Action Heroes

26 people who make films happen in Chicago—plus three newcomers making their mark

By Robert Loerzel & Jeff Ruby
Illustrations by Michael Camarra

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Tillman Jr. (left) and Teitel

ROBERT TEITEL and GEORGE TILLMAN JR.
Producer, 41 // Director/producer, 40

Teitel’s and Tillman’s names have become inseparable, and their projects (Barbershop, Notorious) have both men’s fingerprints all over them. The pair met as students at Columbia College 20 years ago, and found they were kindred spirits. “It wasn’t like we were the best filmmakers,” says Teitel. “But we worked harder than anybody else.” Together, they make quintessentially Chicago films, from the surprise 1997 hit Soul Food—which Tillman wrote and directed—to the recent Nothing Like the Holidays. “Chicago’s another character for our movies,” says Teitel, a Mount Prospect native who, for Holidays, drew in memories of his Puerto Rican mother’s family in Humboldt Park. “Because of his commitment to his hometown, Bob has shot six movies in Illinois, bringing millions into the economy and providing thousands of job opportunities,” says Betsy Steinberg of the Illinois Film Office. “The [Chicago] crews are amazing,” says Teitel. “When you create this family, it feels like everybody’s giving you a little more.”

GORDON QUINN
Artistic director, Kartemquin Films, 66

When Quinn and two friends from the University of Chicago founded Kartemquin in 1966, they hoped to change the world by making cinéma vérité. “We honestly believed that if you held a mirror up to society, that would be enough to cause social change,” he says. Working out of a Lake View studio stuffed with tapes and editing equipment, Quinn has nurtured many documentary filmmakers, including Steve James, director of the 1994 Oscar-nominated Hoop Dreams. His newest film is Prisoner of Her Past, about the repressed Holocaust memories of Sonia Reich, mother of the Chicago Tribune reporter Howard Reich. With Justine Nagan taking over as Kartemquin’s executive director, Quinn is eager to focus on what he loves best: making films, full-time.

JOAN CUSACK
Actress, 46

“You have to make your peace with your life,” says Cusack, who lives in Chicago with her husband and two sons. That means keeping out-of-town movie shoots to a minimum and focusing on being a good mom—not that this arrangement has slowed her down. The two-time Oscar nominated actress is in the upcoming Confessions of a Shopaholic, and in the year after that she will appear in Hoodwinked 2 and reprise her role as Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl in Toy Story 3. “I can do it here in Chicago,” she says of Toy Story. “You just show up in a sound booth and you zero in, tightly focused on your voice.” Cusack was 17 in 1980 when she happened to be in the right place to get one of her first screen roles (My Bodyguard); she still considers herself lucky. “It’s a lottery to be in the business in the first place,” she says.

STEVEN CONRAD
Screenwriter, producer, director, 39

Conrad’s story gives false hope to aspiring writers everywhere. While an undergrad at Northwestern University, he wrote a short story called “Wrestling Ernest Hemingway” for a creative writing class and adapted it into a screenplay. Just one year after he graduated, it became a feature film starring Robert Duvall and Richard Harris. “I forgot how much I sold it for,” says Conrad, a Lake View resident. “But I spent it in a year.” It would be another decade before he broke through again, this time with 2004’s The Weather Man, a darkly comic Chicago film starring Nicolas Cage. After writing the screenplay for The Pursuit of Happyness, Will Smith’s 2006 blockbuster, Conrad wrote and directed The Promotion, a 2008 comedy filmed in Hyde Park and starring John C. Reilly. Now he’s juggling several projects, including The Parking Ticket with Ben Stiller.

WILLIAM SCHOPF
Owner, Music Box Films, 60

Schopf, a veteran attorney, bought a building on Southport Avenue in 1986 and became the Music Box Theatre’s landlord. When the cinema’s owners retired in 2003, Schopf, also a film buff, bought the business, though he knew it wasn’t exactly a gold mine. “It’s sort of a break-even proposition,” he says of the 80-year-old theatre. In 2006, he launched Music Box Films, plucking works from film festivals and offering them to U.S. audiences. Schopf struck gold with one of his first acquisitions, the French thriller Tell No One, which became 2008’s top-grossing foreign film and played in more than 100 U.S. theatres. “People were beating down our door to play it,” says Schopf, who tempers his hopes for the upcoming French comedy Shall We Kiss? “It’s a gambler’s business model.”

PEPE VARGAS
Director, Chicago Latino Film Festival, 58

After working as a human-rights lawyer in Latin America, Vargas came to Chicago in 1980 with $200 and almost no English. He got work as a busboy. “People had no clue who I was,” the Colombia native recalls. To improve his English, he studied broadcast communications at Columbia College, made a documentary, and worked as an adviser at the first Chicago Latino Film Festival. “Suddenly,” he says, “I became a human being overnight.” A year later, Vargas was running the event; the festival marks its 25th year in April. As founder and executive director of its parent organization, the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, Vargas dreams of building a downtown center to present films, plays, and concerts. “We can be a bridge that joins Chicago with the entire Latino universe through the arts,” he says.

Photography: (Teitel & Tillman Jr.) Philip V. Caruso/20th Century Fox; (Conrad) Michael Tercha/Chicago Tribune; (Schopf) Antonio Perez/Chicago Tribune