One recent evening in the parking garage at 55 E. Monroe St., John Wilson, a short, sandy-haired man with a Spencer Tracy scowl, surveyed scores of actors and technicians as they set up a gunfight for Warner Bros.` ”Above the Law.” A freelance production manager from Los Angeles, Wilson has a reputation on the West Coast as an experienced ”Chicago guy” who can descend on a location and lash together top-notch crews.
”Almost everybody working on this floor lives in the Chicago area,”
Wilson told a visitor to the garage. ”I did `Risky Business,` `The Dollmaker,` `Big Shots,` `Adventures in Babysitting` and `Code of Silence` in Chicago. I worked on `Jo Jo Dancer` in Peoria, `1941` down in Champaign. And since I`ve been coming to this area, I`ve seen more and more people become more qualified.
”When we arrived in town to do this picture, almost all the good people were on other shows. We had to hire a lot of green ones, but it`s turned out that those people are exceptionally good, too. In a way, this recent crew shortage has been good for me. I`ve discovered some new faces.”
That night, director and former Chicagoan Andy Davis (”Stony Island,”
”Code of Silence”) prepared to shoot a scene in which good guys and bad guys exchange gunfire, jump into their cars and race down a ramp. One car slams into another gunman and hurls him into the street.
Hollywood people would perform the stunts this time, but Wilson frequently calls upon members of the Chicago Stuntmen`s Association or Rick LeFevour of Midcoast Stunts to perform such work. The local acrobats happened to be busy with other projects. ”Anyway, I wouldn`t think of telling the key stuntman from L.A. who to hire,” Wilson said, ”because he`s got people he knows and trusts. There`s a lot of that in this business. We build teams.”
Chicago film personnel caught on to the team-building concept a decade ago, soon after major filmmakers began arriving in large numbers. Two studio lighting concerns and a camera-rental company expanded with the business, and their names often turn up on the clipboards of production managers on both coasts.
The firm with the longest local tradition is Chicago Studio Rentals, the latest enterprise generated by the Crededio family, which has been active in the lighting end of the film business for more than 50 years. Brothers John and Gene Crededio, whose father worked in the industry before them, now roll out all sorts of heavy equipment when producers need it.
One afternoon, trucks commanded by Gene Crededio, 32, tied up half a side street near Milwaukee and Damen Avenues. The vehicles had hauled tons of lighting equipment to the site, and now their massive generators pumped electricity into another ”Above the Law” location.
Crededio and his crew had connected their lights to cables running the length of an alley and out to one of the company`s two 42-foot White Freightliner semitrailers, this one equipped with an 800-ampere diesel generator.
After helping his crew rearrange equipment near the rear entrance of a Mexican grocery store, Crededio paused and watched some actors rehearse a fight scene. In his dirty white T-shirt, Crededio looked more like a laborer than an entrepreneur. Sweat poured out of his dark, curly hair as he talked.
”In the beginning, companies like ours were putting out training films and working on the lights for live road shows or industrial shows,” he said. ”Then came more commercials and, once in a great while, a movie would come in. What put our company on the map, in 1980, was `Chicago Story,` the TV series. We did all 13 episodes. It was all on schedule and under budget.”
The Crededios bought their first semi during that period and stocked it with lights and generators. This year they bought their second truck and felt fully justified in identifying themselves as ”super gaffers,” the label applied to local movie electricians who can offer a large inventory of equipment and a wide range of services.
Robert A. Hudecek would certainly fall into that category. A gaffer and director of photography, he runs RAH Producers Center on Desplaines Street, a few blocks west of the Loop. RAH, housed in a former school-bus garage, offers movie producers two small sound stages, a variety of supplies, production facilities and a fleet of trucks-including one generator-equipped semi, a makeup trailer, a honeywagon (containing portable toilets and dressing rooms), a camera-sound truck and a prop truck.
”We established Producers Center in 1980 because we wanted to grow and we needed a place where a producer could make everything happen,” Hudecek said. Now 43, with the wiry build of a pro golfer, Hudecek started in show business 26 years ago as a teenaged gaffer who helped light up theater stages and local television shows. By the late `60s, he was devoting most of his time to television and motion pictures. Hudecek earned his first big assignment as a director of photography last year, filming eight episodes of the ”Jack and Mike” TV series.
”The reason RAH became big in location work,” Hudecek said, ”is that I went out to California in 1975, met with a few (American International) studio people and gave them some prices. As a result, they came back here to film a picture called `Cooley High.”`
Supergaffers` generators have been humming almost steadily ever since.
Hudecek and the Crededios often function as a form of subcontractor or general contractor, hiring specialists and providing all manner of lighting gear. Other film-related businesses lease space at RAH, including Holzer-Roche Casting and Mr. Mike`s, a catering company that serves meals on locations. The facility resembles a miniature of the massive cinema-production centers scattered throughout the San Fernando Valley in California.
