The theater was still officially closed, but about 100 people were already taking their seats in black box number two at Northbrook Court’s General Cinema at 9:45 on a recent Saturday morning. They’d forked over an $18 onetime admission charge or shown their series tickets, helped themselves from the big pots of free coffee in the lobby, and perused the flyers that told them–for the first time–what they’d be seeing. An anticipatory buzz hovered in the dimly lit screening room: the film was Dancer in the Dark, the latest work of Danish director Lars von Trier and winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, which had been shown only once in this country–at the New York film festival the night before. Host Bruce Ingram made a few announcements about what to expect at Harlan Jacobson’s “Talk Cinema,” a sneak preview and discussion series devoted to independent and foreign films. Then came the moment this audience of cinephiles had been waiting for: the theater went dark, the screen came alive. Show time.
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None of us would have been there if City News Bureau had hired Jacobson any of the 15 times he barged through its door begging for a job in the early 1970s. Fresh out of college, the Ohio native had come to Chicago to launch a Front Page-style career in crime reporting and found himself (like Nelson Algren and other notable City News rejects) stymied at the starting gate by the inscrutable logic of CNB hiring. Things might have been different too if he hadn’t been canned from his customer service job at Playboy for informing a disgruntled customer that his magazine had arrived without a centerfold “because the girls know what you do over it.” After that, Jacobson said on the phone from New York last week, “I ended up at Variety and began my real career.” He worked at Variety bureaus in Chicago and New York, then put in a decade as editor of Film Comment, the magazine of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the New York film festival. In the early 90s he went out on his own, covering film festivals for newspapers including USA Today and launching “Talk Cinema.” He started at Washington’s Walter Reade Theater in ’92 and began working his way up the eastern seaboard. “Talk Cinema” now offers programs in a dozen cities from Seattle to New York. This is its fourth year in Chicago, where it shows at Pipers Alley, and its first season in Northbrook. “People were coming to our Pipers Alley screenings from the suburbs,” Jacobson says. “We knew we’d have an audience out there.”
“Talk Cinema” will screen the second of seven films in its fall series this weekend. Show times are 10 AM Saturday, October 14, at Northbrook Court, 1525 Lake Cook Road in Northbrook, and 10 AM Sunday, October 15, at Pipers Alley, Wells at North. Jacobson refused to reveal the name of the film in advance, but gave us a clue as to its country of origin: the guest critic will be local expat Lisa Nesselson, who writes about film for the Paris bureau of Variety and Paris Weekly. Tickets are $18 for a single session, $99 for a series ticket, but they’ll prorate the cost for the rest of this session. Call 800-551-9221 or check out the schedule at www.talkcinema.com.
