Movies |

Indie heist comedy stakes out Chicago’s Jewelers Row

While Spike Lee’s “Chiraq” has been sucking up much of the oxygen lately, a smaller movie project quietly began filming in town this week.

“Imperfections,” with a screenplay from director David Singer, is a heist comedy about an out-of-work actress (Virginia Kull, “Boardwalk Empire”) who takes a job working for a diamond importing business on Wabash’s Jewelers Row.

“As is happens,” Singer told me, “I had a girlfriend 25 years ago — had, my wife would like me to emphasize had — who had a job working for diamond importers. When they need to get stones from one place to another, they don’t hire security companies because they get robbed all the time. So instead they hire young women, and they stick tens of thousands of dollars of diamonds in their jean pockets and send them from one location to the next.”

You’re kidding. Is this true? “It’s a real thing,” he said. Apparently the thinking is this: No one suspects a random woman walking down the street of carrying loose diamonds on her person. “It’s a caper movie,” Singer said. “We’re thinking of of it as ‘Midnight Run’ crossed with ‘In Bruges’ — set in Chicago.”

Moviemaking is something of a career shift for Singer, who is better known as a musician. (Tribune rock critic Greg Kot has called Singer a “master of slow-motion psychedelia” who writes layered, orchestrated pop.) Singer’s output also includes hundreds of compositions for political ads, as well as music for the stage production of Steppenwolf Theatre’s “August: Osage County.”

I asked about changing gears into film.

“It’s a little bit of a circuitous story. I had made a bunch of records” — Tribune contributor Andy Downing called “East of the Fault Line” one of 2007’s best local albums — “and played a million shows in every bar all over the place. So I ended up going back to school and wrote a collection of short stories.”

Two years ago he adapted one of those stories into a script for a teen comedy called “Advantage: Weinberg,” a 15-minute John Hughes-flavored movie starring actor Jack Foley as an amiably manipulative, lovestruck schlub. (Singer has made it available to watch for free, for a limited time here.)

Shot partially at Niles West High School, the film doesn’t look like a first-time effort. A lot of that comes down to Singer’s producer, who is also his younger brother, Jon, a seasoned producer of commercials.

They screened the short at Cannes in 2013 as part of the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase and took meetings there with producers and financiers, David said, “but decided to do the punk rock thing and raise a bunch of money and try to make a movie in Chicago under our own steam.”

It isn’t completely alien territory for either brother. David: “We grew up in and around this business. Our mother, Maureen Brookman, was a high-profile agent at Stewart Talent in Chicago. She discovered Chris O’Donnell and Nora Dunn, Anne Heche. Any number of Chicago people started with our mom.”

(Brookman died in 2003 of complications from West Nile Virus, contracted from a mosquito bite while she was gardening at her home in Lincoln Park.)

The pair (David is 45, Jon 41) attended the Francis W. Parker School and did some acting during those years. “I was on a pretty good trajectory,” Jon said. “But our father, who was the president of an advertising agency, wanted me to stay in school. So he was against it from the beginning.” According to David, “Jon was a much more successful child actor than I was,” although both were featured on the Life cereal box during the Mikey campaign (“He likes it!”). Jon was also in a couple of movies, including 1986’s “One More Saturday Night,” written by and starring Al Franken and Tom Davis.

One of Jon’s co-stars on that film was Chelcie Ross, who played his father. Some 30 years later, the Singers have cast Ross (based out of La Grange) in “Imperfections.” I’ll always think of him as Conrad Hilton on “Mad Men”; according to Jon, Ross said he’s most recognized for “Major League.”

The cast also includes Ed Begley Jr., Marilu Henner (“Taxi”), Zach McGowan (“Shameless”) and Jerry MacKinnon (“Empire”), and they will be shooting through early June in Chicago, including in Jewelers Center, the self-contained marketplace in the Mallers Building on South Wabash Avenue that has been home to diamond merchants since 1912.

One of the toughest hurdles for most indie filmmakers isn’t the project itself, but getting it seen by audiences once it is finished. “We have some LA representation and people who have demonstrated some interest already,” David told me. “But it’s very difficult to pre-sell a comedy. So it depends on how good it is, which we hope is very.”

After filming wraps, he said, “I’ll sleep for 96 hours in a row, and then we’ll start editing and scoring.”

Emmett Till movie in the works: Chaz Ebert is developing a feature film about the aftermath of the murder of Emmett Till, to be adapted from the non-fiction book “Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America,” which centers on the subsequent activism of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. According to Variety, “a director has not been selected yet. Producers are planning to shoot the film in the Mississippi Delta and Central Illinois in 2016.”

“Chiraq” update: Chicago artist Tony Fitzpatrick told WGN Radio this week that he has been cast in Spike Lee’s upcoming film “Chiraq,” which is reportedly a modern-day adaptation of the ancient Greek comedy “Lysistrata,” wherein the women of a nation decide to withhold sex from their partners until there is an end to violence. “I got a part in the new Spike Lee film,” Fitzpatrick told host Bob Sirott, noting he has a few weeks of work booked on the film starting June 8. Fitzpatrick is longtime friends with John Cusack, who is also in the film. It remains unclear what role either man will play. “Spike Lee is not the person who coined the term ‘Chiraq,'” Fitzgerald said when asked about the title by Sirott. “Chicagoans who live among this gunfire and this sadness, the kids came up with it … that we’re known for it is sad, but maybe it’s time for some tough love and (to) tell the truth about it.”

High school documentary: Chicago-based filmmaker Steve James is at work on his next project. Oak Park residents were informed last week that the documentary director (whose credits include “Hoop Dreams,” “The Interrupters” and “Life Itself”) is embarking on a project that will depict a year in the life at Oak Park and River Forest High School. James himself lives in Oak Park. Filming is expected to begin next year, per Crain’s Chicago Business, which got a hold of the film’s proposal (which is being made with James’ usual partner, Kartemquin Films), which says the movie will “address the school’s efforts to assist students of color in improving their academic performance.”

Obit: Prashant Bhargava, a filmmaker born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, died last week in New York at the age of 42. Bhargava primarily worked as a director of commercials (including promos for several HBO series such as “The Wire” and “Def Poetry Jam”). Though his resume as a feature filmmaker comprises just a single picture, his debut made an impact. Filmed in the Indian city of Ahmedabad, 2011’s “Patang” (“The Kite”) tells the story of six individuals over the course of India’s largest kite festival, set amid a community reeling from a natural disaster and churning with religious conflict. In his 2012 review, Tribune film critic Michael Phillips called the movie “an impressive calling card for what looks like a bright directorial future.”

nmetz@tribpub.com

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