There are a lot of far-fetched scenarios in the made-in-Chicago Jennifer Aniston-Vince Vaughn vehicle The Break-Up, but none more unlikely than the real-life events that have unfolded around some of the movie’s props since it opened earlier this month. The film, a romance between a sports-addicted schlub and an elegant artist, is mostly set in a vintage condo the couple shares and a sleek art gallery–locations that show off the work of a number of Chicago artists. Of the half dozen or so whose pieces are identifiable, the most pointed attention goes to a couple of huge canvases by notorious local bad boy/art star Wesley Kimler. (“Why buy something I could make myself?” is the question uttered by a gallery visitor while the camera lingers on an incendiary Kimler study in red and black.) But the pieces that get the most exposure–all over the walls of the condo and portrayed as works in progress (by Aniston and her over-the-top boss, played by Judy Davis and pitched somewhere between Ann Nathan and Anna Wintour)–were done by relative newcomer Francine Turk.
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It was just three years ago that Turk, a Columbia College dropout, abandoned her tableware design business to focus on the series of figurative nudes, most sketched in charcoal, that are so visible in The Break-Up. They were selected by set decorator Dan Clancy, who’d discovered Turk hawking her artwork at the monthly Chicago Antique Market (where she still sells) a year ago. Turk, who’s 34, works in a range of styles, but for the nudes she arrived at an unusual process: she collects antique frames, then conceives of drawings or paintings that will complement them, usually sketchy, moody, faceless figures in earth tones. With their vintage frames, these pieces make a reliably tasteful, neutral package. “I work with a lot of decorators,” Turk says, adding that her current commissions include 55 pieces for a single home in Northfield.
The television stations and dailies were all over the story, their interest heightened because Gutweiler had been in the news before, albeit in an entirely different light. In 1998, his mother, 47-year-old Susan Gutweiler, was fatally injured in a Saint Louis auto accident. Her car had been hit by an SUV that ran a red light; the driver was Saint Louis Rams defensive end Leonard Little, and he was drunk. To the distress of Michael Gutweiler and his father, Bill, Little got just 90 days in jail, 1,000 hours of community service, and four years’ probation. When Little was picked up and charged with speeding and driving drunk again six years later, Gutweiler–the date of his mother’s death tattooed on his arm–told the Tribune’s Rick Morrissey that the crash had ruined his life and he wanted to “see [Little] be walked away in cuffs,” to know that “justice does happen.” Gutweiler said then that he wanted to work with Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, “to stop this from happening.” He could have been the car crash poster boy: his sister and an uncle had also been killed in auto accidents. In the wake of his mother’s death, Gutweiler told Morrissey, he’d dropped sports and friends, found art, and stopped taking his medication for Tourette’s syndrome. (Little was found not guilty of the 2004 DUI charge.)
