The Horror Society will celebrate its one-year anniversary Saturday with the Zombie Disco Party at the Viaduct Theater. “It’s to celebrate the Horror Society being in Chicago and doing events for the past year,” says Mitchell Wells, who heads up the Society. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door or online. The Horror Society started four years ago as just a Web site. “It was just a bunch of friends talking about horror movies-mostly independent films nobody’s ever heard of,” Wells says. Gradually, the society grew to its current calendar of events, parties and film festivals every couple months. Guests are invited to come dressed as zombies or get decked out on location with the help of makeup artists and then compete in the “best zombie” costume contest. Wells says the party will include vendors, games, screenings of old horror films, a DJ, drink specials and plenty of disco. “Everybody likes disco,” he says, “whether they admit it or not.”

After completing his first film, “The Art of Pain,” independent director Matt Brookens learned that when there’s drama on screen, there’s usually more to follow when filming wraps. Brookens hit the road to promote the film on the festival circuit, got creative with marketing the film, and in the end, the film was pirated and viewed by thousands online. “It’s so random what kind of things will affect your film,” Brookens says. “But with a niche film, it’s a matter of finding your audience.” The fledgling director could catch a break when it comes to finding a supportive audience when the film is screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center June 5-10. “The Art of Pain” was filmed in Chicago and centers around Jack, a movie theater employee, his sci-fi geek friend, his “actress” girlfriend and a ninja-in-training who is hell-bent on kicking Jack’s ass. Brookens will fly back from LA to attend the event and discuss his experience making the film. “I learned that I love making films. It’s a really difficult process but I love doing this,” he says.

By Ray Pride

One of the metro daily film critics still standing, the Oregonian’s Shawn Levy, has written four nonfiction books, including “King of Comedy,” a life of Jerry Lewis. His “Paul Newman: A Life” (Harmony Books, $29.99, 490 pp.), is the first complete biography of the charismatic actor, underappreciated director and epic philanthropist. Levy thinks Newman was a lot like Lewis, or Frank Sinatra, whom he wrote about in “Rat Pack Confidential”: “Men like this have incredible capacities for work and activity.” Levy expects there’s probably a scurrilous book in the works, but he says the man and the life that he found in extensive research, poring over archives, articles, interviews, letters, legal documents and his own interviews. It’s a no-nonsense read with a satisfying amount of detail. Read the rest of this entry »

A modest crowd filters into the Hoover-Leppen Theater at the Center on Halsted. A number of patrons talk with friends while others casually glance behind them to see if they recognize anyone they know. The crowd settles down as Gay Chicago’s film critic Charlie Shoquist takes the stage to introduce his pick for the Queer Film 101 series. The month-long event allows film critics from The Windy City Times, Gay Chicago, Chicago Free Press and TimeOut Chicago to showcase films that have impacted the GLBT community. The series gives viewers “the ability to talk with film critics and have a discussion afterwards,” says Danny Kopelson, the Center’s Director of Communications and Public Affairs. Read the rest of this entry »

Northwestern University’s venue Block Cinema will host the Talking Pictures Festival, Evanston’s first-ever film festival, during the first week of May, curated by Ines Sommer and Kathy Berger of Percolator Films’ Reel Time series. “Kathy Berger and I have been running this Reel Time series in Evanston for a long time,” Sommer says. “It’s a monthly film and discussion series, mostly about documentaries. For the festival it will be a whole range of films from animation to fiction and international films and locally produced stuff. It’s a wider range in terms of audiences and there will be programs that might even be OK for kids to check out.” In association with Percolator, Sommer and Berger have reached out to a number of Evanston organizations in order to get the festival up on its feet and have managed to get a good number of films showcased. “We have fifteen programmed slots because there are a number of short film programs; right now we have about three slots that are short film programs and a couple slots that are longer films combined with the shorter films.”

By Ray Pride

Come to think of it, every frame of every film asks, “What is cinema?” Some frames scream, others mutter, some stumble in literal and figurative darkness. Then there are filmmakers like Carlos Reygadas, whose stubborn, implacable, sublime spiritual tale “Silent Light” has emerged from distribution backwaters to limited theatrical exhibition (it opened Friday at Facets). I’m happily surprised it’s finally playing here.

