Still Schmoozing
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Since 1993 Iltis and Sikich have also operated a subsidiary, Iltis Sikich Associates, a producer’s rep firm that negotiated sales and was the only local service of its kind. Their first project together was a little basketball doc produced by Kartemquin Films called Hoop Dreams. “[The filmmakers] saw us at an IFP [Independent Feature Project] seminar when we were just starting out,” Sikich says. “They were just finishing up five or six years of working on it and it was going straight to PBS, where it was financed. One of the things we do is try to ascertain the value of the film in the marketplace. In this case it was a rough cut, close to four hours. We looked at it and we were blown away. We said, ‘This is more than a PBS movie. It should be in theaters, and we’d like to help you achieve that.’”
“They saved our asses from being eaten alive,” says Hoop Dreams producer Gordon Quinn. “It was John who arranged for Siskel and Ebert to see Hoop Dreams, and they went ballistic. They reviewed the film before it had been shown at Sundance, so we went in with enormous buzz for a film nobody had seen. And then when it really took off at Sundance we had Orion and New Line and Sony Pictures, everyone coming at us, wining and dining us and making us offers like nothing we had ever heard. I probably would have taken the first one. You’re suddenly in this situation where everybody is your best friend, and to have somebody who knows that world, who you have a previous relationship with, who you trust and know is an honest person, it made a huge difference.”
Local performer and director George Cederquist met English playwright James Walker when both were students at a British boarding school in the mid-90s. They ran a theater company together until 1997, when Cederquist returned to the States to go to Yale. The two friends kept in touch, and in 2004 Walker sent Cederquist the manuscript of Proving Mr. Jennings, a satire on the effects of terrorism he’d just entered in the King’s Cross New Writing competition. “I read the script, loved it, and set to work trying to find a local theater company to do it,” Cederquist says. Word soon came that the play had won the competition, but that didn’t break the ice in Chicago, where, according to Cederquist, international theater is pretty much “off the radar.” The only local taker was Michael Colucci, artistic director of Actors Workshop Theatre. Proving Mr. Jennings, about a guy who goes to the hospital for a heart transplant and wakes up a terrorist suspect, will get its American debut this week at Colucci’s 44-seat storefront theater in Bryn Mawr’s emerging historic district, just down the street from City Lit. Cederquist will direct on a $3,100 budget, and Walker, whose current project is a commissioned work for England’s National Theatre, is flying in for the premiere.
Proving Mr. Jennings
