If you could read the thoughts of actors on a motion picture set, you`d find they generally have some fairly standard concerns, such as: Is my character believable? Could this be my Oscar? Should I get another agent?
Recently, however, a group of actors working on location in Chicago added a new question to the list: Is there a sniper in that window?
That anxiety arose from their filming locus: the infamous Cabrini-Green housing project. Known coast to coast for some of its angry young resident gangbangers with itchy trigger fingers, Cabrini has for several weeks provided a stage for the actors and crew of ”Heaven Is a Playground,” a movie about the world of inner-city basketball.
D.B. Sweeney, a jockish, up-and-coming young actor with a major role in the film, recalls thinking about snipers a few Friday nights ago during a post-midnight work session. The crew was filming a scene on a klieg-lighted Cabrini rooftop.
”If I were somebody with a gun and full of a controlled substance,” he remembered thinking at the time, ”I might try to pick off some of those guys in the spotlights.” It was a long night, Sweeney said, on a recent afternoon as he sneaked sodas out of the crew`s ice chest and doled them to neighborhood kids.
Overcoming the fears and doubts of filming in Cabrini was just the latest challenge in writer-director Randy Fried`s nine-year odyssey to bring
”Heaven” to the big screen. The story behind the production, like the movie`s narrative, is essentially about long shots: The experts gave the director, who had never done a feature film before, and his neophyte producer little chance of getting their picture made, especially at Cabrini-Green.
But the tale behind the making of ”Heaven” is about more than just getting past obstacles. It`s also about a tough neighborhood where the harsh realities, for a brief time at least, gave way to the escapist magic of movie- making.
The fictional movie is based on the non-fiction book of the same name published nearly 15 years ago by Rick Telander, the Sports Illustrated writer. In researching the book, Telander, a young white who played the conservative team-oriented basketball learned in the suburbs, spent a summer on the more free-wheeling Brooklyn playgrounds.
Like an anthropologist with a jump shot, Telander infiltrated the basically black society of young and talented city athletes. He chronicled their rise and, for some, their fall as they pursued the often elusive grail of a pro career. And Telander shed light on the accompanying swirl of frequently parasitic coaches, scouts and agents who tried to hitch their wagons to the next slam-dunking star.
Fried, a 37-year old University of Southern California film school graduate who resembles former Bear star Gary Fencik, said he fell in love with the book and its gritty urban tales in 1981 after meeting Telander, appropriately, in a basketball gym in Evanston. The two teamed up to write a screenplay for WTTW, but that effort came up short. Fried acquired the book`s movie rights from Telander.
Somewhere in the process, the story`s locale shifted from Bedford Stuyvesant to Chicago. (Telander now lives in Lake Forest.) And it became the story of a mercenary black coach who wants only bankable stars on his team, a white lawyer who coaches a team of ”misfits,” and a troubled superstar player based on one-time college great Fly Williams. ”Heaven” became Fried`s obsession, and, in fits and starts, he tried to produce it on his own.
Ige of the real estate, apparel and discount retailing businesses but no practical experience in films. Still, he, like Fried, became devoted to the concept.
Their progress has seemingly had as many stops and starts as a basketball game. One potential financier after another told the filmmakers they were shooting airballs.
Bank recited the litany given by doubters: ”People said it`s an all-black cast”-actually there are a few white characters-”and it won`t appeal to the mainstream. Then they said it won`t have any foreign appeal. Then they said it`s a first-time producer and a first-time director, a double negative. Then we heard it`s a sports movie and they`re notorious money-losers. Then they said it sounded like TV material, not a theatrical movie.”
And as if that weren`t enough, they were told their plan to film in Cabrini was suicidal. ”People said: `You`ll get shot. They`ll use you for target practice,` ” Fried said.
After making a number of unavailing proposals to prospective bankrollers, including a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, the two found enough investors in Chicago to proceed. Their budget is ”minuscule” by Hollywood standards, they said. Still, ”this is going to look like a $20 million movie” Bank promised with an in-your-face kind of confidence.
For a while it even looked as if they`d have the acting services of his eminence himself, Michael Jordan. But last year Jordan nixed the idea, a move that threatened financing. ”After that I lost faith,” Fried said. ”For about 15 minutes I said, `This isn`t going to happen.` ”
But they regained momentum. Besides Sweeney, who plays a lawyer and starred in ”Eight Men Out,” ”Gardens of Stone” and ”Lonesome Dove,” they signed a bald Michael Warren (he wore a rug in ”Hill Street Blues”; this will be his debut as a slick top). Warren plays an opportunistic black coach, and Victor Love, who with Oprah Winfrey starred in ”Native Son,” plays the unstable superstar.
The film will also feature Bo Kimball, the former collegiate star who electrified the nation last season with his possessed play after the death of Hank Gathers, his friend and Loyola Marymount University teammate. NBA all-star Akeem Olajuwon makes a cameo appearance.
A different angle
Before filming began in Cabrini late last month, the cast and crew didn`t know what to expect but feared the worst. ”We heard there was too much violence. I was scared,” said StaVon Lovell Davis, a diminutive 11-year old child actor from Park Forest. His recent work includes a Coca-Cola commercial in which Michael Jordan delivers a six-pack via power dunk to some kids in a treehouse. Davis and his mother used gallows humor to air their fears. ”We joked about getting shot,” he said.
