Cinematically Cataloguing the Recent Past

This year is my 14th living in Chicago. I’m a transplant, yes, but the city’s become my home. I’ve put in my time. I’ve stared down Rahm and won. I’ve gone to The Waco Brothers’ Holiday Show at Schubas (more than once). I know how to do a Peter Francis Geraci impression. I got married here! So it surprised me that I was so surprised this past weekend, having lunch in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood with My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife, when a black double-decker bus rolled by outside bearing the words Untouchables Tour. “There’s an ‘Untouchables’ tour?” I incredulously asked. Somehow, despite having been here since 2005, I had never seen one of these buses. Turns out, after a little research, this is not a tour of the filming locations for Brian DePalma’s 1987 film but a tour of gangsterland Chicago sites with dudes dressed as Prohibition Era mafiosos for tour guides. Frankly, that sounds a little too Tony n’ Tina for me, and so I preferred imagining the Untouchables Tour as a movie tour, spiriting tourists from the Great Hall at Union Station to the Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica where one by one, just for $5 extra, you can kneel at one of the pews and exclaim “That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone!”

My own hang-ups aside, this Untouchables Tour, the real one, would be about seeing Chicago of the present but imagining Chicago of the past, which is sort of what “The Untouchables” itself is doing, the magic of the movies transforming South LaSalle into a Roaring Twenties recreation. Any movie from that era set in Chicago would have been filmed on a studio backlot, and so this is as close as we’re ever gonna get. Movies, after all, musn’t merely be transportation to another time and/or place but an evocation of the way a place once was, which is why even the Windy City postcard that is “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” can be importantly historical. The Sears Tower is cited as “the world’s tallest building” and as the famous 1961 Ferrari 250GT rolls down Michigan Avenue you can spy, over the characters’ shoulders, a pre-Millennium Park Loop.

This visual archive is evident in other films too. “The Fugitive” captures the city’s downtown St. Patrick’s Day Parade along its old route on Dearborn passing the Daley Center. And if, as the Chicago Cubs have transformed from lovable losers into a Nuveen-sponsored monolith, Wrigleyville has gone from odd, uneasy merger between daytime baseball and nighttime punk to bro-infested frat party to burgeoning family-friend theme park, John Candy’s “Only the Lonely” exists to bring that old, faded Wrigleyville back into focus, freezing its less spit and polished self on screen forever.

Almost 10 years later, “High Fidelity” encased Lounge Ax, a famed Lincoln Park music club where every notable indie band performed throughout the nineties, in cinematic carbonite before it was, ahem, axed, ensuring it would live forever in the ether as the low-lit space where Marie de Salle improbably makes magic out of Peter effing Frampton. I always wished I could have seen a show at Lounge Ax. Funny thing is, I did see a show at the Double Door – a lot of ‘em – which was where Jack Black performed as Barry Jive and the Uptown Five for “High Fidelity’s” climax. But Double Door closed when it was evicted after a long, contentious dispute with the city in 2017, leaving Barry Jive’s cover of “Let’s Get It On” as a kind of unintentional eulogy.

Jack Black on stage at Double Door

“The Weather Man”, which intrinsically captured Chicago’s soul-deadening winters better than any movie, froze the Esquire Theater and its vintage, picturesque marquee on Oak Avenue in time before the 1930s movie house was gutted in 2011. Joe Swanberg’s ode to Chicago’s superb craft beer scene, “Drinking Buddies”, was released only in 2013 yet found itself archiving the Black Rock, the bar a couple blocks west from where I used to live, home to a gluttonous mac & cheese burger, and which was demolished in 2017. And in “Princess Cyd” (2017), which intrinsically, lovingly captures my current neighborhood, evincing how Chicago can be just as restoratively leafy green in the summer as it is soul-deadening in the winter, has a scene at Lincoln Square’s Brauhaus, where so many of the faux-fabled, so-called “German Nights” I’ve had with friends tradtionally concluded. The Brauhaus closed at the end of 2017.

