MovieGoers

(ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2006)

New York. Berlin. Washington, D.C. has played them all. Chicago though, that was a tough one.

The city called on its inner spookiness for hard-working Batman Begins scenes, including the one with the police cars and low-flying helicopters swarming the Batmobile in a wild chase along Lower Wacker Drive.

Chicago is versatile, but it also has that elusive thing called stage presence, the power to provoke interest just by existing on-screen. Roger Ebert, longtime film critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, says the city has lots of visual strong points. "There’s the neighborhood detail, in films as different as Love Jones and Code of Silence; the lakefront; the skyline; the architecture; the underbelly, like under the El tracks and Lower Wacker Drive, " he says. "Plus, it has the look of a big city that is A: a skyscraping metropolis, and B: not New York. "

Still, all these icons create a stunning sense of place every bit as effectively as the Statue of Liberty. The city has played itself in major roles, including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Fugitive, and in bit parts, too. (With more than 600 on-screen appearances, they can’t all be big.) In Sleepless in Seattle, Tom Hanks tossed and turned here before seeking fresh scenery on the West Coast. And When Harry Met Sally, it was in Chicago, before they headed off to New York. But the two "left town" by heading into it along Lake Shore Drive. (Director Rob Reiner chose beauty over truth, deciding to capture Chicago’s skyline rather than drive away from the south side.)

Reiner heeded the pull of what Rich Moskal, director of the Chicago Film Office, calls the city’s "cinematic drama. " He says, "It can be glamorous and elegant, and it can be gritty and urban, but it’s always a great place to tell a story. " Filmmakers also have chosen Chicago because it is affordable. Plus, it has an experienced community of actors and crew members and a high level of accommodation at both the city and state levels. (You can’t just close down a main artery in a city of 2.9 million without a little help.) A community that’s able to deliver help at major-motion-picture standards doesn’t develop overnight.

"Movies started here, " says Arnie Bernstein, author of Hollywood on Lake Michigan: 100 Years of Chicago and the Movies. "Edison had the name (as the inventor of motion pictures), but they were invented, and then ripped off, in Chicago. " It’s true: Chicagoans William Selig and George Spoor developed big-screen cameras and projectors as inventor Thomas Edison was doing the same tinkering elsewhere.

Selig was also behind one of the world’s first film studios, and subsequently Chicago’s first film: 1896’s The Tramp and the Dog. Actually, many film studios and production companies were here in the early days, drawing a pool of musicians (who played along with the silent pictures), crew members and actors to support them. Even Charlie Chaplin, the world’s first movie star with staying power, got his start in Chicago. During this time, a little town called Hollywood was mushrooming into its filmmaking Golden Age. When that hit in the 1930s, Chicago’s movie industry all but fizzled out.

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