Brian Andreotti and Bill Schopf/Photo: Alyssa Miserendino
By Tom Lynch
You’re probably sick of hearing it by now, but “The Hurt Locker” is the least-seen of all Best Picture Oscar winners in history. In an age when funding for modest pictures is scarce, and studios are less interested in taking risks with films lacking marquee names, an art-house action drama (of considerable caliber, of course) bested the highest-grossing movie of all time. This was no small upset: On a Wednesday a full month after its release, “Avatar” took in more money than “The Hurt Locker” did during its entire theatrical run.
With cash tight all over, movie studios have been limiting their independent-film divisions. In 2008, despite co-producing high-quality pictures like “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood,” most of Paramount Vantage was consolidated into its parent studio. (Paramount retained the brand name, however.) But when most film studios were sprinting as fast as they could away from art-house fare, Music Box Theatre owner Bill Schopf saw an opportunity.
The Music Box Theatre, on Southport Avenue in the Lakeview neighborhood, has maintained a solid reputation as both a high-class art-film exhibitor and midnight-movie cult-film destination. Built in 1929 and barely changed since, the theater’s overwhelming old-time movie-house atmosphere is as much a part of the experience as the actual film you’re there to see—whether it be a midnight screening of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a weekend matinee of some Hitchcock, or the new Terry Gilliam film. And, of course, there’s the live organist.
In 2007, Schopf, a high-profile attorney and real estate developer, who took control of the Music Box in 2003, began considering an expansion, first horizontally. His team began searching for other theater possibilities in Chicago, but the realities of actually finding a good venue set in quickly, and distribution entered the conversation. The vertical leap of a movie theater venturing into film distribution is a substantial move, and a risky one at that, given the financial climate. At first, everyone tried to talk Schopf out of it. Read the rest of this entry »
A fey young man storms across Cleo’s to the back room and taps a tall woman on the shoulder. “Kate Winslet called. She wants her face back,” he says before sashaying over to another woman, delivering more bizarrely aggressive compliments as he mingles. The booths are filled with groups of friends dishing amiable celebrity gossip and sipping beer, eyes glancing up at one of the many televisions as this year’s Oscars begin. The ubiquitous sight of heads bent over cellphones indicates the tweeting has also started. It continues all night.
Clooney is universally loved, even if he looks cagey every time the camera pans to his face. The guy from “Short Circuit” elicits multiple cries of “Johnny Five!” when he wins an Oscar for “The Cove.” Nobody has thought of that guy in years. Molly Ringwald, looking terrified in a grape-colored toga and questionable jewelry, inspires one gentleman to mutter, “Pretty in pink, not so much purple,” while passing around a tray of cupcakes. It’s a friendly, low-key affair, though fiery debates erupt over nominees. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday night, Cobra Lounge is ground zero for a six-city experiment, launching the DVD and video-on-demand of the Sundance award-winning documentary, “We Live in Public.” Now situated in Chicago, the so-called “Warhol of Internet TV,” Josh Harris, accompanied by director Ondi Timoner, will take questions before and after a showing of the film.
On a large screen over the bar, a quadrant of feeds from Los Angeles, New York, Denver, Vancouver and Atlanta alternate with images from the Cobra’s own surveillance cameras inside and outside the building. The phone booth has its own flat-screens and cameras. Harris’ ideas were early: he got millions from investors for Internet TV years before broadband made it feasible. Bored, Harris built a bunker in downtown New York, dubbed “Quiet,” where a hundred or so people lived, ate, frolicked and fired off handguns and automatic weapons for free. The only condition? Cameras captured everything and Harris owned the images.
At Northwestern’s University Hall there is a small room, perfectly square, with walls lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that are all but empty. A large flatscreen TV hangs on the front wall, next to two chairs facing the audience at different angles.
As part of a discussion titled “Where the Arts Meet,” writer Alex Kotlowitz and filmmaker Steve James are seated in these chairs, prepared to discuss a currently filming collaborative project titled “The Interrupters”and the intersection between film and nonfiction prose.
On storytelling in general, Kotlowitz mentions “a constant state of astonishment of being knocked off-balance.”
James, donning a navy blue fleece sweater, explains the premise of his 2002 film “Stevie,” a documentary about a man he met ten years ago in rural Southern Illinois who was once an “at-risk youth” in a Big Brothers Big Sisters program, now awaiting trial for a molestation charge. “Instead of this tidy little first-person portrait of a half-hour long,” James says, “it ended up being this two-and-a-half-hour documentary.” He then shows a clip featuring Stevie and his friend Tim, who is later dubbed “the existential fisherman.” Read the rest of this entry »
Roscoe Village’s Hungry Brain becomes modestly packed as it nears 10pm. On the bar’s small stage, a projection screen has been set up for tonight’s screening, a romance-themed evening from local video blog Everything is Terrible! in acknowledgement of Valentine’s Day. When an emcee introduces the work, the silent, candlelit room, stocked with twentysomethings and endless PBR, gazes in anticipation.
