EXTRA: ‘Chiraq’ will only become lasting image if we let it become one

Learning that an alderman wants to penalize filmmaker Spike Lee if he persists with plans of making a movie about violence and action in inner-city Chicago to be called “Chiraq” makes me wonder why he has nothing better to do with his time.

The alderman in question is Will Burns of the 4^th Ward, who introduced a resolution this week that says if Lee really makes such a movie depicting black Chicago as overly violent and grotesque, then he should not qualify for the film production tax credits the city usually gives to movie productions.

BURNS IS CLAIMING he’s taking the moral high road by saying Lee can make any kind of film he wants and call it whatever name he chooses – even if the name he is considering is the derogatory label used by many black people to imply that Chicago has become the equivalent of an Iraqi war zone.

But all this is going to wind up doing is feeding into Lee’s self-righteous ego and personality and probably make him think he’s on some sort of crusade to expose the gritty and grotesque nature of some parts of our city.

Burns told reporter-types that such a film should lose tax credits because it would be derogatory to the city’s public image.

Nonsense! Not everything that makes it onto a movie screen (or in today’s way of viewing movies, onto whatever kind of screen one prefers to download their video entertainment) is “Up with People” positive.

HECK, MOST OF it is just downright stupid. Yet we don’t care.

I can think of a couple of Chicago-set films off the top of my head with images that are less than praiseworthy, but which no one in their right mind would complain about.

How about “Only the Lonely,” which starred John Candy and Jim Belushi as a couple of cops (although the CPD logos were conspicuously absent) who in one scene of the 1991 film decide to try to lower a dead body with a fire hose out of a window – rather than carry it down several flights of stairs (the elevator was broken).

But when the hose tears halfway through the effort, the body comes plummeting down to earth; with many dozens of spectators nearby.

THEN THERE’S “RUNNING Scared” from 1986, with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines as a pair of undercover Chicago cops who wind up chasing a notorious drug dealer (played by Jimmy Smits) to the Thompson Center state government building, where they wind up thwarting his efforts by dumping his cocaine stash all over the state government building’s floor.

I can’t envision the Chicago Police Department thinking much of either image. At least I want to think they’re both over the top to where we can’t take them seriously.

Which ultimately is the problem with what Lee may wind up doing with his attempt to make a film set in Chicago, but which he says has violence conditions similar to places such as inner-city Philadelphia, Baltimore and his own home of New York.

Is the real problem that some political people just don’t want to have to address the reality of modern-day Chicago? It certainly is obvious enough that some people think we can get away with ignoring certain neighborhoods and focusing all attention on the tourist sites.

AS THOUGH THE people who actually live in Chicago and are native to the area are of lesser importance.

But trying to address those problems is complex, and bound to address certain people who are still offended by Lee’s 1989 production, “Do the Right Thing” and how the character “Mookie” could possibly turn on his boss, Sal, near the film’s end.

I guess ranting and raging about tax credits is a less complex issue to complain about.

Which, in the end, may be the real problem – our willingness to try to pretend that no one who isn’t exactly like ourselves even exists – that faces our society.

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Chicago can make cinema so special

I don’t get out to the movie theater as much as I used to, but I am still a fan of film. One of my favorite genres, so to speak, is Chicagoana.

Maybe that is just evidence of how much of a Chicago-geek I can be, but I have found that the presence of the Second City on the silver screen can add such character to a film that even a clunker becomes bearable.

WHEN A WELL-written screenplay is combined with competent acting and a Chicago setting, the result is a film that registers in my brain as unforgettable.

A Chicago connection is why I am actually looking forward to two upcoming films, and will try to get to the theater to see them. “Chicago 10,” which purports to be documentary-like but is really a dramatic retelling of the insanity that hit the United States in the summer of 1968, was released in Chicago on Friday.

The other is “Public Enemies,” which stars Johnny Depp, in the story of John Dillinger and will feature his jail break in Lake County, Ind., and his eventual slaughter by the feds outside the (still-standing) Biograph Theater. It will be made this spring at area locations (including the county jail in Crown Point, Ind.), and is to be released early next year.

WITH CHARACTERS LIKE Judge Julius Hoffman, Dillinger and Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, these films have potential to be entertaining. With the presence of Chicago, they ought to be interesting. And if they wind up as clunkers, it will be director incompetence – not the setting.

The real question is how they will wind up comparing to some of the all-time great films that use Chicago. It will be interesting to see if either film can displace any of my own personal “top 5” Chicago films, which I am listing chronologically.

CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948): This dramatic re-telling of how Chicago Times reporters were able to clear a man wrongly convicted of a long-forgotten 1930s police slaying intrigues me because of how it uses Chicago scenery.

Back in an era when most films were shot in studios, this film actually sought out many of the sites associated with the real story. Seeing the courtrooms at the Criminal Courts building, the New City police district (now East Chicago Avenue station) and the reception areas and cellblocks at Stateville Penitentiary back when they all were new and clean is a shock.

Hearing the Back of the Yards neighborhood when Polish was the language that wafted through the air (rather than the current Spanish) gives me a sense of the ethnic feel that will always be a part of Chicago’s character – even if the actual ethnicities change over time.

