Chicagoans of the Year.
It has been a remarkable year for Chicago’s cultural community, from the new Symphony Center to developments in the North Loop theater district to the many wonderful performances and exhibits on stages and in museums across the area.
But every year there are a few individuals who enjoy a significant period in their careers. To honor them, the Arts & Entertainment staff of the Tribune 13 years ago established an end-of-the-year story to celebrate their achievements.
This year, there are 15 such people who have significantly enriched the arts in their communities.
The Tribune Arts writers and critics who made their selections are: Alan Artner, Mark Caro, Richard Christiansen, Blair Kamin, Greg Kot, Howard Reich, Sid Smith, John von Rhein and Michael Wilmington.
MARILYNN ALSDORF, ARTS PATRON
Marilynn Alsdorf gave one of the greatest collections in the world of Southeast Asian art to the Art Institute of Chicago.
She and her late husband, James (a former board president of the Art Institute who died in 1990) were known as avid collectors of 20th Century art, but their large Asian holdings were admired mainly by specialists and never exhibited in depth in one place before this year.
Recently, curator Stephen Little had mounted a campaign to organize a show of treasures, going so far as to invite one of the authorities in the field who knew Alsdorf to organize it. James Wood, museum president, approved a lavish book to accompany the exhibition, hoping to encourage Alsdorf to think of gifts for the future.
The exhibition that resulted, “A Collecting Odyssey: Indian, Himalayan and Southeast Asian Art,” showcased 200 objects from the Alsdorfs’ extensive holdings. The exhibition, which closed Oct. 26, did not draw the jostling crowds of casual viewers that the Impressionist shows did, but those with a deeper interest found it extraordinarily compelling.
Before the exhibition even closed, she announced a gift of her entire Southeast Asian holdings, which more than doubled the pieces already on display. Little could be given credit for initiating the process and carrying it out, but Alsdorf’s generosity was exceptional, matching some of the great Chicago patrons at the turn of the last century.
Both James and Marilynn Alsdorf were central to the Art Institute’s post-World War II development. Each served on advisory committees in various departments. James Alsdorf, who had spent his early years in Japan and China, was chairman of the board of trustees from 1975 to 1978, and Marilynn is a past president and current member of the Woman’s Board.
The Alsdorfs made many previous gifts to the museum, including a collection of Renaissance jewelry, but they also were generous to other institutions. So the staff and visiting curator Pratapaditya Pal obviously didn’t take their largess for granted.
“We didn’t collect thinking that this was going to go to the Art Institute someday,” she said. “It was collected for ourselves, but we always lent pieces (to museums) for shows. I enjoy lending because I think it’s important for people to see these things.”
Alsdorf’s decision to give the Art Institute her Asian collection, which was announced at a party given by the Woman’s Board at the time of the symposium in September, was very sudden and surprised everyone involved.
She said the Art Institute’s hiring of Pal as a visiting curator “was very important in my decision.”
“It showed that they had come to the point in their thinking that Indian art was high on their list of priorities,” she added. “If there hadn’t been a curator, (the donation) probably would not have happened.
“Everyone at the museum cared. It’s the logical place for the collection to go, if they had the interest and capability of integrating it into their permanent collection, which they didn’t have originally. This is something that has grown over the years.”
The Alsdorfs began their collection in the 1950s with a small Nepalese figure purchased from an art dealer in Paris. As the Alsdorfs’ interest deepened, they traveled in Asia, and the collection grew into more than 500 works from India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma and Indonesia.
FRED ANDERSON, TENOR SAXOPHONIST
In 1997, a Chicago jazz giant finally began to receive his due.
Among jazz aficionados, of course, Fred Anderson has commanded considerable respect for years, and not only because he plays tenor saxophone with a magisterial presence. Anderson also was a founding member of a Chicago organization that changed the world, the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), an assemblage of South Side musicians who created new and daring forms of improvisation beginning in the mid-1960s.
Intrepid jazz lovers have made pilgrimages to Anderson’s club, the somewhat ramshackle but musically irreplaceable Velvet Lounge (on the Near South Side, within view of the new McCormick Place South Building).
But 1997 was the year when word of Anderson began to break outside the small and insular world of jazz. In fact, it would have been hard to miss Anderson in ’97, thanks to high-profile appearances at Steppenwolf Theatre (in the Traffic series), the South Shore Cultural Center (during JazzFest ’97) and the Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz & Improvised Music (which attracted national media coverage).