Last week, I observed a masterclass at the Thessaloniki International Documentary Festival by Vilmos Zsigmond, whose philosophy as cinematographer boils down to storytelling as lighting, as seen in paintings and stills. Composition, he confidently stated, is secondary, since there is only ever one proper place to put the camera. Read the rest of this entry »

This summer filming will begin for the recent winner of the $100,000 Production Fund from the Independent Feature Project Chicago. The winning script, “Rooftop Wars,” by Miguel Silveira, revolves around Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. “Rooftop Wars” is what producer’s assistant Alejandro Garcia says is Silveira’s take on children, the community and growing up in a time of war. “Everything in the world affects kids and most people don’t realize it. But Miguel saw how the children in Pilsen reacted. As the war goes too far, childhood is suddenly turning serious too fast,” says Garcia. Silveira is hoping that the community of Pilsen will continue to inspire him beyond the completion of the script, and into the actual creation of the film. “We’re going to try and cast local kids in the Pilsen area,” Garcia adds. “Miguel wants to involve the community. Get the children and local adults—who otherwise wouldn’t have such an opportunity—to get involved in making a film.” (Khaveri Campbell)

If you’d like to updates on “Rooftop Wars,” or to make a donation, contact Silveira at rooftopwars@gmail.com

By Tom Lynch

Funny story about Michael Shannon. I was anxious to see William Friedkin’s film adaptation of Tracy Letts’ “Bug,” starring Shannon (who had originated the role on stage) and Ashley Judd, so I got out to the movie theater the first week of its release. His searing, terrifying performance warped my vulnerable brain—Shannon’s entire presence scared the hell out of me, so much so I had trouble sleeping, images of his blood-soaked body, surrounded by flames, his mouth rambling chaotic theory, had me turning over and over again.

The next day, I’m driving to work, happy the sun’s out and shining, drowsy from lack of rest. I’m stopped at the Clybourn and North intersection, first in line, and who do I see walking across the street, directly in front of my car? Shannon of course. Terror all over again. At the time I could’ve sworn he was in the middle of an insane conversation with himself, but I’m sure my mind was playing tricks on me. We make eye contact—one look at me and he picks up his pace, probably stunned by my floor-dwelling jaw.

Shannon, now Oscar-nominated for his scene-stealing supporting role in “Revolutionary Road,” got his start here in Chicago in 1993 with A Red Orchid Theatre, of which he still serves as an ensemble member. He’s also graced the Lookingglass and Steppenwolf stages—his partner is Steppenwolf ensemble member Kate Arrington, the two have a daughter—with roles in the aforementioned “Bug,” plus Letts’ “Killer Joe” and “Man From Nebraska.” On screen, he’s had prominent roles in films like “8 Mile” and Oliver Stone’s “World Trade Center,” but none as powerful as that of John Givings in “Road,” the troubled mathematician whose commentary on the young Wheelers glows—and bites—with its honesty.

Now living in New York, Shannon’s recovering from a tumultuous last few months and, of course, getting ready for Sunday. “Well, it was pretty crazy for a while, but it kind of settles down when the voting period is over,” he says. “No more campaigning to be done, so you just get a week or two to relax back at home, hang with family. I’m trying to catch up with friends.”

He says the Oscar-campaigning process was rather extensive. “Oh yeah, the whole deal is very, very extensive. They call you up and they say, ‘You know, we think we want you to get nominated for an award,’ and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s really exciting, I can’t believe how lucky I am.’ And then they’re like, ‘Well, you’re gonna have to do a couple things, go to some functions and stuff.’ It’s really like running for office.”

But it wasn’t all that bad. “It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it,” Shannon says. “It’s something you can’t understand unless it happens. I used to hear people complain about things like this, and it would irritate me, I would think they were ungrateful. It’s not that I’m not grateful, I’m extremely grateful, but it’s something you can’t fathom unless you’re doing it. Parts of it I really love, like doing Q&As after screenings, hearing what people think about the movie. It’s a rare experience.”

Shannon says that as a young actor coming up in Chicago, he never imagined he would get to this point. “I just did an interview with the Italian Vogue…and this woman, she was Italian, and had a very thick accent, and she asks, ‘You know, I did a lot of research on you, I read some of your reviews from when you started in Chicago, and all the critics, they said you weren’t very good. So I’m wondering, how did you get better?’ And I’m like, ‘Wow, I don’t know how to answer that.’ I guess it’s a long journey. I don’t think I ever thought about it—I never thought I was gonna leave Chicago. I never wanted to leave Chicago. I wasn’t one of these people who wanted to move to LA or New York and get famous. I just liked doing plays.”

He says he learned some valuable lessons here as well. “Well, I think it’s pretty hard to escape humility in Chicago. It’s kind of drilled into you, being humble, and always no matter what trying to get better and never settling where you’re at or resting on your laurels. And also that—I don’t know if I learned this in Chicago or what—but the story is the most important thing. Actors, it’s kind of an ironic thing, we’re all seen as arrogant and vain and self-centered people, or that’s one commonly held perception, but it’s really a service industry. You’re serving the writer and the director. I feel like that’s something I’ve learned.”

Shannon says he’s looking forward to more time spent in Chicago during the next theater season, as Arrington’s hitting the stage in two upcoming shows, and he might be “doing some shows” himself. And he has plans—next week, in fact— to make it here to see AROT’s new production of “The Unseen.”

