On those frequently published lists of great Chicago writers we see, you know, the usual suspects … Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Ernest Hemingway, Nelson Algren, Studs Terkel, Ben Hecht, Saul Bellow, Loraine Hansberry, Mike Royko, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Theodore Dreiser and, more recently, Scott Turow, Stuart Dybek, Sandra Cisneros and on and on and creatively on.
Many of these people were not born here. Algren was born in Detroit, Terkel in New York City, Bellow in Montreal and Brooks in Kansas. But what matter? They were all formed here.
One name that rarely appears on such lists is that of Barry Gifford, a writer who is very tied to this city of his birth and formative years. Those years are the focus of a powerful and artfully entertaining new film titled “Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago,” which you can go see when it premieres as part of the eighth Chicago Critics Film Festival.
Written and directed and coproduced (with Michael Glover Smith) by Chicago’s Rob Christopher, it has been a hit at film festivals in the U.S. and abroad and it is based largely on Gifford’s writing about a young boy named Roy, whose history and adventures in Chicago closely mirror his own life. These stories, and the film adapted from them, are in a real sense a memoir in disguise, a coming-of-age tale (think Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories) but hardly sentimental or sweet. They are hard-edged, powerfully so.
Gifford was born and grew up in the Seneca Hotel in Streeterville. His name was Barry Stein and his mother was a former Texas beauty queen, his father a pharmacist who ran a drugstore at the corner of Chicago Avenue and Rush Street. Twenty years older than his wife, his father was also a bootlegger and bookie with mysterious mob ties, ever flying off to such places as Miami, Havana, New York and Acapulco, sometimes with little Roy in tow.
It was not a happy family and eventually a divorce took Roy and his mother to Rogers Park where they lived, she would marry five times. He went to grammar school, played a lot of sports and began to discover life and its many characters and revelations, and girls. His father died of cancer when Roy was a teenager and soon the kid leaves town with the notion to “go everywhere.”
There is nothing sentimental about this remarkable story, this film. It is marvelously moody, with a jazz infused soundtrack by Jason Adasiewicz, and employing the voices of actors Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon and Lili Taylor, and with striking animation by Lilli Carré and Kevin Eskew.
It is a vanished city we see, brought to vivid life by the use of archival photos and film clips.
I have been reading Gifford for most of my adult life and greatly admire his 40-some works. He is perhaps most famous for what are labeled his Sailor and Lula novels, a series that inspired filmmaker David Lynch’s “Wild At Heart,” the 1990 romantic crime film that Lynch wrote and directed with stars Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern and Diane Ladd.
Rob Christopher first saw that film as a teenager in Denver, his hometown. He says, “I had to see it on VHS since I was too young to get into theaters (the film was rated R). I first thought that the weird stuff in the movie was devised by Lynch, but I discovered it was Gifford and that’s when I started reading his books.”
He came here to attend the School of the Art Institute, later graduating from Columbia College with a degree in film. In 1997 he saw “Lost Highway,” the Lynch film also based on the Gifford’s work and he began to devour all of the writer’s words.
“I was especially floored by his stories set in Chicago,” he told me. “There was such a beautiful power to them, and they were so evocative of a specific time in this city.”
He interviewed Gifford for the late and lamented publication Chicagoist and when Gifford came to Chicago to participate in a play at Steppenwolf in 2009, he offered to pick the author up at the airport.
“In that ride into the city, and while he was here, he asked me to drive to some places he remembered from childhood, and he told stories about that time,” he said. “I was captivated.”
That was also when I met Gifford. We were in a one-time event called “Nelson Algren Live: 100th Birthday Celebration at the Steppenwolf Theatre,” part of an onstage gang that also included novelists Russell Banks and Don DeLillo, actors Dafoe and the late Martha Lavey. Editor/publisher Dan Simon was also in the show; he co-wrote the script with Gifford.
It was a fine evening. I “played” Studs Terkel and the highlighted of the show for me was Dafoe’s reading of an Algren short story about a boxer who dies the in ring.
Christopher saw that show and later dove into making what would become “Roy’s World.” It took him a relatively short three years to make the movie, financed in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and a lot of individuals. He praises the archival resources at the Chicago Film Archives and the University of Illinois Chicago. He feels “lucky” that Dafoe, Dillon and Taylor (all admirers of Gifford’s work) were receptive to working on the film, “donating their time and gifts,” as Christopher says.
“It was great,” he says. “I flew to New York and taped them in their apartments, with my little digital recorder and a lavaliere microphone. They were so familiar with Barry’s work, so plugged in, it didn’t take long to finish.”
Gifford will be back in his hometown this week to see some old friends and watch the movie of his early life. He will be at the Music Box Saturday for a question-and-answer session following the screening. Christopher too will be there.
“Sometimes I just have to pinch myself about this film,” he says. “I have always believed that the best place to start is by not knowing what might happen. … And what has happened here is something very special.”
“Roy’s World: Barry Gifford’s Chicago” screens 2:30 p.m. Nov. 13 as part of the Chicago Critics Film Festival at the Music Box Theatre, 3733 N. Southport Ave. Tickets and more information at musicboxtheatre.com
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