John and Gene Crededio have been building up a similar ”one-stop”
facility that would provide space and services for almost every aspect of movie production. At a former Hotpoint plant on the West Side, they can offer producers areas for 2-story-high indoor sets and full production offices. Future plans call for a small back lot and a large equipment-supply house, although the brothers are still at least a couple of years away from creating a full-fledged studio complex with huge sound stages, which John Crededio estimates could cost $20 million to $30 million.
Meanwhile, the shows grind on without the massive sound stages that once were considered essential to the feature-film industry.
”We don`t need something like that, because we`ve already done tremendously without it,” said Kirk Paulsen, 28, the tall, soft-spoken general manager of Victor Duncan Inc., an equipment-rental firm at 661 N. LaSalle St. Victor Duncan supplies and maintains an estimated 95 percent of the cameras used in Illinois motion picture production, and Duncan also does a lively business in the rental of lights, camera dollies, video equipment and production trucks.
Although the city lacks a huge studio center, movie producers have been able to improvise, filming interior scenes in rented offices and homes or building elaborate sets in factories, gymnasiums, warehouses and advertising- commercial stages around town. In recent months, the producers of MGM`s
”Poltergeist III” managed to make full use of Chicago`s motion picture resources. Rather than simply film at a few outdoor locations and then head back to the coast, as most Hollywood people do, director Gary Sherman shot every foot of ”Poltergeist” in the city and edited it at Cinecenter on Erie Street. Shortly thereafter, he supervised the shooting of ”Sable,” an ABC television series set in Chicago.
Last summer Paulsen and his Victor Duncan technicians worked out some complex optical illusions for ”Poltergeist III,” while Sherman filmed interior scenes at Metropolitan Chicago Corp., a warehouse at 2500 W. Roosevelt Rd.
”They were doing a lot of in-camera effects,” Paulsen said. ”Instead of using West Coast special-effects laboratories, which would have driven up the costs tremendously, they used camera tricks instead. That way, they could make a $15 million film look as if it had a $25 million budget.”
”Poltergeist” relied heavily on smoke, mirrors, trick sets and other optical illusions, all designed and built with Chicago labor. Victor Duncan technicians performed further magic by manipulating Panavision cameras.
”For example, we built for them a small bracket system with partial mirrors so they could do a lot of ghost effects,” Paulsen explained. ”It`s just a set of mirrors attached to the lens and angled at 45 degrees. While the camera films one of the other characters directly, the actor playing the ghost stands in darkness to one side. All of a sudden, they turn a light on the ghost, and the mirror throws his image into the same shot.”
Trickery aside, a motion picture, reduced to its simplest terms, involves shedding light on a subject and recording the image on film running past a camera lens.
Most of the gigantic studio lights that once confined productions to sound stages have been replaced by HMI`s, powerful little beams employing haloid (a mixture of chemical elements including fluorine, chlorine, bromine and iodine). A medium-size electric arc, passing between two electrodes, torches the haloid when a gaffer flips the switch. Haloid, Medium-arc Iodine is never mentioned on a set, of course. Cinematographers simply say, ”Give me a couple of hemmees over here.”
”Ordinary lights tend to be on the green side,” Paulsen said. ”The old, standard movie lights are on the orange side. Daylight tends to be blue, and HMI`s simulate daylight.”
Duncan maintains 25 cameras in its rental stock. Six are made by Arriflex in Munich. The rest come from Panavision, headquartered in Tarzana, Calif. ”Panavision is the Rolls-Royce of camera equipment,” Paulsen said.
”The body alone, without the lenses, is worth $75,000. A Panavision zoom lens costs $20,000. A basic camera package with an assortment of lenses would be worth $200,000.”
The rental fee for a Panavision camera and accessories averages about $4,000 a week. Arriflex cameras rent for slightly less, because Duncan owns them outright and does not have to split revenue with the manufacturer, as it does with Panavision, which retains ownership of its equipment and consigns it to authorized leasing agents. ”Some directors of photography prefer the Arriflex lenses,” Paulsen noted. ”They have a very sharp resolution and general high quality.”
Victor Duncan, a Detroit filmmaker, started the company in 1959 and over the years branched out from the Motor City to establish facilities in Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago, which is the largest in the group. Not long ago, Samuelson Ltd., the immense, London-based audio-visual concern, bought Duncan and then promptly merged with Eagle Trust, another huge British conglomerate. In January, Duncan bought a large lighting inventory from a Los Angeles company, consigned most of it to the Chicago branch and joined the Crededios and Hudecek in the super gaffer business.
Out-of-town filmmakers have come to appreciate the eagerness and vast resources of local equipment-rental outfits. Almost always, producers find everything they need in Chicago, and when one company runs short, the others gladly help fill the gap. ”We try never to tell a customer we can`t get something,” Paulsen explained, ”because it looks bad for the city.”
