By Jeff Huebner
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Mortell grew up in Kankakee, spending the summers in Montana on her grandparents’ ranch. She says she was a “clinically hyperactive, rebellious tomboy. I was a terrible student, and I was in trouble all the time.” In 1971 she got an English-literature degree from the University of Colorado (“I spent a lot of time marching against the war”), then moved to Denver to work as a sound engineer and commercial photographer. For most of the 80s she ran a real estate development company that specialized in moderately priced apartment-to-condo conversions. But when Colorado’s tax laws changed, she says, “it drove apartment buildings sky-high–and drove me out of the market.” She came back home and in 1988 earned a master’s degree in urban planning and policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
She then took a job as the development director of the Holy Family Preservation Society, helping to raise $2 million to restore the near-west-side landmark. A video she produced about the church’s history won a local Cable Access Network award and was a documentary finalist at the 1990 Hometown USA Video Festival.
The CTA had been spending as much as $15 million a year on graffiti removal. “We saved millions of dollars over the first year,” says Mortell. “Painters at the CTA were amazed at how much less they had to clean up. Nobody could believe that it worked.” A video she made for the American Public Transit Association about the contests, Make the Change, which aired on local public TV, spawned similar efforts in other cities.
This fall Mortell screened a new cut of Sketches at the Independent Feature Film Market in New York, where she says it received a “very warm response. The fact that anybody’s interested at all–I was thrilled. I’m still learning this thing.” She says she was especially gratified by the comments of the young people in the audience. “They said it seemed really true to them–that they came off believing these were real kids and that’s what kids’ lives are like. I’m going, ‘All right!’ It was the same kind of feedback I’d gotten from kids in Chicago.” She’s now in touch with several small distributors and agents and says she might show the film in Chicago again soon.