The video mash-up begins. Clips and scenes from direct-to-video movies, infomercials and instructional tapes, all edited down and slammed together to form one film. An eighties tape that teaches the various styles of kissing; a quick look at Alaska Men magazine, the place to find single Alaskan masculinity; a god-awful horror show that features Fabio dressed as some sort of knight.
The crowd loves it. Laughs at every turn, often riotous. (“Alaska Men” really does them in.) When it’s finished, the emcee—who says the Everything is Terrible folks are out of town at the moment—gives away some DVDs as prizes and takes a vote on how the rest of the evening should play out, a mock choose-your-own-adventure. The crowd votes to watch the entire Fabio film.
Of course, as it turns out, two of the seven members of the Everything is Terrible! coalition are in the audience. They’re just apprehensive about appearing in public without their monster costumes. Read the rest of this entry »
Vampires will come and go, but zombies have staying power. As part of the Facets Night School, Facets Cinematheque will show George Romero’s classic “Day of the Dead” at midnight this Saturday, February 20. Facets’ Patrick Ogle, who will lead a pre-screening lecture, says, “George Romero created the ‘movie zombie’ as we know it in ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ Before that—and there are some exceptions to what I am about to say—zombies were ‘voodoo zombies’ or an adaptation of ‘voodoo zombies.’” “Day of the Dead” is the third installment in Romero’s “Dead” trilogy, and as Ogle puts it, “Is the poor stepchild amongst the first three Romero zombie films. It is the grimiest of the movies.” Tickets for the night’s event are five dollars, and include an educational packet with notes, essays and a bibliography for further reading. There will also be raffles for movies, posters and books. And if the movie and discussion isn’t enough for your undead palate, Ogle jokes, “I usually kill an audience member and eat their brains.” (Peter Cavanaugh)
On Friday, Chicago Filmmakers will host the work of local filmmaker Adele Friedman, who will show nine films that span from her 1983 portrait of her grandmother and father (“Sarah and Norman”) to a couple working in a kitchen in Paris in 2008 (“Pauline and Patrick, Le Marais, Paris”). Friedman’s work revolves around the use of portraiture, focusing on friends. “My work is often about cultural people, and how their lives are informed by their cultural interiors and artistic tastes,” Friedman says. “They surround themselves with what moves them.” It is a decided break from the celebrity-centric media we are usually saturated with, and Friedman aims to show how her subjects (oftentimes, those in the art world) cannot just stop being who they are when they are away from it all. “People don’t leave their culture at the museum or the office; they bring it home and live with it,” the filmmaker says. “It’s part and parcel of the daily fabric of their lives.” (Peter Cavanaugh)
There’s a concept lurking whenever I talk to people who write about film, or filmmakers, or film people at festivals. Let’s call it “the conversation.”
The conversation is the cultural conversation: how does storytelling stand out and seep into the larger consciousness in the twenty-first century? I’m writing this as the early figures have come in from Sunday: yes, “Avatar” has been beaten at the box office for the first weekend since it opened by “Dear John,” a movie directed toward a female audience, from a Nicholas Sparks novel. “Dear John” made $32.4 million, $10 million more than the most optimistic estimates. Multiple movies directed toward multiple constituencies or demographics, all making money: that’s how an industry survives and thrives.
But the Monday morning number that’s more striking is the ratings estimate of the Super Bowl, its 106 million viewers set to topple the “Most Watched Television of All Time” title held by the last episode of “M*A*S*H.” There’s the conversation: what gets more than a roomful of people talking for more than five minutes. It’s more than the nominal idea of the “water cooler conversation”: it’s about a notion or an idea taking root and being handed along. With new distribution strategies, it’s a difficult concern for, say, a social-issue documentary like Steve James and Peter Gilbert’s superb contemplation of the death penalty, “At the Death House Door,” which was financed by IFC and made available on cable and on demand. In the mid-1990s, when “Hoop Dreams” was made, a theatrical release window before video was the first of a series of platforms, and along the way, not only the film but its concerns were discussed in the media. But nowadays, there’s the danger that a finely tuned documentary with sports at its center can have a sterling first-shot audience if it debuts on ESPN, but it doesn’t strike a chord in the culture. “On-demand,” on the vast scrolling menus, can mean “no demand.” Each film becomes part of the cultural clutter; it’s a plateau instead of a platform. Subtextual issues of race, class and economy don’t become part of the conversation.