The Brauhaus in Princess Cyd

“Princess Cyd”, whether it meant to or not, spiritually preserved the Brauhaus, just as “Drinking Buddies” preserved the Black Rock, “The Weather Man” preserved the Esquire, “High Fidelity” preserved Double Door, and so forth. And I realize: if the Untouchables Tour, or just “The Untouchables”, is about conveying a historical Chicago, I have now lived here long enough to see Chicago places I knew so well become history, perhaps not a symbol of our sped-up society so much as a reminder of the way it’s always been, wrecking, planning, building, breaking, rebuilding.

Countdown to the Oscars: Cinema Romantico’s Film Location Awards

Film locations, if you’re choosing to get off the set, which is, of course, so much more common in these days long after the studio system in which all manner of movies were shot in rigidly scheduled time on cavernous backlots, becomes crucial. Consider Michael Mann, who often shuns soundstages for the real world, finding places as off the beaten path as the mountaintop conclusion to “Last of the Mohicans” (which is literally off the beaten path – I know because I hiked to it) as famously a jaw-dropping locale as the Iguazu Falls in “Miami Vice” or as unassuming yet memorable a place as the coffee shop in “Heat.” You listen to Mann on the director’s commentary track for “Miami Vice” talk about capturing real images of Colombia’s downtrodden discarding Styrofoam from packing boxes in the street, which he nimbly contrasts with images of the high-rolling Range Rovers of a big-time drug cartel, and you can hear him lighting up. I can only imagine how many houses Mann scouted to find “Heat’s” house on stilts in East L.A.

Film Locations are no joke, which is why each year the Location Managers Guild International bestows its LGMI Awards in which they honor the “creative contributions of location professionals and film commissions from around the world.” Well, Cinema Romantico wants to do this too. Cinema Romantico did this two years ago, as you may or may not recall, but forgot to do it last year, which we considerably regret. (We would have cited Donut Time in “Tangerine”, Max’s Steaks in “Creed” and, of course, the Hong Kong Ritz Carlton in Michael Mann’s “Blackhat”.) So today we re-engage with our aspiring tradition of honoring the best in the year’s film locations, IORO (in our ridiculous opinion).

2nd Annual Cinema Romantico Film Location Awards

“Moonlight”: Jimmy’s Eastwide Diner, Miami

The concluding scene in which two characters who have not seen each other since childhood is essentially a stepping back in time, which the setting, this little diner with its tiffany lamps, red & white curtains and vinyl booths, economically and colorfully underlines.

“La La Land”: Rose Towers, Long Beach

One of the criticisms I have heard levied at “La La Land”, which has principally come from actual Los Angelenos, is that the film is only interested in some whimsically fantastic version of L.A., not the real L.A. I liked “La La Land”, though I’m not overly high on it, but this is one complaint I find difficult to receive. Isn’t it called “La La Land” because it’s not the real L.A.? And though the Rose Towers, where Emma Stone’s aspiring actress dwells, might be real, director Damien Chazelle chooses them because their pink exterior mingles so majestically with the myriad colors he puts on screen through the sky at twlight and the colors of the characters' clothes during the movie’s most breathtaking scene.

“A Bigger Splash”: Coste Ghirlanda, Pantelleria

Among “the oldest and most compelling reasons there is to go the movies,” film critic Dana Stevens once wrote, is watching something “(w)e’d like to be doing too and (knowing) this is as close as we’re ever gonna get." I thought of that line when the primary quartet of Luca Guadagnino’s “A Bigger Splash” sits down for dinner at the mind-bendingly picturesque hillside bistro. Sigh. If only...

“Paterson”: Paterson Great Falls, Paterson, NJ

The day after the Presidential Election, I was on vacation in the Minnesota hinterlands and my family and I went up to Grand Portgage State Park on the Canadian border. Because it was early November, there were very, very few people around, giving me the chance to stand in the presence of the High Falls of Pigeon River and simply close my eyes and......listen. God, that sounded good, the ceaseless churn of the water over those rocks 120 feet up. It was a noise to get lost in, to subsume all the nasty thoughts roiling in your head into more cleansing, uplifting ones instead. I thought that must have been the feeling Paterson the Poet of Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson” was seeking when he wrote in his notebook while sitting before the Great Falls.

“Hail, Caesar!”: Good Luck Bar, Los Angeles

I had no intention of including this on the list because I had simply assumed The Coen Brothers dreamt up their in-movie Chinese restaurant from scratch. But no! It was actually the Good Luck Bar in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood. Read a few reviews of this place, however, and not just the obligatory “they didn’t have bendy straws so this place sucks” laments on Yelp, and it might instead make you hesitant. Of course, that’s also what the movies are for, turning something real into something mythical.

