful of Chicago showings.

"Edgy" is the most common of adjectives in early reviews of McDermott's tense thriller, and like any good Chicago-bred theater artist, he can cite elevated literary references for his mind-control plot. Citing Nabokov's "Pnin," the writer-director offers the quotation that "The cranium is a space-traveler's helmet. Stay inside or you perish." It's a particularly timely message when the retinas sizzle from all the branding, co-branding and "partnering" of commerce and art in this Utah mountainside resort. "Nightingale" demonstrates resolute attention to intellect--and a playwright's love of the linguistic--instead of brute thrills in its chilling version of a not-too-futuristic time when invasion of the mind is the ultimate corporate form of hacking. McDermott's unlikely heroine is a suburban woman, a real estate agent and mother of two, who tries to steal a new life form hatched to take over the human brain. She loses her memory. Or does she? As she's interrogated in a secret biological lab, the multifaceted puzzle of a plot continually reinforces the theme: how do any of us adapt to this brave new branding?

It's Sunday afternoon, the second day of Slamdance, the fourth of Sundance. Within the week, "Nightingale" will have locked up a special "jury honor for excellence in writing" from the festival. Today, McDermott and Jones stand in the lobby of the Treasure Mountain Inn, keeping an eye on the lineup for their second festival showing. McDermott, very tall yet consumed by his parka, stands to one side. Jones is more casual in jeans and a New Wave-style T-shirt. "The line is unembarassingly long," McDermott deadpans. He has a fistful of shiny red tickets, fanning them out. Nice souvenirs if no one else needing comps comes in before showtime. The unfancy space is reminiscent of Jones' background as the impresario of the early 1990s Chicago performance space, Club Lower Links, where David and Amy Sedaris got their start, and other performers included Annie Sprinkle, Lydia Lunch, Karen Finley and Henry Rollins.

After the crowd is ushered in, McDermott hurtles to a seat in the back of the 99-seat auditorium. After a loud short, McDermott's introduced. The Slamdance rep mispronounces his name "Hugh." "To make one crotchet," McDermott says, when he takes the mike, "It's Hurt. I want to thank Paul for that great introduction. Some of the darker scenes may be very dark, including, unfortunately, the first one." Jones scampers to the back as well.

Afterwards, Jones says, "Producing a film is nothing compared to this shit." She goes on to elaborate. "Will that line go on the cover? Okay, you get the film made and everything--that's one thing. But the life it has after? Or doesn't have, or the many lives it has afterward. It's hard to plan that. To put your finger on it. There are so many different ways you can go, how it works and where it won't work and will anybody come for it?"

That was the question with her now-legendary, long-defunct performing arts venue, Lower Links, which, with Jones, was on a Newcity cover in July 1990. "I was so young!" she exclaims before the Tuesday showing in the Treasure Mountain Inn lobby as the near-capacity lineup shambles in place. She was the founder, artistic director and owner of Lower Links from 1988 to 1992, with hundreds of events from music to performance art. "It ended up becoming my passion and ultimately my vision as I became more and more exposed to so many different kinds of art," she says today. "Seeing different things every single night of the week was the most invigorating, educational and fulfilling experience I've ever had. It totally informed me and woke me up to the world." In 1990, she told Newcity, "I didn't want to open a bar where the main object is just to get wasted... I won't put up an Old Style sign."

As a recent mother, Jones hasn't been part of Chicago's performance scene for a while, but she toiled in the field of film production with Bucktown Pictures, a local production house that's made some indie work, but does commercials and industrial films for bread-and-butter. It's a long way from sixty-hour work weeks booking, looking after and cleaning up after Chicago's early 1990s post-punk music, poetry and performance scene.

Reflecting the general economic downturn, Jones jokes, "Production has been down in Chicago so I've recently been moved from full-time employee to freelance producer. I'm looking for freelance producing jobs," she adds. "Anyone?" Still, taking on production chores after the first days of the movie's shooting, she's stuck with "Nightingale" for longer than less tenacious producers might, showing her love of process has lasted over the past decade.

McDermott, a Chicago theater veteran who for his play "WarHawks & Lindberghs" received a 1999 Joseph Jefferson Citation for Outstanding New Work, met Todd Slotten, the other producer, at Yale twenty years ago. Slotten approached McDermott to write and direct a film that he would produce; Jones came on after principal photography was already finished.

"It's clear there would be no 'Nightingale' today if Todd hadn't decided to step forward and make it happen, but he and I really felt we needed someone with more experience with distributors and reps and such to push the film. Leigh fit the bill," says McDermott.

Jones is the one who got "Nightingale" to sing at the notable Mill Valley Festival and then the more visible Slamdance. "She really took over the efforts to push the film and has been pushing it ever since," McDermott says.

They're both driven. "She and I are both so busy outside of this film project that our collaboration has taken place mainly over the phone and through email. We go weeks or longer without seeing each other; but then when we go to Slamdance or something, it feels very comfortable when we're thrown together day and night."

"I think Leigh had to get used to working with Todd and me a little. She's used to having larger budgets, and when we did reshoots we'd say, 'We're going to shoot, and we don't have any money for it,' she'd be a little bit wary of working that way," he says. "Then she realized that the cast and crew knew each other so well that we really were all in it together, and she became very quickly integrated into our tight little community of 'Nightingale in a Music Box.'"

"Nightingale" is low budget, but in the most resourceful of ways. "When making a spy thriller with no money about multinational corporations and U.N. cops," McDermott points out, "it's very important how you balance what you show against what you don't show. Anything you show that looks ridiculous or ludicrous because you couldn't afford to make it seem realistic would destroy the film's credibility. On the other hand, I tried to pick details carefully, which would counter our low budget. I asked a British woman who lived down the street from me to play the Agent at the beginning of the film, because I wanted the film to open with a British accent. Something simple like that raises your production values without costing anything."

Jones salutes McDermott's tenacity as well, noting that it's the only way a production like this is completed or finds its way into the world at all. "It is amazing how committed he is and how he never stops or gives up. What's kept me going on this project has been the fact that I like the film, think it's smart, the writing is great and I like the filmmaking process. I also have tons of admiration and respect for Hurt and Todd and have enjoyed every minute of working with them. Hurt and Todd are so smart and so reasonable and dedicated. There have been many ups and downs with this film but the ups have been real shots in the arm."

"I never get as much done as I want but just have to keep trying," Jones says before the second screening. She's standing in front of the big board of flyers and schedules and an ad for the American Spirit smoking lounge. "Bucktown Pictures was such that everything I was doing had to do with one kind of filmmaking or another, so I could cross the line between my job and my passion easily."

Whatever the fate of "Nightingale," which has New York screenings planned and the substantial support of Kodak behind it, Jones has other films in different stages of development, including more work with McDermott. "I'm also working on some shorts with Steppenwolf Theater along with one of my producing partners, Ericka Frederick. And just to keep the music in me, my husband and I manage a musician by the name of Danny Barnes who used to be in the Bad Livers." There's also a stop-motion feature animation by Chris Sullivan that's "in about its sixth year in the making."

She's more concerned about the quality of the work instead of how it will be received. "I can't say that I worry." Movies, she says, "Either they engage you or they don't."

(2004-01-28)

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