By Jack Helbig
For the better part of four decades, Palazzolo has been making movies around town, and he’s been celebrated for his good-natured cinema verite portraits of local wildlife. These humorous documentaries treated such diverse topics as a senior-citizens’ picnic (Enjoy Yourself–It’s Later Than You Think), a massage parlor (Hot Nasties), antiwar demonstrations (Love It/Leave It), patriotic parades (America’s in Real Trouble), a tacky wedding shower in the northwest suburbs (Ricky and Rocky), and stranger rituals on Rush Street (I Was a Contestant at Mother’s Wet T-Shirt Contest). His films have been both praised and denounced as slack and unrestrained, but they’re undisputedly funny and insightful. They’ve brought Palazzolo one-man shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Pacific Film Archive, Facets, the Film Center, and the Chicago Historical Society. They’ve been studied at the annual Robert Flaherty International Film Seminar in Boston, and screened at the Leipzig, New York, and Cannes film festivals.
“My model was Mad magazine, which had just started publishing a few years earlier. I loved Mad magazine. My father hated it and thought it was filth. He found a stack of them under my bed and threw them out.
The neighborhood’s most unique feature was an old quarry. Palazzolo says it was literally in his backyard. “It was easily eight square blocks. After dinner my friends and I all used to climb down into the quarry to explore, build forts, play Indians, run wild. We liked to dress up like Indians. We had feathers. It was like a little Lord of the Flies, except we didn’t beat up on people. We had our own fort we dug into the dirt, and we would put our clothes there and change into loincloths. We would make spears out of tall weeds.”
When it came time to register, he says, “I waited in a very long, slow-moving line, and when I got to the front of it I found I had to bring my birth certificate. I walked home slowly, got my certificate, and then slowly returned. When I got back, I was told it was filled. Boy, was I disappointed! I had to wear blue jeans, not a shirt and tie and slacks, and I was going to have to go to school with girls.”
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Palazzolo wrote back saying he might be interested. A few weeks later a representative from the school showed up at the front door. “He was almost a parody of a salesman. He drove up in this Cadillac with fins. His car seemed bigger than our house. This guy was like a preacher. My sweet parents were very nice to everyone, and they invited him in for coffee. I remember he was sitting under this picture of the Last Supper and in the middle of talking he dramatically raised his spoon, in a real Christlike pose, and he said, ‘Do you realize that an artist designed this spoon?’ We were mesmerized. We made the down payment then and there.”
Every month Palazzolo would get a different assignment, “like draw the handsome man or draw the gnarled tree,” he says. “You would send it in, and they would put an overlay on it and grade you.” He recalls having particular trouble with the gnarled tree. “I guess I didn’t have enough gnarls.”
