“You guys wanna do WHAT? Really? In an hour?”
He’s grip, gofer, ambassador, traffic controller and City Hall insider to the stars.
“It’s crazy. Damon Wayans wants to do this big shot on Daley Plaza. . . . “
Hollywood honchos lean on him.
” . . . Meanwhile, we’ve got `Wayne’s World II’ in town and John Cougar Mellencamp shooting a music video on Gallery 37.”
He worked on 25 films last year, wearing his beeper to bed and hopping red-eye flights between the Windy City and Tinseltown.
Still, he’s hardly the motormouth mogul type, even though he labored elbow-to-elbow with Ron Howard on “Backdraft,” John Hughes on the “Home Alone” films and Andrew Davis on “The Fugitive.”
You may know the Geocaris name from his father, longtime Cook County Judge James A. Geocaris. But chances are you’ve never heard of Charlie-a mild-mannered, even slightly egghead-ish former film student tapped to run the film office at the tender age of 28, after Mayor Richard M. Daley canned his predecessor.
Since taking over as the Chicago Film Office director in 1990, Geocaris has hawked Chicago to Hollywood like deep-dish pizza, and it has bitten.
In a summer that saw the entertainment business break all box-office records, Chicago played a major role, having played host to four of the season’s major movies: “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Rookie of the Year,” “Dennis the Menace” and “The Fugitive.”
And industry people say the credit is rolling to Geocaris for the recent explosion in on-screen exposure.
A popular phrase among Hollywood location managers is “I owe Charlie big time.”
Need to get five Chicago River bridges to open at once for a chopper shot that resembles a chorus-line leg kick? Charlie can arrange it. Need to turn Wrigley Field into the Polo Grounds? Consider it done. Want to block off a busy street near the Board of Trade and set a deer loose?
That was a tough one, Geocaris conceded.
“I’m 32,” Geocaris said. “I’ve been doing this for nine years. I feel like I’m 52.”
He’s up against film offices in more than 40 other North American cities, and states such as North Carolina and Utah that have become film hotbeds in recent years. But he and state film office director Susan B. Kellett see it this way: New York has the soaps, L.A. has the industry, Chicago has the locations.
“Many people think it’s going out to dinner with stars. No way,” said James E. Sheahan, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. “It’s getting up at 3 in the morning to block off a street. This is not a glitzy job. Charlie is a pro.”
When Geocaris took the job, moviemakers spent $65 million in the city. This year, that figure may top $100 million. His office, meanwhile, has expanded to three full-time employees and three interns.
His two desk phones ring incessantly. So does his beeper. Wherever he goes, he stops to make calls-often to calm crews worried about a freakish blast of lakefront weather.
While Chicago may be turning into a film mecca, it is no Shangri-La. Geocaris admits to spending more time watching The Weather Channel than movies. The city’s strong union presence also discourages some producers looking to keep their costs down. Then, there are the screen-sized egos, the ones who throw tantrums when shoots run long or food arrives late. Geocaris says he has seen enough episodes of egomania to keep an army of shrinks (or scriptwriters) busy for a decade.
“He’s awfully serious about his work, but he’s a lot of fun,” said Jim Klekowski, a location manager on Oliver Stone’s most recent film, “Natural Born Killers.”
“He comes out to the set even when it’s a really miserable production or late at night. He comes out with a smile.”
A bachelor, Geocaris has missed more dinners with friends and relatives than he cares to count. He has also put his lifelong dream on hold-to write and film a major screenplay, “a drama based in Chicago. It involves a lot of different Northwest Side neighborhoods that I’ve grown up in,” he said.
As for the frequent jaunts to Hollywood, it’s not the hot-tub, cappuccino circuit. On his most recent trip, Geocaris chatted it up with other film commissioners at their annual convention, “Cineposium,” held Sept. 16-20 at the Universal City Hilton. There, he attended seminars with titles such as “Filming on Public Lands” and “Marketing Your Jurisdiction.”
But even Geocaris knows you can’t turn Chicago into Laguna Beach-or even wants to.
When he learned that Samuel Z. Arkoff, a man who billed himself as “the last of the old studio moguls,” had produced “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” “She Monster” and “Beach Blanket Bingo,” Geocaris decided to pass on dropping his card.
He looks more to producers willing to make a long-term or major financial commitment to filming in the city, or up-and-coming independents. On the 17th, Geocaris and Kellett spent the afternoon in closed-door meetings with executives from a major studio about a proposed TV project.
Geocaris made his first flick at age 14, a silent color mystery called “Trackdown” that starred his brothers and cousins.
Dozens of homemade reels followed. “I really loved it, the magic of it,” he recalled, “though I’m sure I bored my parents to death.”
“He never bored us to death,” insisted James A. Geocaris, presiding judge of Cook County’s 3rd Municipal District and a member of the bench for the past 28 years. “We always enjoyed his films. Whenever his mother and I see a movie made in Chicago, we’re always the last two in the theater, to see if his name made the credits,” which it occasionally does.
“Charlie’s been very, very dedicated,” he went on. “I know at night sometimes I try to reach him and I can’t, because he’s out in the field.”
Mayor Richard J. Daley all but banished movie makers from the city after director Haskell Wexler shot footage of the ’68 riots and included it in “Medium Cool.”
But the film freeze began to thaw by the time Geocaris enrolled as a film major at Southern Illinois University in 1979. That year, Dan Akroyd and John Belushi tore up the town while making “The Blues Brothers.” They closed expressways, wrecked police cars and smashed their Bluesmobile through the front windows of City Hall.
The high jinks took place with the blessing of Mayor Jane Byrne, who created the Chicago Film Office because she saw economic and promotional potential in bringing Hollywood to the city.
Seeing Chicago on film, especially in “Thief,” with James Caan, Geocaris remembers, “gave me goosebumps.”
After graduating, Geocaris served as a production assistant on the Sean Penn film “Bad Boys.” He also landed an internship with the film office. Attuned to both the finer points of film technology and city bureaucracy, he was promoted to assistant director at 24.
Still, Geocaris longed to work on screenplays again. He left the office in October 1989 and moved to North Carolina, eager to break into that state’s burgeoning film industry.
Three months later, Mayor Richard M. Daley fired then-director Kathryn Darrell and offered Geocaris the top job. “I was shocked,” he said. “I had just had all the going-away parties.”
Geocaris decided his film career could wait. “I wanted to come back, reshape the office, cut through the red tape,” he said.
The real test came less than six months after Geocaris accepted the post. Ron Howard had decided to come to Chicago to make what he billed as the ultimate firefighting movie: “Backdraft.”
During a rare free moment in Hollywood, he darted through the gate of Universal Studios’ Hollywood theme park towards the recently-opened “Backdraft” exhibit.
“You’ve gotta check this out!” Geocaris exclaimed, moving to the front row for a closer look at a live demonstration of the special effects, which he had helped arrange.
For a moment, it seemed as if Geocaris had forgotten his own role and simply became caught up in the magic. Wide-eyed, the city’s cinema wunderkind would have looked more at home with a bucket of buttered popcorn than a beeper.