Perhaps even more important, 1997 saw a near-avalanche of Anderson recordings pour into the CD bins, an impressive feat considering the avant-garde, experimental idiom in which the tenor saxophonist works. Nevertheless, at least half a dozen Anderson CDs are now widely available, including such newly minted releases as “Fred” (a two-CD set on Southport Records) and “Fred Anderson/DKV Trio” (Okka Disk), and critical reissues such as “The Missing Link” (Nessa) and “Fred Anderson and Steve McCall: Vintage Duets” (Okka Disk).
Meanwhile, Anderson’s once-struggling bar, which used to present live performances twice a month, recently upped the schedule to four nights a week. On the sheer strength of Anderson’s reputation, some of the best improvising musicians from across Chicago (and beyond) now regularly convene at 2128 1/2 S. Indiana Ave., the peculiarly numbered address of the tiny Velvet Lounge.
Further, the after-fest sessions that the Velvet Lounge held during the Chicago Jazz Festival introduced the place to new audiences. To all kinds of listeners, the Velvet Lounge — with its rambunctious jam sessions — has become “the center of the horn universe,” as one fan recently remarked.
“Things are definitely picking up,” Anderson said earlier this year, characteristically understating the case. “I’m glad I stayed in Chicago.”
So are the rest of us.
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GERALD ARPINO, DANCE IMPRESARIO
The co-founder and now head of the Joffrey Ballet, after miraculously saving his company, this year pulled off a 40th-anniversary bash to remember — and established the Joffrey as a major player on the local cultural scene. With glowing revivals, including the all-American “Rodeo” and the lavish, breathtaking masterpiece “Les Presages,” Arpino delivered two programs at the Civic Opera House last summer reminiscent of the grand ballet touring years of the ’70s and ’80s. “Les Presages” alone was jammed with a huge roster of additional support dancers, and veterans such as Tom Mossbrucker were on hand to lend a little star power in a work as magnificently structured and textured as any in the 20th Century.
The Civic was by no means the company’s only local outing, so ballet fans had the opportunity to see it on a regular basis and become familiar with its virtues and flaws. Arpino, though not a flawless showman — even an improved “Legends,” the homage to song divas, remains only so-so — came up with enough variety to fill a winter engagement at the Shubert, a late-summer outing at the Ravinia Festival and the company’s lush, scrumptious “Nutcracker” in November at the Rosemont Theatre, a production in a strong position, by the way, to move downtown next year now that the Arie Crown version has played its final performance.
Arpino has his detractors. The complex roster sometimes challenges the abilities of the modest troupe, which has lost a couple of key dancers over the past year. But what a diversity of choreographers he and the Joffrey’s residence has meant in only a year’s time: Arpino himself, Joffrey, Leonide Massine, Agnes De Mille and Laura Dean.
Arpino also has been a visible supporter of other dance performances, attending events from the Athenaeum Theatre’s dance series to that of an old pal, Amalia Hernandez, and her Ballet Folklorico de Mexico at the Auditorium Theatre. He’s also a civic booster with a shameless but excusable love of local celebrity: Ask him about the Bulls (during whose games the company has smartly performed), and he’ll move himself to tears in expressing the hope that his ballet company will some day give the city as much pride. Good for him — great things were rarely built by small dreamers. Though tattered by past financial woes, though smaller than at its height, the Joffrey now gives this city something once thought impossible: a truly international ballet company.
EILEEN BOEVERS AND GARY GRIFFIN, THEATER DIRECTORS
In a year in which much of the big news concerned the future building or restoration of big theaters in the downtown area, the 177-seat Apple Tree Theatre, located on the second floor of a Highland Park mini-mall, pulled off one of the season’s coups by winning the top prizes for play and musical in the annual Joseph Jefferson Awards for excellence in Chicago-area theater.
Eileen Boevers, Apple Tree’s artistic director, achieved this feat through shrewd programming that positioned new and relatively offbeat works in a subscription season that appealed to her North Shore audience.
Wisely realizing that she could not compete with Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre, her powerhouse north suburban neighbor, in satisfying customer desire for mainstream musicals, Boevers instead went for smaller, less heralded shows such as Stephen Sondheim’s “Assassins.” In the process, she has created a small but special niche for Apple Tree in the area’s theater community.
