I used to walk around the whole city while I was a kid still going to Senn High School. I worked at my Uncle Harry’s bar. He had been a famous Chicago cop and then became owner of a bar at Irving Park and Sheridan Road called the Sip and Bottle.
My uncle had all these great stories to tell, and all sorts of characters used to drop in at the bar. As a kid of about 11 or 12, I was working behind the bar and listening.
I don’t remember much of school at all, except that I had one great teacher in grammar school, Dorothy Nordblad, who really took an interest in me. And it was the encouragement I received from her, as well as from my father and mother, that motivated me to try and do something with my life.
I loved Chicago then, as I do now. Life was an adventure, and the city was my teacher. As a kid, you could go from one neighborhood to another and enter into whole other worlds. My childhood was a very exciting time in a very exciting place. A lot of cultural currents were at work then that later came into flower, both politically and artistically, as at places like Second City, which revolutionized theater. Live television was also extraordinarily good then.
Blues music in Chicago was a great influence on me. I used to go down to the blues clubs on the South Side, particularly Theresa’s Lounge, the Checkerboard Lounge and the Sutherland Hotel, where I used to hear the Miles Davis Sextet with John Coltrane. And there was a great jazz club called the Blue Note, on Clark Street.
The food was wonderful. I used to hang out at the Berghoff and at Pizzeria Uno. Every time I now hit Chicago, I go right to those two places. They’re still great. What I miss most about Chicago is the food.
There is a sense of the people in Chicago that you don’t get anywhere else. People were so friendly and helpful to me as a kid. Most of those who helped me out in one form or another and are still alive are still friends of mine.
After high school, I worked for the radio and television stations that were then in Tribune Tower. I started in the mailroom at WGN, and the guy who ran it, Ray Dumalski, was one of my early boosters. He was a legendary character, and we remained friends until he died.
After about a year at the WGN mailroom, I got promoted to floor manager, which is like being an assistant director in the theater. And then about a year later I became a live-television director, and over an eight-year period, I directed a couple thousand television shows. I also worked for a while at WTTW and at WLS.
There was a journalist I met at WGN-his name was Francis Coughlin-who became a mentor of mine. A TV panelist and commentator, he was a kind of bon vivant. He took an interest in me, and I became almost a surrogate son to him after my father died. He really taught me in the Socratic way. He’d give me books to read, and then we’d talk about them. He was a guy who loved to talk, and I loved to listen. That was a very important part of my education.
The first film I made was done in Chicago-a documentary that I shot on death row at the County Jail about Paul Crump, who at that time had been on death row for about seven years. I made the film as a kind of court of last resort to save his life. And the film was instrumental in helping to do that.
The warden at the County Jail then was Jack Johnson, who gave me full access to death row. He had to preside over the execution of a number of inmates, and he did not want to execute Crump. So he totally supported this film I was making, and that was the film that launched my career as a filmmaker. It got a lot of international recognition.
I had just one hour’s worth of lessons in filmmaking before I started that film, from a place in Chicago called Behrend Cine Rental. It was a camera rental place, and the guy who was running it was a man named Jack Behrend. I went in there with this fellow, Bill Butler, a cameraman at WGN, and Jack showed us how to operate a camera and get synched with the sound recorder, how to load the camera and get focused. That was the only lesson I ever had.
I knew every pocket of the city then. I used to hang out with Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren, and I played poker at Algren’s house every Friday night. Sterling “Red” Quinlan, who ran Channel 7 then, wanted me to do a documentary with Algren, and it was he who put me in touch with Algren and Studs, and we all became friends. Those were great days, and I learned a lot from them. From Algren I learned about the pain of success, because he was successful but was never really recognized.
In those days Algren, who’s easily one of the most definitive Chicago novelists, found his books banned from the Chicago Public Library. You could buy his books, and he certainly had a lot of supporters among the booksellers, but officially he was persona non grata in his own hometown, which was a lesson to me.
Chicago feels better to me now than it has ever. It’s cleaner, the food is unbelievable, and the theater is the best in the country. I think Chicago is the model city for the future. It has always been a city that works, and it works better now than ever. The whole feeling of being there is just exciting. I’m very grateful to the place, and I love it. I go back as often as I can.
