By Patrick Z. McGavin
After he earned his degree in the mid-80s, Stern worked for 18 months for his father’s company, a manufacturer of appliances like air purifiers and handheld massagers, but he still longed to develop his own film and theater projects. “In the financial world, there’s a kind of reflexive crouch; you wait for the ceiling to fall in on you, so I was very much driven by not relying on anybody else to hire me. That set me in the direction of producing,” Stern says. He moved to Los Angeles and began shopping scripts around, without much success. Then his father decided to sell his company, and Stern returned to Chicago to work with the investment bankers to help coordinate the details of the sale.
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Of course Stern had other projects and interests to fall back on, in particular the investment portfolio he was managing with his father at their hedge-fund company. He found the work comforting compared to what he’d been doing. “I’m so intense with the theater and film projects,” he says. “Investing is all dispassionate. Making plays and movies is very passionate. That’s the greatest joy in the world to me. But [finance] gives my brain a place to go because there is a lot of frustration in making movies and producing plays.”
The film was savaged by reviewers and was shown on cable in April before a limited theatrical release here and in LA and New York, but Jim Stern is not letting it get him down. In addition to the Stomp! film, he has three other movies in various stages of development. His wife’s first novel, Another Song About the King, was published by Random House in February to good reviews and encouraging sales. With their two small children, they divide their time between Chicago and LA.