The man responsible for staging Apple Tree’s Jeff award winners, “Assassins” and Oliver Mayer’s boxing drama “Blade to the Heat,” is Gary Griffin, whose steady hand with risky dramas and complex musicals has made him one of the busiest directors in the area. Griffin knows how to stage big musical shows, as his continuing work with musicals at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace demonstrates, but he’s exceptionally good in gaining focus and impact for a small show on a small stage, and he has done some of his best work at Apple Tree.
Boevers, whose theater is marking its 15th anniversary season, began Apple Tree in the same Highland Park church basement once used by Steppenwolf Theatre in its early years. She moved to the present auditorium in 1988, running a five-play main stage season and a Theatre for Young Audiences series. She directs some of the plays herself, but she also brings in first-rank actors and directors like Griffin who are attracted to the material she programs.
Clutching her twin “best” awards at this year’s Joseph Jefferson ceremonies, Boevers noted that it was possible to produce good theater in the suburbs. Thanks to her, it’s not only possible. It’s actual.
COMMON, RAPPER
The bevy of stars making cameo appearances on Common’s latest album — the Fugees’ Lauryn Hill, R&B songstress Erykah Badu, rap giants De La Soul and Q-Tip of a Tribe Called Quest — hints broadly at the rapper’s rapidly rising stature on the national hip-hop scene.
Consider that for more than a decade Chicago had not produced a single rapper who could have attracted the attention of such a supporting cast. Chicago was for years a sleeping giant on the national hip-hop scene. But Common — whose real name is Lonnie Rashid Lynn — changed all that with the release of his 1992 debut album, “Can I Borrow a Dollar?,” back when he was known as Common Sense. The follow-up, the 1994 “Resurrection,” yielded a genuine hip-hop classic, the single “I used to love h.e.r.,” an allegorical state-of-the-music address.
His 1997 release, “One Day It’ll All Make Sense,” raises the stakes even further. At a time when rappers are increasingly relying on gimmicks or trafficking in gangsta cliches to make a splash, Common takes the high road. With each album, he has increasingly become more introspective, more revealing of who he is and where he is from, and the music has grown in sophistication. On “One Day,” Common wrestles with issues such as the existence of God, parental responsibility and the death of a close friend.
“The pictures tie in with the soul of the album,” Common says of the family snapshots that adorn the CD sleeve. “The themes are about growth and learning to become a man, learning about respect. I want my music to be personal, to show people my life and how I’ve tried to learn from my mistakes.”
Though the cleverness of Common’s early pun-filled raps won him praise, the depth and imagination of his latest lyrics put him in the upper-echelon of hip-hop emcees. His raps flow like liquid saxophone solos over the lush, highly melodic backdrops of producer No I.D., another local native, whose sound is evocative of old-school Chicago soul and jazz. Together with other recent local success stories such as Do or Die, Crucial Conflict and Twista, they are helping forge a distinctive Chicago identity in the world of hip-hop.
SHAWN DECKER AND PETER GENA, ART EDUCATORS
Shawn Decker and Peter Gena, educators in electronic media (visual art and sound, respectively) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, organized this year’s International Symposium on Electronic Art, the largest convocation of artists and electronic media people ever held in North America.
It was a massive city-wide electronic arts symposium including multiple exhibitions and live performances. Nothing like it ever occurred in Chicago before. The two also co-curated an exhibition and concert series, presenting some of the most advanced interactive art pieces and electronic music in the world.
Decker and Gena are first-rate facilitators in the best sense of the term.
“The electronic arts have really come of age,” said Decker, chairman of both ISEA97 and the department of art and technology at the School of the Art Institute. “By now a large group of artists have grown up with electronic technology and developed personal relationships with it. That’s a very subtle thing. It’s difficult to do and takes a lot of time.
“The result is that we’ve begun to see work that has less shock value than before. People aren’t particularly impressed with the flashiness of electronic technology. That’s ending. You see it in so many different ways every day that you no longer care about it.”
The electronic visual arts are, of course, much younger than electronic music, which began in the early 1950s and by now has built up a respectable catalog of masterpieces. Yet, oddly enough, concerts and live performances have not figured strongly in previous symposia.
“They are the biggest headache to organize,” says Peter Gena, chairman of the ISEA97 exhibitions program and professor in the department of art and technology at the school. “But we have a tradition of computer music in Chicago that began with Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois to spread across the country.”