“I’m a creature of habit, I go places I used to go,” he says of when he visits Chicago these days. “I like to go to Old Town, I feel like that’s my neighborhood. I used to live around there. I go to the Old Town Ale House—I got a pretty good chance of seeing who I want to see if I sit there long enough… I just love the whole city. I miss it.”

By Laura Hawbaker

With ten dollars in my pocket, I recently stared up at the AMC River East marquee. I was torn; two films were on my to-see list: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and “Milk.” “I’m a bad sister,” I told my movie buddy. “My big sister worked on both, and I haven’t seen either.”

My sister is J.R. Hawbaker, a costume assistant in Los Angeles. In 2007, she worked with Jaqueline West, the costume designer of “Button,” and she was a key costumer beneath “Milk”’s Danny Glicker. Both are nominated for Oscars in Costume Design.

“They deserve to be nominated for their different visions,” she says. “Danny did gritty, lived-in costumes. You couldn’t tell what was a costume and what was 1974 footage. As a designer, that’s the biggest compliment you can get.

“Meanwhile, Jackie did an epic for the ages. There are so few perfect storms that take the risk to be grand. She gave over a year and a half of her life to that film, and she made it stunning.”

J.R. may call these two Oscar-nominated designers “Danny” and “Jackie,” but it has been a long road to get to this point.

In 1999, J.R. embarked on a six-year-long academic identity crisis. First it was a Floriculture major, then Journalism, then English, then (at Mom’s suggestion) Communications. No course of study seemed to fit, and every quarter or so, we were not surprised to learn that the eldest Hawbaker girl had switched her major yet again.

At long last she settled on a major, her fifth and final, a peculiar choice with an uncertain career path: Costume Design. “I didn’t know there was a job out there that would pay you to put clothes on people!”

Mom and Dad had mini-heart attacks. What followed was four years at the DePaul Theater School’s rigorous conservatory program. Taught by some of Chicago’s best theater professionals, the School was like boot camp for young theater adepts. I often came home to a hurricane, our shared Lincoln Park apartment in a state of pandemonium: fabric draped over couches, renderings strewn about the floor and my sister in the midst of it all.

“At DePaul, I learned to make anything in five minutes, and in this industry, it’s a skill you need. They will always ask you for the impossible, and they will always want it yesterday.

“I also learned to deal with the crazy personalities that pop up in this industry. In theater, film and television, it’s like moths to a flame for crazies.”

Upon graduating (at long last!) from DePaul in 2005, J.R. moved to Los Angeles for an internship with the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She built up an impressive resume on “24,” “That 70s Show,” “Seraphim Falls,” “Reign Over Me” and “Mad Men.” Eventually, she landed at a costume rental house, United American Costume (UAC).

Eventually, a client arrived at UAC, a smiley blonde woman in the midst of researching her latest project. That woman was Jaqueline West; the project was “Benjamin Button.”

“Jackie was so down to earth and approachable. She was scouting, getting her head together for prep work, and she needed help with her initial research. I was bored stiff that week, so I was happy to help out.”

For twenty minutes, West sat down and like a storyteller told the plot of “Button.” With a timeline spanning nearly a century, costuming the film was a massive undertaking. J.R. helped as a research assistant, unearthing information on 1930s prostitutes from the New Orleans French Quarter, 1950s Americana designer Claire McCardell, forgotten 1960s Audrey Hepburn publicity stills and more.

“It was amazing and rare, having that one-on-one time with Jackie early on, when those tiny baby kernels of ideas were just starting to formulate,” she says. “Afterward, ‘Button’ became HUGE, and they shot for a year and a half. But I will always cherish that movie. I was there for a really small, tiny part of the costume design’s gestation.”

After ‘Button,’ J.R. worked on “this weird little vampire pilot.” The pilot was HBO’s “True Blood,” costume-designed by Danny Glicker.

“Then the writer’s strike happened in October of 2007, and it shut down everything in town except for a couple of features that had already been green-lit.” Like every other television show in Los Angeles, “True Blood” was put on hiatus, and my sister, along with thousands of other below-the-line industry workers, faced a bleak stretch of unemployment—until Danny Glicker came to her rescue.

“Danny said, ‘Oh, I have this Gus Van Sant movie with Sean Penn about Harvey Milk lined up. Come and prep with me.’ So I was one of a very lucky few who actually worked during the writer’s strike.”

As the film’s key costumer, J.R. pulled background numbers and clothed extras while Glicker busied himself dressing the principal actors.

“Danny is very talented and so hilarious! He’s like an alchemist. There was an opera scene that called for some old batty opera ladies, and I would ask Danny for his direction on the look. He’d say, ‘I want them to be encrusted like a ship, like a floating barge.’ So I would bring him barnacle-like rhinestone glam dresses and he’d love it!”

