ART
Kartemquin at 40
By Scott Jacobs
The doorbell never worked. In all the years I’ve been going to the old Emily’s Cleaners in Lakeview that serves as world headquarters for Kartemquin, the doorbell button has been a twisted metal wire that threatens to electrocute you -- but somehow buzzes when you press it.
You’d think, after The MacArthur Foundation gave Kartemquin a $500,000 media arts grant last week, that doorbell might get fixed. But I doubt it. They have bigger fish to fry.
The MacArthur grant is a spin-off of the foundation’s famous Genius Awards, a recognition of Kartemquin’s unique 40-year history producing documentaries in Chicago and an investment in its new leadership who have bold plans for the future. Before too many changes take hold, I thought I’d stop by to visit some of the relics of its past like Gordon Quinn, 64, and Jerry Blumenthal, 70, the founders.
“You want to see a relic? I’ll show you a relic,” Blumenthal says, proudly leading me to his office where he still sits in a duct-taped chair he acquired in the late 60’s during a Hyde Park Bank remodeling. The office is at the end of a rabbit warren of editing suites, producer desks and tape storage rooms, each sporting its own flavor of discount office furniture. “We change, but its sort of one chair at a time,” Quinn says. “We’re documentarians, you know. There’s not money for that stuff.”
The Old Days
Quinn and Blumenthal lead me into a small living room to talk. The walls are covered with awards and plaques for some of Kartemquin’s better known work: Hoop Dreams, the saga of two inner-city high school basketball stars; The New Americans, a 4-part PBS series on immigration; Vietnam, Long Time Coming about war veterans who return to bicycle through the country where they once fought; Refrigerator Moms, another P.O.V. documentary on autism. In between the awards are fading posters of Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez, reminders that Kartemquin, from its very beginnings, has always been rooted in what The Left used to call “The Struggle.”
Kartemquin started in 1966 at the University of Chicago when Quinn, then a student, banded together with Stan Karter and Jerry Temaner to make socially-relevant films in the cinema verite style of the times. The name – a combination of their own – was also a play on the name of the famous Russian minister Potemkin, who built fake villages along his borders to make his empire seem greater than it was. They shot with hand-held 16mm black & white cameras looking for gritty real life scenes uninterrupted by an omniscient narrator. After working as a crew member, Blumenthal, then a graduate student at Northwestern, gave up academia to join them. “They said what do you want to do? Be an old fart professor, or do you want to make films – and starve to death?” he recalls.
Their first film was Home For Life, an examination of life in The Drexel Home for the Aged at 62nd and Cottage Grove. A more famous contemporary, Frederick Wiseman, was at the same time making a similar documentary on life in the Bridgewater state mental hospital in Massachusetts called Titicut Follies. But Kartemquin had its own take on the problem.
“Wiseman was very interested in going into places and doing exposes,” Quinn says, “What he does in his work is show you an institution and the people in the institution as dysfunctional. But we wanted to show what we thought was a well-run institution. We wanted to look at the institution on the assumption these were good people, so the problem was really the structure of the institution, and we wanted to ask the question how do good people work within the limits of that kind of place.”
The administrators and staff at the nursing home loved the film. But when it premiered at a large fundraiser, “you could hear a pin drop,” Quinn remembers. It was his first inkling that telling the truth in documentaries might not always be so popular.
The group went on to produce films about The Chicago Maternity Center and three documentaries on labor – Taylor Chain I & II and The Last Pullman Car – that played nationally on PBS. Karter and Temaner moved on to other careers. But the independent filmmaking community in Chicago was growing. Mike Shea, Michael Gray and Chuck Olin were producing their own documentaries under the banner of The Film Group and people like Tom Weinberg and Anda Korsts, from the outlaw TVTV group, were running around the city with a little box-like camera called the video portapak adapting Studs Terkel’s “Working” into real life television.
Stew Pots and Spirituals
After a 1973 fire in their old headquarters in Lincoln Park, the collective bought Emily’s Cleaners at 1901 W. Wellington and moved its operations into the upstairs apartment. This was a quiet blue-collar neighborhood at the time tucked behind the sprawling Stewart-Warner manufacturing plant. “Everyone had a different vision of where we should go,” Quinn says. “Some wanted to be in with the people, part of the community. Others wanted to be down on Hubbard with the rest of the filmmakers, and I was like, bullshit, moving into a neighborhood isn’t going to make us working class.
“But, in fact, we got very involved with the union at Stewart Warner. The plant is gone now, of course, and it has all been replaced by a gated community. But back then, Stewart Warner had a very corrupt union. There was a little radical group inside trying to throw out the bad guys, and eventually they did. They brought in The United Electrical Workers and our downstairs wound up being their union hall,” he says. “When they would have strikes, you could walk through the kitchen here and see big restaurant vats cooking on the stove and these big African-American women standing over them singing spirituals. And I thought, well, maybe locating here did connect us.”
