Trio Entertainment Inc.
William Links, the president of Trio Entertainment, also got his start as a distributor. He founded Trio, based in Oak Lawn, in 1978 as a wholesaler of low-budget horror films from Europe to the video market. It wasn’t long, however, before the firm got involved in production work of its own. When a picture titled “Dead Time Stories,” filming in Florida, ran aground without financing in the mid-1980s, Links stepped in with a $250,000 bankroll to save it.
The investment proved astute, for “Dead Time,” starring Scott Valentine of the TV show “Family Ties,” eventually earned back $1 million when it was resold to the Cinema Group for distribution and became a hit in the so-called exploitation market, a subgenre of films dealing in sex and violence (it played in Chicago at the old Woods Theatre).
Links returned to Florida recently to produce a spoof of B movies, titled “They Bite,” a 98-minute feature shot on 16 mm film and starring Charlie Barnett, once a regular on “Miami Vice.” The budget was less than $1 million, a sum that Links expects to earn back in the video market.
“The B movie business has changed,” Links explained. “Ticket prices are so expensive that most theaters can’t afford to show them. They’re fodder for home video instead, and we’re also trying to get a cable TV deal, too.”
Links is just 39 but already an old hand in the film business. A native of the Southwest Side of Chicago and graduate of Brother Rice High School, he formed Apache Films at the tender age of 17. The company distributed art-house movies as well as discreetly pirated prints of old Charlie Chaplin classics and other films unavailable to the public.
He counted Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion as an early client. Soon after he graduated from Roosevelt University with a degree in business, Links and Apache turned to the pornography market. He was the first distributor locally of the breakthrough X-rated hit “Deep Throat.” At the same time Links was distributing such underground non-X hits as “Reefer Madness” and the Rolling Stones’ “Symphony for the Devil.”
As organized crime muscled into the porn market, Links sold off Apache and started Trio. One of Trio’s first projects, in the late 1970s, was distribution of a Chicago film, directed by Fred Smith and starring local theater actors Joe Mantegna and Michael Nussbaum, titled “Towing.” It played mostly in art houses but whetted Links’ appetite for local production work.
Links currently is at work on a science-fiction feature, still untitled with the script under development. “We’ll do the whole thing here, including shooting some scenes in south suburban locations,” said Links, who plans to begin work in mid-summer. Meanwhile, he has also begun production of a TV special about the 25th anniversary of the cult classic horror flick by legendary George Romero, “Night of the Living Dead.” Links hopes to do one feature film a year and is buoyed by the occasional runaway success of other low-budget thrillers, like “Halloween.” He thinks he can keep working out of his Oak Lawn home where Trio is headquartered.
“I’m well enough known that directors have come to me with ideas for projects. And I know casting people in Hollywood and will have no problems getting the actors I need,” he said.
Rochi Productions Inc.
“The Great Escape,” the John Sturges film starring Steve McQueen in a massive escape from a German prison camp during World War II, was one of the great films of the 1960s. Based on a true story, it inspired the follow-up comedy TV series “Hogan’s Heroes.”
Jim Quattrocki, president of Rochi Productions, is retelling the story in “Wartime Log,” based on the recollections of Chicagoan John Cordwell, a British RAF pilot who immigrated to America after the war and today owns the Red Lion Pub on Chicago’s North Side. A trained architect, Cordwell went uncredited in “Great Escape,” but it was he who actually designed the maze of escape tunnels under the prison camp.
Shot documentary-style, “Wartime Log” went before the cameras in various locations around Quattrocki’s Willow Springs home and studio in June 1991 and is now in the final editing. It should be finished in March, and producer/director Quattrocki hopes to sell it to PBS or a national cable network.
Quattrocki, 35, got his start in film as a cameraman for local racetracks in the late 1970s. He went from there to a suburban cable TV news outlet, then on to a free-lance career filming musical acts onstage. In recent years he’s been a producer for Video Impressions Inc. in Aurora, where he puts together corporate videos and independent programming.
His recent film, titled “Blues Goin’ On,” a musical tribute filmed in part at Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, played on Channel 9 in December.
Rochi Productions started as a part-time enterprise that has come to consume Quattrocki’s evenings and weekends. “Wartime Log” was originally meant to be a five-minute interview of Cordwell. Then Quattrocki decided to re-enact the escape itself, actually digging tunnels under his studio floor and filming wintertime marches through local forest preserves. The World War II Historical Re-enactment Society, based in the homes of suburban members, provided Quattrocki with the cast of 60 or so German soldiers he needed in authentic uniform.
“Wartime Log,” which will run one hour in finished form, was filmed on the cheap. Quattrocki borrowed his cameras and equipment from Video Impressions, and his actors donated their services free.
“The equipment would have cost me $2,000 a day to rent,” said Quattrocki. “As things turned out, my biggest expense was catering the food for the crew.”
The original “Great Escape” was filmed on location in Germany, but Quattrocki found all the scenery he needed close at hand.
“Almost everything was filmed within an acre of my house. The woods here are perfect,” said Quattrocki, who is already looking forward to his next project. He’s looking for unsolved crimes around Chicago that he could re-enact for the TV show “America’s Most Wanted.” “I’m not going into these projects with the idea of making lots of money,” he said. “If that comes sometime later, fine. Right now I’m still trying to learn the business.”
Pyramid Pictures Inc.
As a child, Glenn Pniewski would spend his Saturday nights at home on Chicago’s Southwest Side studying old Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith silents. Out of those starstruck moments grew an abiding love for film.
By day, Pniewski, a 30-year-old resident of Merrionette Park, toils as a public relations assistant at the First National Bank of Evergreen Park. Evenings and weekends he is hard at work on a Civil War opus titled “Touched With Fire,” about a middle-of-the-woods encounter between two deserters, one from the North and the other from the South.
The 60-minute work, shot on videotape, was filmed last summer and fall in local forest preserves and is expected to emerge from the editing room by March.
“I hope to sell this to some cable stations and maybe take it to a film festival or two and get some exposure,” said Pniewski, who figures he will have spent just $1,500 or so to produce the finished picture. “This isn’t MGM and I’m not Steven Spielberg. I’ll be happy enough to earn back my original investment.”
Those are modest expectations, but then Pniewski has limited experience in the industry. Through the 1980s Pniewski spent most of his free time on stage as an actor with local community theaters. In 1986 he filmed a 90-minute documentary on videotape about the staging of a musical comedy, “Batman Gets Old,” at the Showcase Theatre in Blue Island. Three years later he filmed a 45-minute tale about a widower facing Christmas alone, “Silent Miracle.”
Pniewski was emboldened to start Pyramid a year ago after volunteering as an extra for Rochi Productions’ “A Wartime Log.” He wrote the script of “Touched With Fire” himself, then shot stock footage at a Civil War re-enactment camp erected last summer near Lockport. Further versions are possible.
“I’m thinking of expanding the script, adding more actors and making this into a full-length feature some day,” Pniewski said. He has other ideas, too. A compulsive writer, Pniewski has accumulated four or five scripts that could be adapted to film. He hopes to shoot one of them in the south suburbs this summer.
“The important thing for me is to keep working, to get my films out there and get noticed,” Pniewski says. “I’d love to be able to make a living at it, but for now I’m taking one step at a time.”