And when James Stewart’s reporter character, McNeil, goes to the Illinois Parole Board to plead his “case,” he makes his argument in a room I am all too familiar with. What was once the Illinois Supreme Court chambers is now a legislative committee meeting room where politicos ram through public policies that put their interests ahead of the people.

MEDIUM COOL (1969): This film tried to tell a story that was still very contemporary – we get to see the Democratic National Convention of 1968 and the infamous riots that broke out between Chicago police and anti-war protesters who were upset that Democrats were not doing enough to get the army out of Vietnam.

In fact, filmmakers shot some of their footage during the actual protests in Grant Park, and one of their camera operators got hit with teargas along with the protesters.

Anybody who watches “Chicago 10” should go out of their way to see this film, which worked real footage with the actors. The new film, regardless of how true it tries to be to fact, is by definition a revisionist account.

Chicago in this film looks a little more like its contemporary counterpart, although watching scenes shot in the South Loop where protesters interact with police and the National Guard show just how decrepit that part of the city was becoming.

Then, there’s my own personal favorite scene, where Illinois State Police officers are rehearsing how to cope with anti-war demonstrators. What makes the scene so funny is that some police play the part of Hippies and allow themselves to be arrested – that is, if you can envision Hippies in crew cuts and Bermuda shorts going around saying, “peace” and “love.”

THE BLUES BROTHERS (1980): Let’s be honest. This is a stupid film.

The story is truncated and, in some parts, absurd. (Dropping a car with would-be Nazi stormtroopers from hundreds of feet in the air and expecting us to believe they would survive?) The blues music sung by John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd is all wrong – it’s more Memphis soul and Detroit r&b than Chicago blues. This is a mediocre Saturday Night Live sketch dragged out to 2 ½ hours.

BUT WHAT MAKES the film bearable, in fact what makes it memorable, is Chicago.

Unlike “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” where the lead character plays hooky by going to the Art Institute and Wrigley Field, this film digs into the seedy underbelly that is the real Chicago.

Watching Elwood Blues show off the power of his one-time Mount Prospect police car by jumping the fully-erect 95th Street Bridge that separates the South Chicago neighborhood from the East Side is unique because no other film would even dream of using that site.

THE BLUES BROTHERS also lets us see the extinct seedy strip that used to exist along Van Buren Street in the South Loop, the real Maxwell Street market and the old Dixie Square Shopping Center in south suburban Harvey.

Even when The Blues Brothers goes to an upscale location like the Chez Paul (the long-defunct French restaurant), we get to see some of the most uncouth behavior ever envisioned on screen. Those snobs deserve to have to endure Jake and Elwood.

I have just one gripe. According to the story, Jake and Elwood are from Calumet City and visit the orphanage where they were raised. In reality, nothing in the film was shot there, and I know because I am a one-time Cal City resident who first saw this film at the River Oaks Theater.

UNTOUCHABLES (1988): From the Sean Connery character’s spiel about doing things “the Chicago Way,” to seeing scenes in the LaSalle Street financial district and realizing the buildings haven’t changed much since the 1920s, this film is Chicago.

Robert DeNiro as Alphonse Capone was interesting, even though DeNiro is only in a few scenes and is actually a minor character.

Now I realize that the film’s facts are totally skewed (Frank Nitti didn’t die from being thrown off the criminal courthouse roof). But the film gives a sense of Chicago as it existed 80-something years ago, and successfully uses the parts of the city that have changed little in appearance. Every time I have business at Union Station, I can envision the film’s climactic gun battle.

In my mind, the title “The Untouchables” has come to mean this film, rather than the 1960s-era television series based on the Oscar Fraley book of the same name that tells the tale of how Chicago-based G-man Eliot Ness led a team of agents in combating The Outfit.

ONLY THE LONELY (1991): John Candy and Jim Belushi make totally unrealistic Chicago police officers (what kind of cop gets transferred to a precinct in Florida?) in this film about a man (Candy) who remains a little too attached to his mother (played by Maureen O’Hara).

The film gets it right in understanding that in Chicago, even white people have a sense of their ethnic roots. It has its characters hanging around the neighborhoods, rather than at downtown tourist sites.

And it also contains my favorite Chicago film scene ever – Candy’s first-date picnic with Ally Sheedy with the exploding scoreboard at the old Comiskey Park looming in the background. This film was shot just months before the one-time “Baseball Palace of the World” was torn town.

OF COURSE, THE presence of Chicago cannot save all films. One of my least favorite films ever was “Switching Channels” (1987), which is all the worse because of the ridiculous way it portrays the city.

The film is an attempt to update “The Front Page” (1931 and 1974) and “His Girl Friday (1940) to the modern era. These reporters are not newspaper-people; they work in television. One character goes so far as to denigrate newspapers as, “19th Century journalism.”

KATHLEEN TURNER PLAYS Christy Colloran, an anchorwoman who supposedly covers all the big stories that take place in Chicago County.

Chicago County? We live in Cook.

About the closest I can come to saying anything nice about this film is to note that it also stars Burt Reynolds as Turner’s editor, and it isn’t any worse than any of the “Smokey and the Bandit” films.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Chicago municipal government has a separate agency devoted to (http://egov.cityofchicago.org/city/webportal/portalEntityHomeAction.do?entityName=Film+Office&entityNameEnumValue=15) working with film crews wishing to use the city as a backdrop.