Decker is also a composer and an artist who creates works for live performance; electronic tape, film and video soundtracks; and electronic media installations. Most recently, he has worked with interactive computer-based performance and sound installations. Gena is also a composer whose instrumental, electronic and computer-generated works have been presented across the globe.
HENRY FOGEL, CSO PRESIDENT
If acoustician Lawrence Kirkegaard (see below) made the new Symphony Center sing this year, Henry Fogel made the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s refurbished digs resonate in close harmony with the community.
Fogel, the CSO’s influential president, has a knack for making himself the center of attention, whether he is stumping for funds on radio beg-a-thons, hosting his own radio series, helping to arbitrate labor disputes at other orchestras or tossing off record reviews and program notes. His flamboyant manner has not endeared him to everyone, particularly those who recall the quiet, self-effacing dignity of his predecessor, the late John S. Edwards, whom he succeeded in 1985.
But Fogel, 55, has vision. He knows the ways of the music world. And he gets things done. In his 12 years as chief executive, he has remade a once-complacent, debt-ridden organization into a fiscally sound, high-powered corporation for the late ’90s, a corporation whose business happens to be music.
The opening of the CSO’s $110 million new home Oct. 4 capped off a watershed year for Fogel. Symphony Center’s national acclaim began with his ability to galvanize the institution as a whole behind his vision of a 21st Century concert facility that is much more than a place where symphonic masterpieces by dead composers are played. Fogel made good on his objective to create “a place where we can make music less intimidating, more meaningful for people.” Under his watchful eye the center has been running virtually nonstop since opening its doors. By the end of the season, more than 200 classical, pop, jazz and world music events will have been presented.
The essential thing, as Fogel sees it, is to pull in segments of the community that have felt disenfranchised from the organization. To that end, he has pitched special concerts to specific ethnic and minority groups, such as a “Sounds of Blackness” concert and a klezmer program with violinist Itzhak Perlman. Preparing young people to be the audiences of the future is also central to his objectives. ECHO, Symphony Center’s new listener-friendly music education facility, is set to open in late January.
For Fogel, community engagement is no empty political promise. For the past two years he has been meeting with community leaders, gathering and exchanging information. In 1997 he began implementing those findings. The orchestra’s president instituted a successful series of town meetings during which the CSO addressed the needs of and got valuable feedback from the city’s black and Latino communities. Fogel also created a CSO department of community relations, headed by Lee Koonce, and a new board committee — community relations and programming, headed by Donna Lee.
Among executive directors of the major U.S. orchestras, Fogel has long enjoyed an enviable track record as a shrewd money manager. This year was his best yet. Not only did he bring in the Symphony Center project within budget, but the CSO ended fiscal 1997 in the black for the 11th time in 12 years, posting a $23,000 surplus on an operating budget of $45.7 million. No peer American orchestra can match that achievement. Under Fogel, the Chicago Symphony remained in first place among major orchestras in percentage of subscribers, rate of subscription renewals and ticket revenue.
If Fogel looks out for the bottom line, he also knows how to balance institutional needs with the needs of the rank and file. Autumn brought a new three-year labor agreement with the orchestra musicians, a contract that was signed less than 24 hours before the gala opening of Symphony Center. Unlike previous contract negotiations, Fogel steered clear of the bargaining table. But he was clearly the power behind the management negotiating team. His success at securing a mutually satisfactory pact while avoiding a potentially disastrous strike made him a modern-day Solomon among U.S. orchestra managers.
What, one wonders, can he possibly do for an encore in 1998?
A. LAWRENCE KIRKEGAARD, ACOUSTICIAN
A. Lawrence Kirkegaard is not a musician. Nevertheless, he became the most powerful man in Chicago classical music during 1997. How? Because, as project acoustician for the “new” Orchestra Hall at Symphony Center, he was in a position to decide how audience members and musicians hear music in the area’s most important, and busiest, concert facility — now and for many years to come. It’s a heavy responsibility and Kirkegaard knows it. He also knows he can shoulder it.
Three years and $110 million later, Symphony Center opened successfully on Oct. 4 with a gala concert conducted by Daniel Barenboim. But nobody deserved a standing ovation more than the 59-year-old, internationally respected head of the architectural acoustics firm Kirkegaard & Associates, Downers Grove. Throughout the center’s three-week opening festival, the consensus among musicians and public was that the sound for symphonic music had been decidedly improved.
