Robert Zemeckis? That’s easy. He’s a technological wizard, an unsettling populist, a shameless heartwarmer, a blackhearted satirist, an Oscar winner, a frequent financial and critical disappointment and, to many, an abiding inspiration.
All facets and contradictions of this filmmaker, who gave us “Back to the Future,” “Forrest Gump” and “Flight,” who cowrote (with his early writing partner Bob Gale) one of Steven Spielberg’s biggest flops “1941,” will be reexamined in a near-complete retrospective of the Chicago native’s filmmaking career. It begins on Thursday with “Flight,” a highlight of Zemeckis’ output this century. The series continues through April 19 at the Music Box Theatre.
Copresented by Chicago’s Oscarbate film collective, the wide-ranging tribute is titled “Crackerjack Compass: The Works of Robert Zemeckis.” It grew out of “Zemeck This,” a five-episode Oscarbate podcast
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hosted by John Dickson and Will Morris. They’re crazy about the filmmaker, who grew up in a working-class household in Roseland and attended Northern Illinois University.But not in the same way they were crazy about a lot of it when they were growing up.
Take “Forrest Gump,” which made hundreds of millions and won big Oscars. Sometime in the pandemic, Dickson was sick and “just wanted to re-watch something with familiar beats. I put on ‘Forrest Gump,’ but as I watching it, it felt like the first time. This time I saw a much more acidic, blackly ironic-comic movie than the one I experienced when I was younger.”
He texted Morris, marveling at how different it seemed now. “Will texted me back, saying, ‘You’re insane. Stop texting me. I’ve gotta get some sleep.'” But eventually, Morris re-watched it and was, in his word, “floored.”
That put the podcast tribute in motion, and a subsequent, successful pitch to the Music Box to put the director’s work back on the screen. Nearly all of it, including the USC film school student films that got Spielberg’s attention, all three “Back to the Futures” and the more recent and deeply divisive forays into the realms of digital and motion-capture technology, from “The Polar Express” (“as lonely a movie as “Cast Away,” Dickson calls it) to “Beowulf” and “Welcome to Marwen.”
Zemeckis’ parents weren’t sold on his plans to conquer Hollywood. “There is a healthy cynicism that is bred into you,” he told an interviewer years ago, “when you grow up on the South Side of Chicago. I mean, you know, my father never, never paid for a traffic violation. It was always fixed. That was the way life was. That kind of Mayor Daley corruption … (but) being grounded in the harsh realities of real life helped me a lot in Hollywood.”
Zemeckis’ worldview grabbed Dickson and Morris from the beginning and became their guiding light in pulling the retrospective’s titles together. All the films, Dickson says, evince “a pretty strange and complicated worldview,” and that includes the movie that made him bankable: “Romancing the Stone.”
Also: How weird is “Back to the Future?” Very. “So dark,” Morris says. Attempted rape. Perilous flirtation with incest, played for laughs. “That opening scene, with Lea Thompson and Crispin Glover — it’s seriously one of the most insane scripts in the history of cinema.” But it had Swiss watch precision in its plotting, nutty as it was. And it was a massive hit.
There are other Zemeckis films you may not know, or may have skipped when they first came out. These are the ones, from “The Frighteners” to “Allied” to “Welcome to Marwen,” that the two-man Oscarbate collective hopes audiences will find and appreciate, if only for their unconventionality within conventional genres.
“That’s why we’re doing this,” Dickson says. “He’s a filmmaker deeply deserving of reevaluation.”
“Crackerjack Compass: The Works of Robert Zemeckis” runs April 13-19 at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave. All-festival passes $100-$125; individual tickets $9-$12 at Musicboxtheatre.com
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
Twitter @phillipstribune