FILM

continued from p. 31 because of the authenticity that each individual brought to their characters, especially on I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental. I feel like there’s a better ability to cast people rather than actors in the midwest.”

Though this show is certainly an indie production, there are examples of major network television shows that have really stuck to the Windy City. One frequently mentioned example is Work in Progress, cocreated by and starring Chicago improv stalwart Abby McEnany; it premiered at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and subsequently aired on Showtime for two seasons. Hawley noted that the writer’s room was here in Chicago, it was produced and edited here, the score was composed here, and it was even uploaded to the satellite from Chicago.

Mike Berg, the editor for I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, also worked as an editor on Work in Progress. As someone involved in the postproduction process, Berg has a di erent perspective on the industry here. “The talent in this town on the post side is really great,” he says. “[But] even a lot of the shows that do some of their production in Chicago, a lot of them still don’t edit here, don’t finish here.” Though, as he points out, that might be changing. “I literally cut this in my bedroom. You don’t need a big, full facility, and you’re seeing a lot more of that.”

The potential of Chicago’s film and television landscape is a topic about which everyone I spoke to is very enthusiastic.

“I feel like Chicago film is in a state of renaissance, and we are continuing to expand with the Fields Studios sound stages [in Belmont Gardens],” Aimy Tien, executive producer of I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental , says. As Hawley tells me, in addition to the new studios coming online, Cinespace, on Chicago’s west side, is the largest sound stage studio complex between the coasts and the second largest in the country behind Universal Studios. The Illinois Film O ce also o ers a Film and TV Workforce Training Program and boasts the most diverse crew base in the country, being spurred further by diversity initiatives that incentivize productions for filling crew positions from underserved areas.

“This is my little pet topic,” Tien says excitedly, “because I think more films should be made in Chicago. Fantastic films can be made in Chicago . . . we don’t have to bring in a production designer from somewhere else unless they are genuinely offering us a unique skill set, which is frequently not the case.”

Much of that talent already exists here in Chicago, and as Hawley says, “We want to retain those people. We don’t want the brain drain. And as Chicago is an arts center in improv comedy and in theater and in food and in music . . . we should be the same way with film and television. We want to have our own film community, as well as bring in all these productions from the coast, to make it a healthier ecosystem.”

Another hot topic is the aforementioned Illinois Film Services Tax Credit, which in 2009 was increased to 30 percent; a headline in a 2010 issue of the Medill Reports Chicago boldly declared, “Illinois Tax Credits put Chicago film industry back on the map.” Just last year, it was extended through 2032 and expanded to allow for a limited number of non-Illinois residents to have their wages included in the tax credit. But what, exactly, is it?

“The Illinois Film Office does two things, primarily. Number one is we process the Film Production Tax Credit,” says Hawley. “The Film Production Tax Credit is a film incentive, or why any production anywhere goes anywhere in the world. The Illinois Film Tax Credit is 30 percent under qualified spend, and so, very simply put, if you make a million-dollar picture here, we will give you a 30 percent tax credit, so $300,000, on your qualified spend of a million dollars. And that’s why productions come to any jurisdiction, as a starting point. That’s one thing we do. The other thing we do is, we are what I will just call film friendly. Half of my o ce works on the tax credit, the other half of my o ce works with filmmakers on locations and problem-solving and things like that.” With the help of this credit, Illinois broke its own records with almost $700 million of film production expenditures in 2022, up $131 million from 2019.

I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental’s cinematogra- pher Gianna Aquilina said it was a no-brainer to shoot in Chicago. “A lot of us started in Chicago and grew in the industry here,” she says. “So hearing things, like, ‘Oh, there’s tax incentives and stuff like that,’ it’s great because I think a lot of people are maybe a little bit ignorant to it, and they think there are just a few places where film can grow. But Chicago has been here, and it’s definitely here to stay, and it’s definitely continuing to grow. I think once people come over, like, for example, with the tax incentives, and they see, ‘Wow, there’s a thriving industry here, and everyone here is not only talented but they’re so supportive, it’s such a community,’ it will continue to grow.”

One would be remiss to talk about television production in Chicago without mentioning Open Television (OTV), which, among other initiatives, is “a nonprofit streaming platform and media incubator for intersectional storytelling,” per the organization’s website. Founded in 2015 by Dr. Aymar Jean Christian and Elijah McKinnon, OTV has long championed Chicago-made television pilots and series, such as the renowned Brown Girls webseries.

But, as McKinnon says, “While Chicago is a really amazing filmscape in terms of market . . . many of the studios and many of the networks and many of the production houses reside in Los Angeles and New York. And that is just a fact.

“It is really vital to invest, not only into stories coming out of Chicago, but also [in] the cultivation of artists and talent that come from Chicago,” they say. “What I mean by that is that there are a lot of individuals in Chicago that are writers, that are directors, that are producers . . . that are based here in Chicago, that oftentimes have to relocate to the coastal cities because of the opportunity. And it’s not that the opportunity is not here, it’s the con- sistency of the opportunities.”

Actor Kimberly Michelle Vaughn has appeared in Chicago-based shows such as Empire, Chicago Med, and The Chi. In I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental, she plays a group member in one of the pilot’s most ambitious sequences, wherein the relationship between the two leads begins to develop. “Wait, you two know each other?” her character asks as they begin recounting the school parking lot dramatics that got them where they are.

Glenn drew inspiration for the show from her own struggles with mental health. “I got to this point because of the many catalysts that were my mental health experiences,” she says. “As a writer, the greatest piece of advice I ever received was, write what you know. And this is exactly what I know, and it was just a blast to make.”

