Features

“The Accidental Movie Mogul: The Hollywood-size Saga of How Alex Pissios Made Chicago a TV and Film Capital,” Chicago, December 2019. “Pissios can see the future right in front of him. The bearish 46-year-old stands just inside the main entrance of Cinespace Chicago Film Studios in the Douglas Park neighborhood of North Lawndale. He points out the buildings on the east side of Rockwell Street, the studio’s main drag, whose exteriors he plans to convert into blocklong street sets. ‘This is gonna be Main Street, USA.’ He turns and looks toward Cinespace’s northernmost building, at the corner of Ogden Avenue. ‘That over there, when you first walk in, is gonna be London. And then around this corner’—he points east, along 16th Street—’is gonna be Chinatown, and then the other one’ll be New York.’”

“How Bill Morrison Makes Magic With Found Footage” (on the experimental filmmaker), Chicago Reader, September 27, 2017. “Most striking for Morrison was the last ten minutes [of Lyrical Nitrate (1991)], when [filmmaker Peter] Delpeut relaxes his standards and includes damaged footage in which the chemical emulsion has dried up and begun to peel away from the nitrate strip. The final sequence pictures Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and no sooner has Eve given Adam the apple than the screen explodes with God’s wrath, the image disintegrating into a machine-gun spray of mottled browns, broken blacks, and gray patches crumbling into a million little fissures. ‘That was sort of an aha moment for me,’ Morrison recalls. ‘Wow, the decay can really be part of the narrative.’”

“The Funny Similarities Between Chaplin and Hope,” Chicago Reader, December 18, 2014. “Both were born in Britain and grew up in dire poverty, [Charlie] Chaplin emigrating to the U.S. as a young man and [Bob] Hope coming to Cleveland with his family at age five. Both were ill educated and took up show business as a means of survival, growing addicted to the spotlight and obsessed with themselves. Both were compulsive workaholics of unchecked ambition who neglected their wives and children, public men who were perceived by their intimates as being empty inside. And each man traveled the same career arc, enjoying a period of synchronicity with the American mood but, in his old age, falling badly out of step.”

“The Robert Altman Film Altman Never Wanted You to See” (on the local restoration of Corn’s-A-Poppin’),  Chicago Reader, June 17, 2014. “For Altman aficionados, it’s essential viewing: his sarcasm and jaundiced view of the business world are already much in evidence, and the live country-western show at the center of the story makes the movie a fascinating precursor to two of his most beloved films, Nashville and A Prairie Home Companion.”

“Red Lion Pub Offers a Respite for Weary Film Buffs” (interview with bartender and John Ford fanatic Joe Heinen), Chicago Reader, March 14, 2013. Heinen: “My favorite Ford-movie drinking is in Fort Apache (1948). There’s a scene where they find liquor hidden in boxes labeled ‘Bibles’ and Henry Fonda, as the colonel, tells the sergeant, ‘Sergeant, pour me some scripture.’ [Laughter.] And when he’s finished he says, ‘Destroy all this stuff.’ Henry Fonda leaves, and it’s Victor McLaglen and the other two guys, and McLaglen just sticks his cup in the whiskey and pulls it up and says, ‘Well boys, we’ve a man’s work ahead of us this day.'”

“The Sound of Silents” (on silent movie accompanists), Chicago Reader, October 27, 2000. “The music has to go just underneath the story line,” says [organist Dennis] Scott. “Sometimes you’re playing thunderously, and sometimes you’re playing so it’s very quiet. If you do your job right, you can hear people breathing in the audience, which has happened to both of us a few times in some of these quiet scenes. That’s when for us it’s really good. It’s not making all the noise and racket and everything; it’s when the story has captivated the audience and they’re sitting there very quietly and intently.”

Columns

“Batman vs. Superman: An Exclusive Interview With Billionaire Bruce Wayne,” Chicago Reader, March 24, 2016. Wayne: “I think we need to get back to the idea that earth was made for us, and we need to impose more barriers on people coming here from other planets and, frankly, changing our way of life. … They’re coming here uninvited, they’re taking our jobs, they’re using our resources, they’re blowing things up, … they’re breeding and creating mixed-species children, which they then use as a means of staying here. It’s crazy and it can’t go on, and I’m going to do everything I can to put a stop to it.”

“The Most Reliable Movie Critic in America?” (on the dubious honor of this title, bestowed on the writer by the website Vocativ), Chicago Reader, May 8, 2014. “From now on I expect my colleagues to treat me as a Solomonic figure—the lawgiver, the soothsayer, the final arbiter of any dispute. When the lights go up, all heads will turn toward me. In fact, in the tradition of Solomon, when we can’t agree whether a movie is good or bad, I shall simply order that the movie be cut in half. Everyone knows the first half of a movie is usually better than the second half.”

“A Decade Under the Influence of Terrible Movies” (commemorating the writer’s first ten years as a film critic), Chicago Reader, November 22, 2012. “I started reviewing movies for the Reader a little over ten years ago, and in that time I’ve published 3,664 capsules. So when our digital editor announced this would be ‘Turkey Week’ on the Bleader, I decided to compile my old reviews for the ten biggest turkeys I’ve seen during that time. Brace yourself; as George Carlin once observed of his Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television, “They must be reeeeeeally bad to be separated from a group that large!“

“Meet Dave Kehr” (on the Chicago Reader‘s first staff film critic and his book When Movies Mattered), Chicago Reader, April 21, 2011. “I’ve never met Dave Kehr, who served from 1974 to ’86 as the Reader’s first staff film critic. … But I wouldn’t be exaggerating much to say that Kehr was my film studies teacher. As a college student in the early 80s and a young wage slave in the city afterward, I picked up the Reader every chance I could get, and his work was a revelation to someone who’d been reared on movie reviews in Time magazine and the Chicago dailies. Here was movie writing so acute, intelligent, committed, and beautiful that one could, with a straight face, actually call it literature.”

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