Bill Horberg admired the daring and ambition of his older sister, Marguerite, when they were growing up on the north side. “She was always a trailblazer,” he says. “She was listening to jazz when everybody else was listening to the Jackson 5.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
His first passion was also music: he played the flute, and after graduating from the Latin School in 1977, he ended up at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. Instead of practicing, he spent a lot of time going to the movies. He was often joined by his best friend from Latin, Albert Berger, who ran the film society at Tufts University.
Horberg dropped out of Berklee in his second year and returned to Chicago. In May 1979 he and Berger secured a lease on the shuttered Sandburg Theatre–formerly known as the Playboy–at Division and Dearborn, intending to open a repertory house. “I was 19; Albert was 21,” Horberg says. “The theater had fallen into a state of disrepair. Despite that, it was a thrilling business experience. The theater was very successful for what it was. It was a single screen, so it was hard to make it a profitable venture. We got locked into the economics. But we showed a Hitchcock festival, Ophuls’s films. We premiered Fassbinder movies and showed everything from The Thin Man and The Searchers to the revival premiere of Peeping Tom.”
The Talented Mr. Ripley ends a seven-year struggle to secure the rights to the book, complicated by Highsmith’s death in 1995 and her apparent dissatisfaction with Rene Clement’s French adaptation from 1960, Purple Noon. The project was further delayed when Anthony Minghella, initially involved as a writer, decided he wanted to direct the film himself after he finished The English Patient. Horberg says their mutual interest in music, especially jazz, was indispensable in shaping the material. The movie opens this week.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Davis Barber.