Thanks to Kirkegaard and his crack team of acousticians and engineers, the 93-year-old facility finally sounds like the concert room Orchestra Hall always wanted to be. Not only do the lower strings and lower brass have much more presence but the sound boasts a new depth and fullness. (Upper string sound remains less than ideal, but Kirkegaard suggests that further modifications between now and the end of January should boost the hall’s upper frequency response.)
Improving an auditorium whose dry, hard sound scarcely did justice to the CSO’s wide sonic spectrum was the driving factor behind the trustees’ decision to undertake the three-year expansion and renovation. Kirkegaard was brought into the project partly because his track record for improving old concert halls and building fine modern ones such as Tanglewood’s Ozawa Hall was so good. He also was chosen because, of all the acousticians with whom management spoke, “he was the one who focused most emotionally on maintaining the presence and impact of sound,” according to CSO President Henry Fogel. “He said that whatever we did to the hall, we cannot lose that.”
Kirkegaard was true to his word. Orchestra Hall kept its familiar sonic impact. And just look what it gained.
But will the home of the Chicago Symphony live up to Fogel’s expectation that it will take its place among “the three or four truly great halls in America”? Kirkegaard suggests it will. But he also points out that his acoustical fine-tuning of the auditorium formerly known as Orchestra Hall is an ongoing process and could continue through June. “If fixes are needed as the season progresses,” he explains, “we will be there to identify what’s needed and follow through on it. We will not step away until we are happy with it and you, the public, are happy too.”
LEWIS MANILOW, PHILANTHROPIST
Lewis Manilow began his campaign for a revitalized North Loop theater district back in the 1970s, when nobody was paying much attention to the concept. He envisioned a “theater row” lineup that would include the old Selwyn and Harris theaters on Dearborn Street, the Chicago Theatre on State Street and the Oriental Theatre on Randolph Street, along with accompanying restaurants and shops.
About two decades later, with some revisions, the North Loop theater area Manilow envisioned and for which he proselytized for so long with such vigor, is nearing reality. In separate transactions in 1997, plans were unveiled for the restoration of both the Oriental (at a cost of $32 million) and Palace ($74.5 million) movie theaters as performing arts centers in the Loop, and Goodman Theatre officially launched its campaign to open a new complex ($53 million) in the Selwyn-Harris buildings in the year 2000. All told this amounted to an investment of $159.5 million in government and private funding, not to mention the additional $22 million involved in the new theater planned for Shakespeare Repertory on Navy Pier.
A cultural philanthropist of long standing in the community, Manilow sees all this activity as a commercial boon for Chicago. “It’s not just for people who like theater,” he is fond of saying. “All this activity is going to encourage new businesses, create new jobs, make the Loop a much livelier place.” In this belief, he has found a strong ally in Mayor Richard M. Daley, a big supporter of the North Loop theater revival.
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Manilow served as president of the Museum of Contemporary Art from 1976 to 1981 and is honorary president of the Goodman Theatre/Chicago Theatre Group Inc. Since 1992, he has been co-chairman, with Irving J. Markin, of the capital campaign for a new Goodman Theatre.
In addition to seeing his dream fulfilled and being hailed as the symbolic, unofficial poster boy of the North Loop theater renaissance, Manilow in 1997 also had the pleasure of seeing the old Couch Place alleyway between the Selwyn and Harris renamed the “Honorary Lewis Manilow Place.”
CAROL ROSS BARNEY, JAMES JANKOWSKI ARCHITECTS
At a time when Mayor Daley is raising the level of design in the Chicago Public Schools as part of his push to improve education, the efforts of these architects stand out. Partners in Ross Barney and Jankowski Inc., they received awards from the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects for their renovation of a Prairie School gem, the Carl Schurz High School, and their new Little Village Academy, which is tailor-made to its largely Hispanic neighborhood in contrast to prototype schools the city is building.
“We recognize that buildings are handmade. They’re hand-made by the craftsmen who make them, but they’re also handmade for the communities who use them,” says Ross Barney, who formed the firm with Jankowski in 1981.