Countdown to the Oscars: Film Location Awards

It’s been almost ten years since I arrived in Chicago and set off into the wilds of downtown for a job interview and emerged from the office building cozied up between a few much more towering edifices and looked up and did a double take and mentally gasped and internally cried: “OH MY GOD! THAT’S THE ‘ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING’ BUILDING! AM I GOING TO WORK NEXT TO THE ‘ADVENTURES IN BABYSITTING’ BUILDING?!” For several years, I very much did, and as a zealot of the film de cinema, the rush never really dissipated for me.

Film locations, in other words, are all around me. Yet it’s not simply the “Adventures in Babysitting” building nor the Cameron Frye painting at the Art Institute (which totally has its own name, FYI) or the Jewelers Building where Batman stood aloft looking down over a twinkling Gotham that looked so much more dazzling than when it was Pittsburgh or that other city somewhere on the east coast. No, there are so many more, so many you might never suspect, so many that are so small but so crucial. Locations like the Black Rock, the bar just a couple blocks down from me where bits and pieces of “Drinking Buddies” was filmed, or The Double Door, where “High Fidelity” ended and where I was less than a week ago, or the St. Vincent de Paul Parish where Kelly Macdonald in my beloved “The Merry Gentleman” visited and which I pass by, oh, say, twice a month during my favorite walk in the city.

It was my friend and film blogger and/or filmmaker extraordinaire Alex Withrow of And So It Begins... who brought to my attention the existence of the Location Managers Guild of America (LMGA) and, even better, the LMGA Awards, scheduled this year on March 7 at The Wallis Beverly Hills. Film Location awards! Of course! It makes so much sense! Let’s say “Birdman” wins Best Picture. You will, whether consciously or not, remember the St. James Theater as much as the bird costume. Sure, you’ll remember the visual effects of “Interstellar” but also lingering in the back of your mind will be the locales of Alberta, Canada.

The LMGA recognizes Outstanding Feature Film and Outstanding Achievement By A Location Professional and Outstanding Film Commission and, heck, despite only having had an awards show for two years they have a Lifetime Achievement Award! The vaunted Eva Monley Award, bestowed last year upon Alexander Payne, no doubt for this. We here at Cinema Romantico felt there was no choice but to hop on the bandwagon.

1st Annual Cinema Romantico Film Location Awards

Night Moves. Aidan Sleeper, Location Manager. It’s not simply the radiant foliage of Oregon standing at attention throughout but the barn functioning as a sort of eco-friendly Studio 54 where club-hoppers drink out of mason jars and listen to fiddles as well as the bouts of pro-environmental pissed off poetry that director Kelly Reichardt captures whether in the fleeting image of apocalyptic timber or a white collar home with a fake waterfall in the backyard whose real-life owner must not have realized Ms. Reichardt employed it to give said owner the middle finger.

Only Lovers Left Alive. Chris-Teena Constas (Detroit). The Tangier locations as managed by Mohamed Benhmamane are spectacular in their own right, no doubt, but what Jarmusch’s vampire film does for the Motor City is beyond reproach, eliciting a vibrant apocalyptic air through its locales, a nostalgia that makes it seem like modern America’s version of a fallen Rome. Maybe the ruined Michigan Theater was an obvious choice, maybe not, but, God help me, that sequence’s romantic doom is taken up to eleven because of its setting.

Beneath the Harvest Sky. Josh LaJoie, Location Manager. Admittedly part of this stems from my own whimsy. Though “Beneath the Harvest Sky” was filmed in Maine’s Aroostook County, nudging up right alongside the Canadian border, its look and feel is nonetheless akin to the rural Midwest, and that always arouses fondness in my oft-homesick mentality. The opening shot features kids tossing rocks at a ramshackle water tower because what else do they have to do? That water tower is more beautiful than any iron latticework on the Champ de Mars.

Boyhood. Peter Atherton, Robbie Friedman, Steve White, Jose Luis Hernandez, Location Managers. For Antone’s alone. What other place could so perfectly capture a father's heart-to-heart with his son in advance of the son on the precipice of becoming “a man”?