It was four years ago that Jennifer Estlin and Mick Napier of Annoyance Productions tried the banana strategy. In a quest for investors to help them transform Annoyance from a theater troupe into a company that could produce film and video as well, they deployed 10 to 20 ensemble members, each discreetly equipped with a banana, to mingle with the crowd in front of the Chicago Board of Trade every Thursday morning that July. On signal, the sleepers all froze into a scattering of instant statues with bananas and Annoyance business cards aloft. The escapade brought thousands of hits to their Web site, Estlin says–but no backers. Napier, a longtime director and teacher at Second City, took this as evidence that the local film and video industry needed to get serious, stop the talent drain to the coasts, and educate the financial community about the potential return on entertainment investment here at home.
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That gave Estlin, Annoyance’s managing director, and Napier, its artistic director, their next big idea: they’d pull together a summit meeting to galvanize their colleagues and win the attention of the money people. They got Sony to sponsor it, Buzz nightclub to host, and the likes of director Harold Ramis and Chicago Film Office head Richard Moskal to speak. Then they invited 500 A-list locals: producers, government officials, and potential investors. Preliminary response was positive, anticipation high. It was all set–for September 11, 2001.
Annoyance was founded by Napier in 1987 as Metraform and quickly racked up a string of quirky successes. Its first production, in a space at CrossCurrents cabaret, was the improvised slasher spoof Splatter Theatre. In ’89, in a former drag club on North Broadway, they opened a more structured film parody, Coed Prison Sluts, which had an 11-year run. The Real Live Brady Bunch, in which actors performed episodes from the television show, opened in ’92 (about the time Metraform began being phased from the company’s name); it ran to sellout crowds in Chicago for two years and sent satellite shows to New York and LA. In ’94 they moved to a 300-seat space at 3747 N. Clark, where they mounted a long-running late-night improv show, Screw Puppies. In ’99 they sold Fatty Drives the Bus, a film they’d been working on for seven years, to a company that took it straight to video. By then Napier and Estlin were interested in doing more film and video. They were building a production facility in the basement of their Clark Street quarters when they found out the building would be demolished.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Jon Randolph.