That philosophy has worked to spectacular effect in such Ross Barney and Jankowski-designed schools as the Cesar Chavez Multi-Cultural Academic Center, which features the firm’s characteristic decorative brick work and bright splashes of color. In a gang-plagued neighborhood where graffiti rivals the telephone as a form of communication, the school is all but untouched by vandalism, illustrating the maxim that if you treat people with dignity they will respond in kind. Among the many prizes it has won is a national honor award from the American Institute of Architects.
Other Chicago-area buildings by Ross Barney and Jankowski include the Mabel Manning Public Library, just west of the United Center, the Barrington Area Library in Barrington and the Glendale Heights post office, whose red, white and blue brick facade suggests an American flag.
This year, Ross Barney and Jankowski was selected by the General Services Administration to design the replacement for the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. The firm has proposed three alternatives, and a final selection is expected by mid-January.
“Making defensible public space is the biggest challenge,” says Ross Barney.
GEORGE TILLMAN JR. MOVIE WRITER-DIRECTOR
George Tillman, Jr. actually based the wondrously convivial family dinners in his Chicago-set sleeper “Soul Food” on his grandmother’s Sunday dinners back in Milwaukee: gala affairs in which relatives, friends, preachers and even homeless people down on their luck would join in and chow down. But so expertly does Tillman convey the mood and atmosphere — and great eating — of Chicago’s inner city and its close-knit families that you’d never guess the inspiration came from anywhere else.
Like Janusz Kaminski, Steven Spielberg’s regular cinematographer (“Amistad,” “Schindler’s List”), the 26-year-old Tillman is a Columbia College graduate who has hit big in today’s Hollywood. It’s been a fairly swift rise. Tillman’s Columbia short film, “Paula,” won numerous student film prizes and a Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame Award. His Chicago-financed independent feature “Scenes from the Soul,” made for $150,000, was sold for $1 million (it remains unreleased after the bankruptcy of the distributors). Then he struck a real bonanza when his “Soul Food” screenplay caught the eye of producer-composer Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, who became the film’s executive producer, supervised and helped write the score and helped draw the excellent cast (including Vanessa Williams, Vivica Fox, Nia Long, Michael Beach and Mekhi Phifer). The movie — as real, warm and human as any released by the Hollywood studios this year — also became one of 1997’s surprise sleeper hits.
What makes “Soul Food” unique among recent films with African-American settings is its powerfully convincing and affirmative portrait of family life. Without forcing his theme or lapsing into formula sentimentality, Tillman reveals and recaptures the mellow and fortifying spirit of the banquets he recalls.
He captures the way family traumas and dramas, even the most grave, can be compassionately played out against these backdrops of food and good fellowship, where the dinners can be a vital arena for resolving crises and easing troubles. Nowhere is that spirit more richly incarnated than in the character he obviously loves the most: family matriarch and head cook Mother Joe, played to perfection by Chicago’s Irma P. Hall.
THEODORE WITCHER, MOVIE WRITER-DIRECTOR
Like George Tillman Jr., Theodore Witcher is a young Chicagoan and Columbia College grad whose 1997 film offered a tonic for viewers longing for intelligent dramas about African-Americans characters removed from the gangsta scene.
From the opening black-and-white montage of “love jones,” featuring Chicago’s African-American neighborhoods, you knew you were watching the vision of someone with a sense of the rhythms and poetry of the everyday. The rest of the film confirmed that feeling as it took a familiar love story, placed it in an interesting setting — Chicago’s black underground poetry scene — and infused it with smarts and life.
The movie brimmed with self-assurance, all the more impressive when you consider that its writer-director is 27 years old and making his feature-film debut.
This soulful and literary twist on “About Last Night . . .” — starring Larenz Tate and Nia Long as the on-and-off-again lovers — featured sharp dialogue, seductive poetry readings and a cocktail party in which the male and female guests engage in a ribald yet probing argument over whether God was a woman.
The novelty wasn’t simply seeing so many articulate black characters on screen. It was seeing so many articulate characters on screen.
Chicago rarely has looked so good — or authentic — on screen. Shooting on the North and South Sides, Witcher and cinematographer Ernest Holzman presented a city of neighborhoods populated by real people.
Witcher’s efforts were rewarded with the Audience Award at January’s Sundance Film Festival and an enthusiastic reception from critics and audiences when “love jones” opened in the spring. The movie made the case that romance is appealing because it offers a world of possibility. In that sense, Witcher can look forward to a romantic filmmaking future.