The 1970’s and 1980’s were lean years for documentary film producers. Opportunities to show your work were limited. Television consisted largely of the three broadcast networks and a public broadcasting system with arcane rules governing what got on the air. Theatrical distribution was confined to art houses and campus film societies who set up projectors in lunchrooms to screen new work.
But video was coming of age. Sony’s introduction of the Betacam in 1983 spurred a wave of new corporate video, and Kartemquin covered its costs hiring out as camera crews. The turning point for Kartemquin came in 1986. Prodded by Judy Hoffman, now a professor at the University of Chicago, they reluctantly turned in their film equipment for video and, with local guru Jim Morrissette, were becoming a resource for other independent producers.
Hoop Dreams
One Spring day, two young filmmakers named Steve James and Frederick Marx showed up on their doorstep with a $2,000 Illinois Arts Council grant to make a documentary on street basketball. Quinn agreed to help them with fundraising and pointed them to various African-American cameramen he thought could help them, but they had already decided on Peter Gilbert, who was, like them, a basketball fanatic. (“Peter’s great. He’s on our board now,” Blumenthal laughs. "But I think they really liked Peter because he had his own Betacam.”)
“I took one look at the three of them and said this is perfect. These guys just belonged together,” Quinn remembers. The idea quickly evolved into following two players as they were recruited into high school, and later, college. What was to be a summer of shooting turned into five years. After recording 800 hours in the lives of William Gates and Arthur Agee, the three filmmakers bundled their story into a two-hour documentary called Hoop Dreams and shipped it off to the Sundance Film Festival.
Quinn by now had many friends in town. One was film publicist John Iltis, who showed an advance copy to his friends Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who praised it on their television show even before its first screening as one of the best documentaries of their generation.
By the time the trio got to Sundance, Hoop Dreams was the talk of the town. James tells the story of sitting at dinner with one studio head when a rival studio executive came over to whisper in his ear. “Listen, we’re really interested in your film,” he said. “I haven’t actually seen it yet, but I can smell it.”
Fine Line Entertainment won a bidding war to distribute the film and released Hoop Dreams theatrically in 1993. The Chicago premiere at the Esquire Theater drew hundreds of friends and fellow filmmakers, half of whom had contributed time or services to the project. The credit roll at the end listed 200 names under special thanks.
Hoop Dreams was the start of a string of successes, not just for the original Kartemquin partners, but other documentary makers who have made Kartemquin their home. With increased prominence, Quinn became active in the movement to create an Independent Television Service (ITVS) to fund public television docs. He has also been active recently in an effort to establish “fair use” guidelines for songs in documentaries so critical scenes which contain incidental use of music (like jukeboxes playing in bars) can be included without paying royalty fees to the copyright holders.
The MacArthur grant arrives at a time when Kartemquin is transitioning into a media arts organization, with a real board of director and staff positions for development, film preservation and promotion. “We’re going to keep doing what we’ve always done, but we’ve never been ‘branded’ before,” Quinn says. “And we’re developing a minority fellowship program.
“The hardest part of any documentary are those first steps where you have to raise your own money, put together a demo reel, write proposals, and still hold down a day job to stay alive. We’re hoping when people come to us with a good project, we can pay them for those six months when they are getting started.”
Making The Doc
Is it harder or easier to make documentaries these days? “Certainly it’s easier in the sense the means of production have become so available and relatively inexpensive,” Blumenthal says.
But Quinn notes that’s a double-edged sword. “Everyone says you can make a film on your laptop, or do it all for $10,000 -- and that’s true. But that doesn’t take into account -- if it’s a major film -- who is going to pay you for the six months or six years it really takes to tell the story right? How do you live?”
Much of what passes for documentaries on cable channels like A&E, The History Channel or reality shows on network television really don’t meet the standard, Quinn says. “Most of reality television is artificial people in artificial situations being totally manipulated for commercial purposes. It’s a joke. None of it is real. “
“I was on a panel once with the guy who invented “Cops” and people were fawning all over him about how raw and real it was. So I said, ‘It may be real. But even that’s questionable because you do edit it. But none of it is true because it has no ‘truth value’. You don’t know what happened before. You don’t know what happened afterward. There’s no context. There’s nothing up there on the screen that helps people make a decision about anything important. It’s all spectacle.’
“On the other hand, I would say there is a lot of documentary work out there. In theaters, there are far more documentaries than ever before. There’s HBO and Showtime. There’s The Sundance Channel. There are two channels -- Link TV and Free Speech TV -- that are both documentary and, of course, The Documentary Channel.”
“And there’s public television. PBS is showing more documentaries by independents than it ever has. ITVS has been enormously successful both in funding documentaries and placing stories in two strands on public television (Independent Lens and P.O.V.) and it’s coming from a far more diverse range of documentary makers. So I think there’s a lot of excellent work out there – like Frontline and World – that’s reaching wide audiences.”
“The crucial question is whether people really have a passion to finish their films. When we were making our early films, we never had enough money. We were always asking friends for favors. But we had a passion for what we were doing. And that’s the key element. We had a passion to say something and we did.”
