Michael Phillips: The Oscar for Chicago Authenticity goes to ... well, not ‘Trial of Chicago 7’ or ‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

Can you make a persuasive, evocative Chicago movie without filming most, or any, of your movie in Chicago?

For decades, Hollywood answered that with: Stupid question. Outside Chicago, who cares? Look at the late silent and early sound era gangster classics, from “Underworld” (set in an inferred, not stated, Chicago) to “Little Caesar,” “The Public Enemy” and “Scarface.” Those weren’t filmed here. Who cared? They worked like crazy, and they maximized the customary way of shooting movies, on studio backlots and a few Los Angeles streets.

Until “Call Northside 777″ filmed with James Stewart on location here, in 1947 for an early 1948 release, location authenticity wasn’t on any production budget’s priority list.

It still isn’t.

Two of this year’s Best Picture nominees at Sunday’s Academy Awards dramatize and fictionalize true stories of crucial, painful, egregious miscarriages of Chicago justice, law and order.

Writer/director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7″ shot some footage here. A bit; a few days. But mostly the project was filmed in Paterson, New Jersey, and largely on a courtroom set — high-ceilinged, oaky, beautiful and nothing like the real, low-ceilinged, ugly-flourescent-lighting sweatbox where the trial took place — designed for visual impact, not factual representation.

Director Shaka King’s “Judas and the Black Messiah” (the better movie, by the way) tells two intertwined stories. One concerns the coordinated Chicago and federal law enforcement plot against Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton, which culminated in Hampton’s assassination. The other story is about Bill O’Neal, the FBI informant whose inside work helped the assassination come to pass. His uneasy role in those events sets the picture’s queasy suspense in motion.

The film was made in Cleveland and other parts of northwest Ohio. Former Tribune film critic Dave Kehr, who grew up in Palatine, Illinois, and now works as a curator in the film department of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, tweeted last week: “My problem with CHICAGO 7 and BLACK MESSIAH is the absence of 1960s Chicago, both as a built environment and as an authoritarian state centered on Mayor Richard J. Daley — a crucial figure in these stories who has been removed and replaced by generic FBI heavies.”

A few days later, Kehr elaborated on his problems with the two Chicago-centric Oscar nominees.

“The Daley machine,” he said, “was just such a big part of both stories. Daley was at the center of it.” With “Chicago 7,” he said, even the interiors looked off. “The scenes in Hyde Park don’t look like Hyde Park.” And the Tom Hayden headquarters, the house, he said, “looks like no house in Chicago, ever.”

Tim Samuelson, the City of Chicago’s cultural historian emeritus, acknowledges similar problems watching any Chicago movie that, mostly or entirely, filmed elsewhere.

“A history nerd like me,” he said, “starts thinking about everything that doesn’t look right and suddenly I’m losing track of the story. I’m not just distracted by it. I’m actively bothered by it. The filmmaker just can’t win with me.”

Watching Sorkin’s version of Daley-era Chicago, the scant Chicago location work really sticks out. Sorkin and crew staged and shot part of the Grant Park clashes between police and protesters in the park itself, matching the new footage with archival scenes from Haskell Wexler’s 1969 docu-fiction masterwork “Medium Cool.” You notice those scenes, along with a brief “Chicago 7″ street scene filmed in the Printers Row neighborhood, because suddenly you’re actually here, in the real city, as opposed to anywhere and nowhere in particular.

Chicagoans care more than most, I think, about getting the geography, look and feel of their hometown a little bit right, at least, on screen. This is why a “Netflix” rom-com such as “Holidate” or a slew of Hallmark Chicago-set, Atlanta-filmed heartwarmers tend to stick in the craw en route to the heart. They’re about as Chicago as a peach tree. The sun looks ridiculous. The accents, if the actors go whole hog with their idea of a Chicago vowel sound, are enough to provoke a class-action defamation suit.

They’re enough to inspire entire articles about Portillo’s onion rings, as discussed in a Hallmark Channel holiday movie.

I get hung up on this stuff, too, though it’s easy to easy to overlook the lies, narrative or visual, for other compensations. “The Untouchables,” for example. Director Brian De Palma and Chicago-born screenwriter David Mamet filmed a lot of their 1987 Eliot Ness/Al Capone saga here, at Union Station, or on the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River.

Factually the film is full of it, and I don’t mean facts. It makes stuff up. (It’s a fictional narrative based a little bit on fact; in other words, not a documentary.) At one point, Mamet bailed on rewrites ordered up by producer and fellow Chicago native Art Linson involving Ness tossing gangster Frank Nitti off a rooftop.

It’s a pretty dumb scene, but “The Untouchables” has many I love. Some take glorious advantage of filming here, in the city where the story is set, as in the simple establishing shot of Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia and Charles Martin Smith crossing LaSalle Street, backed by the 44-story wonder that is the Chicago Board of Trade Building. That famous corridor has never been given grander screen treatment, with the possible exception of “The Dark Knight.”

Chicago as an authentic 20th-century screen entity has a sadly incomplete history, largely thanks to Richard J. Daley. In 1957, NBC-TV premiered the Chicago-set police drama “M Squad,” starring Lee Marvin as the tough guy who, decades later, inspired Frank Drebin in “Police Squad!” and the subsequent “Naked Gun” movies.

Daley and then-Police Commissioner Timothy O’Connor had no love for it. In their eyes, “M Squad” made Chicago look bad. A 1959 episode depicted a cop on the take, which made Daley vow never to make special accommodations for outside film crews. That same year, Marvin told TV Guide: “We shoot locations, twice a year. No permit, no cooperation, no nothing. They don’t want any part of us .… Any public building, but nothing else, no stopping traffic. We shoot it and blow.”

A decade later “Medium Cool,” with its culminating scenes filmed during the downtown Chicago melee during the August 1968 Democratic National Convention, gave the city and the mayor another image problem. Daley let John Wayne and “Brannigan” film here, in the mid-’70s, but only when the Jane Byrne mayoral years commenced did Hollywood feel welcome and free to take over Chicago’s streets and beat things up a little, the way the 1980 smash-‘em-up “The Blues Brothers” did.

“Judas and the Black Messiah” may not give you any of the real or period-approximated Chicago of the Fred Hampton years, but Cleveland turned out to be a reasonably effective substitute. Oddly, it’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7″ that looks and feels more fraudulent in terms of atmosphere, even though Sorkin filmed some scenes here.

Moral of the story? You never know. Filming “Holidate” here wouldn’t have saved “Holidate.” And, though I love it, the Chicago-set and Chicago-filmed “Widows” apparently had just enough script issues and knotty storylines to prevent it from connecting with the mainstream audience it deserved.

We’ll close with a little-known story behind the Union Station sequence in “The Untouchables.”

At the time, cultural historian Samuelson was working for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, helping with location scouting for De Palma’s crew. They needed, as he recalled, “a building that looked like a 1920s hospital with a lot of stairs in front of it, plus a landing.”

Samuelson told them about a couple of churches he knew, here and there. Those might work, he said. How about a church instead of a hospital? No, doesn’t fit the script, the crew said.

Well, the only other place, really, is Union Station, Samuelson replied.

A day or two later: “Thanks a lot,” one of the production liaisons told Samuelson, laughing. “Thanks to you, we had to rewrite the whole (expletive) script!” And that’s the scene we have today, filmed on the steps of our beautiful downtown train station, the only possible location for such a preposterously effective homage to the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin.”

It never really happened. It’s fiction. But you know? Who cares?

———

The 93rd Academy Awards begin at 8 p.m. ET Sunday on ABC.

———