Now that the writers’ strike is at an end, J.R. is back on “True Blood,” this time as the show’s assistant costume designer, and her resume now includes two Oscar-nominated films.

“I feel lucky because I have a quiet family connection to both of those movies,” she says. “It’s weird because when I was working on them I never thought, ‘I’m working on a possible Oscar movie!’ I was just trying to get the clothes on the people.” 

By Ray Pride

The stockings are still hung by the chimney with care.

Surveying a couple hundred year-end lists by movie reviewers and entertainment writers can be a soul-squishing thing, particularly if you read the reasoning and rationales, the dithers, the doubts, the demurrals, the dishing and dashing to and fro, recurring, recurring. Oh, that’s what “The Dark Knight” was about! (No, it wasn’t, but thanks for watching.) Oh, that’s why “Slumdog Millionaire” is so special! (Um, where’s the fun? Fun? Energy? Bold colors? Remember.) That’s why “Wall-E” is the best movie since, in, well, since, ever! And doesn’t Eve deserve a best actress nomination? (I can’t get animated. Sorry. An hour of the apocalypse followed by this week’s adventure with The Inedibles?)

It was years ago, a bit, I will concede, before the turn of the century, the dawn of the millennium, but I do remember when I was a moviegoer on the street corner, looking up at the marquees of the Cinema or State-Lake, the Oriental or the Granada, the Sandburg. The Sandburg… whose cinephile operators went on to respectively produce “Election” and “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Milk” and “Synecdoche, New York.” I’ll even get teary going past a storefront recognizable as having once been a neighborhood theater. Say, the Wicker Park, now the John Fluevog store on Milwaukee Avenue below North Avenue, or the Parkway, now an optical store just south of the Landmark Century.) Those were the days. Those were the days. Stale smells and bright lights and furtive goings-on in the balcony. Civilian cinephilia: by this time of the season, I would not have had the chance to have seen all the films, or the privilege to have seen some movies several times before they hit Chicago. That was also before the epoch of knowing a movie would usually be available for rental eighty days after its release, dropping neatly through the mail slot the afternoon of its street date if you were one of the subscribers picked out of the Netflix queue.

I’m not sure how the experience a 22-year-old civilian cinephile who’s not visibly, volubly blogging his or her little heart out would simmer in today’s distribution picture. I do know a video-besotted bunch of talented amateurs, but they’re knowing as hell. The average moviegoer, though, may be confused by the return of the “platform release.”

Less a matter of being parsimonious than returning to canny marketing of the past years, distributors large and small have taken their sweet time in releasing movies, whether a matter of them not having come to Chicago at all yet, or perhaps only on a couple of screens for a week, two, three. Universal did its work releasing Clint Eastwood’s “Changeling” a few months back, a bigger picture, with a star (Angelina Jolie) in a star performance in the middle of it. It was released in hundreds of theaters. Didn’t do all that well. Now Warner’s got “Gran Torino,” a smaller, darker, profane, sometimes mad Eastwood picture. The powers that be seemed to have watched that disappointment as well as the platforming of movies like “Slumdog Millionaire.” The figures say Eastwood’s purported last acting role is only at eighty-four theaters, but goes to about 2,250 this weekend.

“Slumdog Millionaire,” on over 100 best-of lists, brightens only about 600 screens. (An oddity: Warners, who turned most of the rights to “Slumdog” over to Fox Searchlight later this month releases “Chandi Chowk Goes To China,” a Chinese-Bollywood comedy hybrid in a few dozen theaters.)

Does the anticipation build? Or are audiences, pounded by politics, going “eek!” about the economy mentally changing the channel? In Chicago, for the early weeks of some releases, the committed theatergoer gets to know well the smell and sound of AMC’s River East multiplex.

Another example: Mickey Rourke’s been named best actor for “The Wrester” by critics’ circles in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Florida, Kansas City, Oklahoma, San Diego, San Francisco, Toronto, Utah and D. C. For the same movie, Marisa Tomei’s gotten nods from Detroit, Florida, Las Vegas, Oklahoma, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco. How many theaters across the nation? Eighteen.

Sometimes I don’t want to be in my own shoes, but I’m glad my post-collegiate years as a filmgoer are tied up in my edifice complex, remembering without trying not just where I saw a movie for the first time, but often the seat where I sat.

A young film lover can buy and rent and download enormous chunks of the medium’s history, but the present tense is my concern. When does movie-watching become merely curatorial, a decadent arraying of lovely narratives and unmatchable images that can no longer be produced because of all manner of economic factors not worthy listing here.

Take “Watchmen.” Tied up in a very serious legal action caused by some bad lawyering: but the politics-charged Japanese trailer was released online Tuesday. Nixon and Kissinger in a Stanley Kubrick-Ken Adam war room? Lovers in the desert kissing in front of the rising orange bloom of nuclear irradiation? One more corner to loiter on. How soon is now?