You had to be there. Mike Gray and the Film Group were. They were working out of a studio on Grant Place just off Clark in the summer of 1968. They had the latest handheld cameras from France and they were making good money shooting documentary-style commercials for the top advertising agencies in town. On Wednesday, August 28, says Gray, “we had Colonel Sanders in our studios when we heard there was a riot in Grant Park”–where antiwar demonstrators in town for the Democratic National Convention were squaring off with Chicago police.
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They ditched the colonel and took their cameras where the action was. About dusk Gray found himself standing on a fence that ran from a pillar at the corner of Michigan and Balbo to the entrance to the Haymarket Restaurant on the first floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Through the viewfinder he looked out at the intersection. “People were sitting down, shouting ‘Peace now!’ at [vice president] Hubert Humphrey’s hotel window. Someone said, ‘Look out!’ I swung around and saw a phalanx of cops getting out of a bus. They formed up, moved in, and started hitting people indiscriminately. I was looking through the viewfinder, thinking, ‘Is this Prague?’ I never expected to see that in the United States of America.”
They returned to making commercials while they continued “filming the revolution” (Gray’s words), but it was hard to get enthusiastic about the placement of logos or finding just the right Iowa farm family for an Aunt Jemima spot. Their advertising clients faded away. With help from Second City cofounder Howard Alk they turned 7,000 feet of raw film into American Revolution 2, a feature-length documentary about the convention and its aftermath. It premiered in 1969 at the Playboy Theater and ran several weeks at the 3 Penny.
Watrous, however, takes a step back, noting that the Film Group’s work is valuable because it’s cinema verite, with no authoritative voice-over telling you what to think. “One purpose of the Chicago Film Archives is to start with films and open up Chicago history,” she says. “We’d like to nuance it and get people looking at the gray areas.”
