Last Friday, as Chicagoans faced a weekend of liberating their cars and sidewalks from a foot of snow, local filmmakers Ben Redgrave and Ben Berkowitz were jetting off to Park City, Utah, for the Sundance Film Festival. The two Bens–whose feature Straightman opened the 2000 Chicago Underground Film Festival–planned to try to snag studio financing for their next one, Polish Bar. It’s a major step for Redgrave and Berkowitz’s six-year-old partnership, the Benzfilm Group. And their odds aren’t bad–thanks in part to Effie T. Brown, an LA-based producer they’ve teamed up with.
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Straightman, which grew from character sketches the pair wrote at the School of the Art Institute in the late 90s, starred Berkowitz (who also directed) and Redgrave as best friends and roommates whose friendship changes when one of them reveals that he’s gay. Like many low-budget indie films, it lost money, though Berkowitz says it’s made a respectable showing since being released on video and DVD in 2002. Redgrave and Berkowitz started on the script for Polish Bar that year, while they were coproducing Rockets Redglare!, a documentary about the eponymous New York punk personality. At the time Berkowitz was also working in the jewelry business, selling watches at the Manhattan store of a family friend. “I ended up doing it for almost two years,” he says. “I made a lot of money, but more importantly learned all these inside things about it.” His experiences there–along with a later gig deejaying at an east-coast strip club–inform the plot of the new screenplay, which is about a young Jewish wannabe DJ who leaves behind his family’s jewelry business to hang out with strippers and Polish gangsters.
“There’s also been this real trend in ‘indiewood’ movies to have a happy ending,” says Redgrave. “Ours is very far from that.”
The pair say they’re confident they’ll get a deal for Polish Bar eventually. “We’re sitting on Melrose Avenue with Effie talking money in the millions, having these hypothetical financial conversations,” says Redgrave. “It can be sort of shocking.” This will be their first time working in 35-millimeter film–Straightman was shot in 16-millimeter. “The smallest way that we could do Polish Bar . . . would be ten times larger than Straightman and Rockets Redglare! put together,” Berkowitz says.
