What Chicago film sites are people most surprised to learn about?
I would say absolutely the Essanay film studio. Most people don’t have any idea that Chicago was once a film capital when the movies were first starting out. Two film studios in Chicago were putting out about 400 films a year up to around the second decade of the 20th century. Most of them were gone by the 1920s. There is a resurgence in bigger movies filming in Chicago – What are some of the benefits that are drawing filmmakers back? What happened in Illinois’ case was that a couple of very prominent movies had Chicago settings but they were shot in Toronto. The big one was “Chicago,” the 2003 Best Picture where not one frame was shot in the city. That got the legislature spurred on, with the help of lobbying from some agencies here, to get tax incentives in place so that filmmakers could come in and use the city and still get the kind of cost relevance that would make it essential for them. Does Chicago allow more disruption of the city to draw filming than New York or other cities?
