CULTURE
The Gentleman Filmmaker
There’s so much to say about Chuck Olin -- and so many Chuck Olins to
talk about -- I can only speak to Chuck Olin The Filmmaker, but I can’t
imagine he was ever any different as a husband, father, partner or friend
in any of the many other endeavors he undertook.
The Chuck Olin I am talking about died two weeks ago, at the age of 68, after five decades as one of Chicago’s most influential independent film producers.
He was born in 1937 in Hyde Park to a family that had a successful ice cream business – successful enough to allow him to go to Harvard in 1955 and graduate in 1959. He might never have touched film if his father had believed -- like he did -- in the redeeming qualities of “Valas" ice cream. But his father was a stubborn man and Chuck was impatient so he left the family business in the early 60’s to make a career out of film.
The ice cream industry’s loss turned out to be the film industry’s gain. The 60 ‘s were a time of revolutionary change in America. Chuck – with friends Michael Gray and Michael Shea– formed a film collective they called The Film Group to document that social change.
Chuck was out in the streets of Cicero documenting Martin Luther King’s fair housing marches, and in Lincoln Park during The Democratic convention in 1968, a 31-year-old white guy with an Afro, carrying his 16mm camera shooting scenes of police brutality.
With his Film Group partners, he helped turn pictures of bullet holes in a Westside tenement doorway into a film called “The Murder of Fred Hampton.” And while The Vietnam War split America down the middle, Chuck ventured out into the suburbs to bridge the gap in filmed discussions with war supporters that he turned into the revealing “Eight Flags for 98 Cents.”
Chuck made films in those early years that he felt had to be made. No one paid him to do it and none of his crew got paid for helping. In the end, of course, they were films that, in journalism's highest calling, spoke truth to power; but they were also films that treated everyone who appeared in them with respect and dignity. Tom Weinberg described Chuck’s style as “righteous and magnanimous.” I can’t imagine two more appropriate words.
In 1974, after the 60s revolution had come and gone, Chuck realized he had developed a talent for filmmaking for which he could charge real money so he started Chuck Olin & Associates, which, roughly translated, meant “me and all my friends.” His first bona fide client was The Art Institute of Chicago, which commissioned Chuck to make a documentary about the making of Marc Chagall’s “Windows. It won an Emmy. But his best clients, it turned out, would be corporate executives who wanted to get their message out in this new medium they called video.
What’s most interesting about Chuck is that he wasn’t an ideologue. He didn’t make leftist or rightist films. He put himself into situations he found interesting, and followed his curiosity deeper and deeper into the heart of his story.
He did this in his interviews with Chagall, then one of the world’s most renown living artists, but he also did it in interviews with Northwestern University Medical Faculty doctors looking to raise money for a downtown medical center; the board of The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library that needed documentary interviews with the workers who built Hoover Dam; and a half dozen Fortune 500 company executives who would hire him to get their message out to the troops – and get back film that was, in many cases, a message to the executives from their troops.
About ten years ago, Chuck came across a group of World War II veterans who had fought in Europe under the auspices of The Jewish Brigade. Curiosity drove him to find more of them and he pursued their story back to Europe and into Israel where many of the veterans still lived.
Three years later, he produced the award-winning documentary “In Our Own Hands” revealing for the first time the bravery and resolve of Jews who chose to fight in the war. But Chuck felt there was more story to tell; so he returned for another three years to follow the Jewish Brigade leaders in Israel as they re-fought the battle of Latrun in “Is Jerusalem Burning?”
Over the last 25 years, Chuck Olin has made some 40 films. Even in his alleged semi-retirement in Stinson Beach, Chuck was drawn to start another documentary on the efforts to save the Bolinas Lagoon.
I once had the opportunity to watch an editing session where Chuck watched the raw tape of his interview with a Fortune 500 executive and had to choose the segments he wanted to use. It was a simple enough film. A video interview where Chuck asked the president what he wanted to do and why.
“So, why don’t we start by you telling me about your plan,” Chuck began the interview. The man answered, and Chuck asked the next question, and the next, and the next. Before anyone knew it, the president of the company and Chuck were deeply engaged in a discussion of what role everyone in the corporation could play a role in realizing the president’s plan. It was a fascinating conversation between two intelligent, caring people that went on for more than an hour.
In an editing room, unfortunately, an hour of raw tape must be pared into a minute of finished program. I watched Chuck agonize over where the heart of the conversation was. “It’s in there someplace, we just have to find it,” he said. Sure enough, when I returned, he had found an eloquent and cogent summary of the interview.
What Chuck Olin did as a filmmaker was to find the fundamental truth of any conversation he ever had. And he did it in such a gentlemanly way that he preserved the dignity of the speaker, the dignity of the listener, and the dignity of everyone who ever worked with him on a film.
So now I can only imagine that Chuck has been sent to heaven. He arrives as both a believer and a skeptic. His first instinct is to make a film for the rest of us on how heaven works. His first task, of course, is to interview The Good Lord.
He sits The Lord down in a comfortable chair and
takes the one next to him. He checks with the cameraman to see that he has
a full cassette in the camera. Then he begins. “Let’s start, Lord,
by you telling me about the plan.”
A Memorial Service for Chuck Olin will be held Sunday, February 6, at
1:30 PM in the Park Hyatt Hotel, 800 North Michigan Ave. If you are unable
to attend, the family asks that memorial contributions be sent to Facing History
and Ourselves.
