Southwest-Side Story
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Like Mucci-Beauchamp, who’s part Puerto Rican and grew up in Back of the Yards, Goldberg was a Latina with an unhappy sister. Goldberg and her siblings were raised in the same Mexican home in Pilsen and Little Village headed by a mostly single mother, but while Rosie graduated from college, got a good job as a pharmaceutical rep, and married a doctor, one of her sisters struggled. “Every time I would see her,” Goldberg says, “I would think ‘How has she come to this state?’ and ‘How could she get out of it?’” Mucci-Beauchamp’s play led to a eureka moment for Goldberg, and working sporadically over a couple months last fall with help of DramaDog software, the mother of two preschool boys knocked out a script for a full-length movie, Hopeless, about a woman’s poor life choices.
The higher budget meant they’d have an assistant director, a good director of photography (Chicagoan Vladimir Van Maule), and technical upgrades like HD video and a “real lighting truck.” In April, with help from IFP and the Chicago Film Office, they began working in earnest, scouting locations and auditioning would-be actors from sources like the Pilsen YMCA and the Highland Park Senior Center. The screenplay, which they characterize as a “woman’s story,” is hung on the relationship between a Latina and her psychiatrist–40ish and Jewish, with her own problems. Both women’s mothers loom large in the story, which touches on infertility, cancer, drugs, physical abuse, death, and the Holocaust and includes two flashback scenes to be shot in Yiddish (with subtitles) and a sprinkling of Spanish. They cast a novice, recent UIC graduate Jessi Perez, in the younger role, and Chicago actor Mara Monserrat as the shrink.