Fried remembered some bad vibes during an early visit to check the Cabrini location. A case-hardened young man confronted him. ”He said, `What the (pound sign)%&! are you looking at?` ” Fried said. ”I didn`t want to maintain eye contact with that guy. I said `Whoa, is this going to be the shape of things to come?` ”
But aside from a few comments in the vein of questioning the desirability of whites in the neighborhood, the experience has gone remarkably well for both sides. For Cabrini, it has been a chance to demonstrate what most of the people there already know even if most outsiders don`t: that Cabrini-Green is a place long on pride if short on affluence.
The filming has brought upwardly mobile whites and blacks from elsewhere into the normally insular community. ”I don`t believe I would`ve walked through Cabrini any other way,” said Don James, a Chicago actor who portrays a ballplayer in the film. ”The crew members have really been surprised by the way the people here have welcomed them. The folks here are really too nice,” said Sudie Taylor, a track coach at Chicago State University who is the production`s first-aid man.
Cast and crew have been awed by some of what they`ve seen. Fried couldn`t believe the ”brutality” of the living conditions. Sweeney said seeing the broken glass, the darkened stairwells and the hallway urine puddles explained the ”subculture of violence. . . . If I had to return home to this I`d be angry too.”
And the filmmakers have been exposed to some remarkable talents. During a break in the action, a Cabrini rapper entranced the crew by spinning an extemporaneous, free-association rap, incredibly weaving descriptions of his audience with a commentary on Cabrini life into a seamless urban poem. And a masterful Cabrini hair artist was discovered and became the cast`s favorite barber. ”All the folks here need are opportunities,” Taylor said.
Playground comes alive
On the other side, some Cabrini kids have been exposed first-hand to filmmaking. Cinematographer Tom Richmond, whose credits include the box-office hit ”Stand and Deliver,” has let kids peer through his camera`s lenses.
”The thing that`s so good about this is that it improves the neighborhood`s self-esteem,” said Julia Burgess, executive director of the D`Amico Youth Center, adjacent to the playground. ”Whenever the media needs a picture of poverty, they always come over here, I guess because it`s close. This isn`t your `Father Knows Best` community, but there are normal families here. They`re trying to make it. It`s just that they have limited resources.” Many residents agreed that the film would be good for Cabrini`s reputation. ”They say it`s bad over here, but it`s not that bad,” said truck driver John Overton, 33. Raised in Cabrini, he watched the filming of a mock 4th of July block party, in which a few hundred Cabrini residents served as extras.
”I don`t think Cabrini-Green has had this much exposure since those police got shot over here,” he said, referring to the 1972 slaying of two officers. Of course, this was positive exposure.
”The police keep saying if there`s one incident, that`s it, we`re out of here,” said Bank, the producer, fresh from a chat with a police officer who repeated the warning. ”But there hasn`t been anything.”
Even though there have been no incidents involving the production itself, the film company has gotten a taste of a common Cabrini occurrence: gunshots. During the night-time filming on a Cabrini rooftop, gunfire sounded nearby.
”People ducked, but when we realized it wasn`t for us, we got up and laughed it off,” said Terry Bradley, a former pro basketball player who landed a speaking part in the film. ”What do you expect on a Saturday night in Cabrini?”
Because of the phalanx of special-duty police officers protecting the film company, ”The negative elements have stayed away from this site,” said Calvin Tyler, a police sergeant. The only bloodshed so far occurred when a crew member`s forehead was laid open by an elbow during a pickup game between takes.
The police presence has resulted in the welcome, if transitory benefit, of turning Durso Park, a playground on Hudson Street in the middle of the project, into a safe ground for the community. As with many Chicago Housing Authority parks, a lot of parents keep their children out of Durso.
”Normally, I don`t even come into the playground. It has the stigma of being gang turf. A lot of bad things happen here,” says Charlotte Thomas, a 30-year old mother who had momentarily stopped in the park with her toddler on an early summer`s evening to watch the filmmakers at work.
Lately it has been alive with the sights and sounds of screaming kids playing with the latest rage, the click-clack, a brightly colored toy featuring two oversize marbles that slap against each other incessantly, making a racket kids seem to love in direct proportion to the level of annoyance it produces in adults.
As a low-budget production, ”Heaven” couldn`t pump much money into Cabrini, although some community residents have gotten cleaning jobs, while others have made a little money through the use of their apartments and through raffles the crew uses to keep the extras from getting restless.
A new ballgame?
But the film company`s permanent contribution to the community will be a newly resurfaced playground, and, if the CHA allows them to stay, some Brooklyn-style backboards (rectangular versus the half-moons popular in Chicago) that were brought in to replace the dilapidated ones at the park.
Gil Walker, the director of the CHA`s Midnight Basketball League who, along with some of his players, will appear in the film, has a vision for the future after this summer`s filming becomes a faded memory.
”I`d like to get (CHA Chairman) Vince Lane and community dignitaries to dedicate this as the first outdoor Midnight Basketball League court,” he said.
Perhaps, then, this one playground, instead of returning to its former(color): Actor StaVon Lovell Davis.