The scene stands out because of how in sync the performers are, with each getting their moment to shine. Glenn’s background makes it feel relevant and genuine, almost as if a sense of authenticity—what a film or television show set in Chicago might get if they actually shoot in Chicago, for example—is integral to a creative work’s success.

But there are other factors at play, too. “It just depends on the culture, I really believe that,” Michelle Vaughn says. “Because each set has its own culture, whether it’s a network production or an indie production.”

The Algonquin native, who came to the city to attend Columbia College, plans to move to LA next year, having been faced with the dilemma of lacking consistent opportunities. “You can only do so much here,” she says. “You can continue here, and still be successful in whatever success means to you, but if you want more, you need to go to either coast.” (It’s still indeterminate as to what kind of effect the current Writers Guild of America and potentially forthcoming SAG-AFTRA strikes will have on production in general and in Chicago specifically.)

I, for one, hope I Didn’t Mean to Go Mental gets picked up, as I’m eager to see where it goes. I want to see Chicago emerge as more of a character, so I can relate not only to the plot (if you know, you know) but to its place within the world, the place that is our incredible city. In the map of our souls, the red pin is always on Chicago.

“It’s just like this gut feeling,” Glenn says, “that Chicago, to me, makes things with a little bit more heart.”

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RThe Out-Laws

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R Joy Ride

Subversively clever and delightfully raunchy, Adele Lim’s directorial debut follows a transracial adoptee (Ashley Park) who goes to China to find her birth mother. With her are three friends: a sex-positive struggling artist (Sherry Cola), an up-and-coming actress (Stephanie Hsu), and a deadpan K-pop stan (Sabrina Wu). Together, the four journey across China and get into loads of varied mischief including but not limited to: a slap-fight in a Beijing club, a mistaken drug search on a high-speed train, and a night of carnal delights with half a basketball team. The film toes the line between a poignant search for identity and a frank, full-frontal view of desire, ultimately landing us on a journey to self-love in all senses of the word. Juicy, maximalist visuals, a lithe storyline, and hilarious performances from its four main actors make for a crisp, 90-minute summer comedy that can tackle large questions of diaspora and belonging without getting bogged down in tacky self-seriousness.

—NINA LI COOMES 95 min. Wide release in theaters

Tyler Spindel’s The Out-Laws on Netflix is your basic boy-meets-in-laws rom-com. Beta male bank manager Owen Browning (Adam DeVine) has to prove he’s worthy of his fiancee’s hip, dangerous, bank-robbing parents Billy (Pierce Brosnan) and Lilly (Ellen Barkin). They think he’s a “pasty little goober”; he thinks they’re dangerous criminals who are taking advantage of him. They’re both right . . . but can they transcend that and live, if not happily ever a er, at least long enough to dance together at the wedding?

That may well sound like many an uninspired film you’ve already seen—there are a lot of parallels with the very underwhelming You People, which debuted on Netflix earlier this year. The ritual humiliation, sexual and otherwise, of the boring nice guy was plenty played out some decades back; you could probably write the skydiving and tattoo scenes yourself given the setup.

But, like Owen, the unpromising material ends up looking better than you’d guess. DeVine manages to make unapologetic dweebishness charming, and the movie is elevated by a mish-mash of wonderful character-actor bit parts. Poorna Jagannathan is a joyously bloodthirsty diva villain, and Lauren Lapkus is a joyously bloodthirsty diva dominatrix bank manager. Richard Kind is wonderful as Owen’s fuddier, duddier dad, and Julie Hagerty is even more wonderful as Owen’s mom, who spends the run time reminding us that Hollywood has really let us down by not putting Julie Hagerty in every single movie ever made. Add in a couple of inspired set pieces—including a shoot-out in a cake shop and a car chase in a graveyard—and you start to appreciate the film’s principled and cheerful lack of ambition. Again, like Owen, The Out-Laws just wants you to like it. And by the end, I, at least, found myself doing just that. —NOAH BERLATSKY R, 95 min. Netflix

RScarlet

Where Italian director Pietro Marcello’s 2019 Jack London adaptation Martin Eden was an epic Künstlerroman, tracing the title character’s social and artistic development in parallel with a reactionary (and ultimately ill-fated) desire for individualism, this follow-up film is a smaller, more modest, and altogether more sublime expression of Marcello’s visual aesthetic, dealing in themes less explicitly political but just as subtly radical. Shot in France and based on a 1923 novel by Soviet author Alexander Grin called Scarlet Sails, the film centers on a small rural family; the hardships they face; and a prophecy foretold concerning the daughter, Juliette (played by Juliette Jouan as an adult). Raphaël (Raphaël Thiéry) returns from the front lines of World

War I to find that his wife has died, leaving baby Juliette in the care of Adaline (Noémie Lvovsky), a farmer on the town’s outskirts whose husband le her with significant debt. In spite of these and more malignant troubles, this makeshi family unit has moments of love and light, largely through their connection to the arts. Raphaël is a skilled woodworker who channels his talent into creating wooden toys and sculptures, and Juliette, in stark contrast to the steely villagers, loves to read and sing (the film is, in fact, a quasi-musical). Magic is another of those forgotten arts, as evinced by a happily hermetic Baba Yaga-esque figure who prophecizes Juliette’s destiny, which, as luck would have it (for her and us), comes in the form of a strapping pilot played by Louis Garrel. Marcello has said that, in comparison to Martin Eden, this is a more personal and less outrightly ambitious endeavor. Filmed in Super 16mm like its predecessor— and also including colorized archival footage that adds to its sense of realism and rapture—this sparkles with intimate feeling and pure affection for the cra . —KAT SACHS 100 min. Music Box Theatre v