Steering clear of how “the conversation” is steered in contemporary politics, and staying with movies, in the case of “Avatar” the most prevalent conversational topic has been “is it worth the extra money?” and “Oh yes, it’s worth the extra money.” Nothing wrong with a smooth ride. Then other factors, and media memes erupt: is it an anti-American tract? Is that abrupt ending transcendent or nihilist? Is its story a match to “Strange Days,” a movie by Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron about transplanted consciousness that had its genesis at the same time as “Avatar”? Is this ride a rebirth of the moviegoing experience or the death of literate cinema? Its sleek success as the highest-grossing movie in history becomes a topic in itself: are 3-D and IMAX tariffs going to necessitate putting an asterisk beside its entries like a steroid-injecting baseball player? (Probably not questions to pose directly to Cameron: filmmakers and writers are supposed to be a little off the mark in life, and surfacing after years in the “Avatar” bathysphere, he’s living up to his own bold reputation.)
Nothing succeeds like success, it’s said, but nothing gets talked about like success. One of my treasured experiences this decade was seeing the entirety of Jacques Rivette’s twelve-hour-and-fifty-three-minute-long “Out One” over a Memorial Day weekend at Siskel; sold out, buzzing, a conversation onscreen and off, but quickly, you realize that single 16mm print has only been exhibited less than fifty times and that auditorium holds 197 people. 197! That conversation will eddy outward.
After Sunday night’s Super Bowl, not being in the company of full-on sports fans, the conversation afterwards was about the eight spots for upcoming movies and for a single commercial that were satisfying as narrative in the way that good movies are. Notably, it was the first broadcast ad for Google search. By yesterday afternoon, before it was identified as the ad Google would run, more than a million people had watched the sixty-second clip, “Parisian Love,” since its YouTube upload in November. A slosh in the bucket, still, compared to the Super Bowl audience.
There are a lot of striking things about it (including cleverly avoiding the clever ending of clicking on “I’m Feeling Lucky” as the final image of the commercial), but in terms of moviegoing today, and how people talk about movies (such as “The Hangover” or “The Blind Side”), as well the evolution of the distribution of smaller films, of foreign language films, “art-house films,” to use a phrase used as little as possible by distributors today, is the embedding of the phrase “Who is François Truffaut?”
It’s a bright, breathless ad but in the middle of its rush, that was the pause for me: that question has to be asked? But immediately the eyes-wide realization: that rhetorical question breezed past 106 million sets of eyes, not 197. Audiences are fragmented, attention is diverted, but subversive little details drop into the conversation. Plus, it’s the best short I’ve seen so far in 2010, with a late, great filmmaker name-checked in an elegant piece of commercial whimsy. And yes, “Avatar” is anti-human.
Chicago not-for-profit film production company Split Pillow has produced “Life as Lincoln,” a seventy-minute documentary darling, directed by local filmmaker Caitlin Grogan, about men who make their living—or at least part of their living—as Abraham Lincoln impersonators. “Presenters” is the term they prefer, and as the film focuses on three of these men it shows duties much more rewarding than ribbon-cutting at mall openings. Lincoln presenters are often called upon to appear and speak at schools; they are educators as much as they are entertainers. Grogan’s film, which bounces between Decatur, Indiana, Kentucky and Washington D.C., shines a light on three men who take their jobs as Lincoln very seriously—in many ways, we learn, their calling toward the great president saved their lives. Read the rest of this entry »
The Numero Group, primarily known as a record label, is venturing into new media with “Celestial Navigations,” a compilation of the work of Long Island filmmaker Al Jarnow, who’s created everything from children’s animation on shows like “Sesame Street” in the 1970s to trippy, experimental short films. “He has a really fascinating body of work,” says Numero Group’s Ken Shipley. “When we looked at it, we were like, ‘How can we piece this together the same way we piece a record together?’” Shipley says that the difficulty of putting together a film like this is comparable to the difficulties they face when putting together one of their comp records. “The life of a project tends to be about somebody being passionate about that discovery and driving it to the next place,” he says. “We have so many projects on our white board, there’s probably not enough time to complete them all in the lifetime of the label. A project is driven forward because someone becomes passionate about it.” Asked why exactly Numero Group decided to venture into film, Shipley shrugs, “For us it’s just, ‘Let’s make some cool shit.’” “Celestial Navigations” plays at the Siskel Film Center February 19-20. More info and footage from the film can be found here. (Tom Lynch)
