When Arnie Bernstein was a student at Niles West High School, every afternoon he had to choose which of two great men he would study: Euclid, the Greek philosopher who’s considered the father of geometry, or Groucho Marx.
The book is an encyclopedia of Chicago film history, from the early part of the century, when the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company was one of the leading silent-film studios in the country, through the industry’s rediscovery of the city in the 80s and 90s. There are interviews with local film creatures like Dennis Franz, John Mahoney, Tim Kazurinsky, and Philip Kaufman (he went to the University of Chicago before going on to direct The Right Stuff and Henry & June). But the heart of the book is its guide to places you’ve seen in movies set in Chicago. Want to know just where Tom Cruise drove his dad’s Porsche into the lake in Risky Business? Belmont Harbor. Or where the street party in Monkey Hustle was held? On the 6300 block of South Ellis. You’ll also find lists of the pool halls used in The Color of Money, the fire stations in Backdraft, and the houses where the Marx Brothers lived at the start of their vaudeville careers. At once scholarly and trivial, in the best sense of that word, it’s a book that belongs both on the shelves of Columbia College film professors and on the bathroom floors of single guys who rent one movie a week from Blockbuster.
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The genius of The Blues Brothers is that it worked Chicago’s then-underexposed landmarks into the story. Wrigley Field, for example, was the fake address Elwood and Jake gave the Nazis. Now directors use the stadium as gratuitously as directors of spring-break comedies use boob shots.
“That would be a fascinating movie,” Bernstein says. “Here are people who were fighting racism, classism–and using new technologies, like people use the Web today. They didn’t have much money, but they had the heart and the desire.”
