A local industry renaissance

Film and television production in Chicago still lacks the resources, glamour, and consistency of opportunity found on the coasts—but you can’t build Chicago’s community and authenticity in a Hollywood hangar.

By KAT SACHS

“Traditionally, going back years and years and years, The Blues Brothers , Ferris Bueller’s Day O , 35-40-plus years of films and productions, they came to the state and the city to essentially rent Chicago,” says Peter Hawley, director of the Illinois Film Office. (He was appointed to the position in 2019 by Governor Pritzker). “They wanted to use Chicago as a backdrop. Famously, Ferris Bueller was obviously shot all over the city of Chicago, but Ferris Bueller’s house was in Long Beach, California, and they filmed those scenes there.”

Indeed, if you google “Ferris Bueller house,” there appears on the right side of the screen a map, with one red pin in Chicago (which is actually Cameron’s house, in Highland Park) and the other in California.

This seems like a fitting representation of Chicago’s position in the country’s film and television production landscape. To the left, sunny California and all the benefits of Hollywood, from Tinseltown’s excess of creative talent (much of it shipped in from other places) to its bevy of production facilities, all ready to turn what’s essentially a giant hangar into Anytown, U.S.A.; to the right, bustling New York City, where one has a better chance of bumping into Sarah Jessica Parker filming the new Sex and the City series than they do of finding a ordable housing.

And, nearly in the middle, there’s Chicago. The city has been a bustling production town on and o since the early 20th century, the “ons” of which include Essanay Studios (where Charlie Chaplin briefly worked) in the 1910s, the John Hughes-ification of the North Shore in the 80s, and the recent uptick in Hollywood films like The Dark Knight, Trans- formers , and Jupiter Ascending (the latter from loyal Chicago mainstays the Wachowski sisters). Yet in spite of the newly expanded and recently extended Illinois Film Services Tax Credit—more on that later—Chicago can still go overlooked, writhing under the shadows of its siblings on the coasts.

Independent productions, however, remain the best example of so-called homegrown initiatives.

“One thing we knew for sure is that we wanted to shoot in Chicago, and we wanted our cast to be here, and most of our crew is from here,” says Amy McIntyre, executive producer of I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, which premiered in May at SeriesFest in Denver as an o cial selection for the Independent Pilot Competition in Drama.

I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, a prime example of a recent production that was entirely real- ized in Chicago, was created by Carly Glenn, who also stars as one of two women (Katie Maringer plays the other) sent to the same psych ward after they crash their cars in a school parking lot.

Glenn called in from her childhood home in Brooklyn, though she lived in Chicago for many years (even doing the conservatory program at Second City and later enrolling in what was then known as the Harold Ramis Film School) and still calls it her favorite city. Having just rewatched the pilot in advance of our conversation, it feels like we’re old friends. Presumably if I were talking to, say, Jeremy Allen White from The Bear, it might not feel this way. And while it may be that way for obvious reasons (like Allen White being of the super-famous variety), it nevertheless imbues creative projects like I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental with a more genuine sensibility—even if the pilot doesn’t explicitly appear to be set in Chicago (versus The Bear, which wields the Italian beef like a cudgel).

Producer Ashton Swinford, who now lives in Los Angeles, originally came to Chicago to produce content for the Onion. Though she moved to the coast, she still feels passionate about helping to establish Chicago as a major production hub. “That was really our goal in leaving,” she says, “to bring back projects to legitimize it as more of a creative home where you can hire your writers, your directors, your producers, all of that.”

Several of the key cast and crew members live in either Los Angeles or New York, yet their connections to Chicago run deep. “A lot of us have worked together before, especially on the production team,” Swinford says. “So it was an easy call to be like, this is a position we need, I’ve got the best person who can do this. And that’s consistently true for us in Chicago. It’s a very close-knit community of people who are ready to work and get their hands dirty . . . that I feel is very unique to the city, having shot in LA, and being in LA now, and working in New York. It’s very much a family unit, and we take our team to each project that we work on.”

Glenn adds, “It felt so much better to be in the Chicago community of actors and creators because of the willingness to work together,