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Here's Chicago! The City of Dreams
Ted Hearne, 1983, 13 min, 70mm with DTS
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Read more at in70mm.com The 70mm Newsletter
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Written by: Kyle Westphal and Julian Antos, chicagofilmsociety.org |
Date:
30.08.2022 |
Here’s
Chicago! features breathtaking shots of the city and “Where’s Waldo” scale
opportunities for watching the inhabitants. Frame
grab from "Here's Chicago. The City of Dreams"
Chicago’s Water Tower Pumping Station at 801 N. Michigan Avenue is an ornate
Gothic building completed in 1869. One of the only structures on the City’s
North Side to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Pumping Station became
a symbol of civic resilience and was inducted into the National Register of
Historic Places in 1975. Less than a decade after that designation, the Pumping
Station would improbably become the site of Here’s Chicago!, a short-lived but
controversial multimedia tourist attraction that included The City of Dreams, a
rare 70mm entry in that most cut-and-dried of genres, the municipal travelogue.
• Go to European Premiere at the
16. Todd-AO
70mm-Festival 2022
The brainchild of real estate magnate William F. Hartnett, Jr. (1924 -
2013), who had developed United Nations Plaza in New York and Lake Point
Tower in Chicago (the world’s tallest apartment building upon its opening),
Here’s Chicago! was promoted as a public-private partnership that would
revitalize a historic structure. Although the Pumping Station still provided
water to 400,000 Chicagoans, it had been closed to the public for five
decades, even as the vibrant Magnificent Mile shopping district had grown up
around it. Hartnett approached the City Council Finance Committee in June
1982 about his plan to rent the Pumping Station, promising millions in
private investment if the City granted a 20-year lease. The proposal had
seemingly appeared out of the blue, prompting several aldermen [elected
supervisors -- Ed.] to suspect that the exhibition was intended as a stealth
advertisement for Mayor Jane Byrne’s 1983 re-election campaign.
By November 1982, the political considerations had been ironed out, with an
announcement that camera crews would be filming around the city and interviewing
everyday Chicagoans. The City Council agreed to rent the Pumping Station for
$42,000 a year, plus a steadily rising share of net profits, which would
eventually top out at 50%. Hartnett kept his end of the bargain and raised some
$3.5 million from 32 investors.
The plan for Here’s Chicago! included a gift shop, a rotating group of temporary
exhibits, and two permanent audiovisual centerpieces: Heartbeat Chicago and The
City of Dreams, both spearheaded by marketing and communications consultant Ted
Hearne.
A quadraphonic cacophony of civic pride, Heartbeat Chicago was a 20-minute
slideshow utilizing 2,500 images and 63 projectors, with snippets of audio
interviews backed by Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s performance of an original
composition from John Tatgenhorst. The show was culled from over 40,000
photographs, largely the work of Bob Frerck, Brian Seed, and Dan Morrill. The
interviews drew upon the city’s most reluctant boosters - its citizens.
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More in 70mm reading:
European Premiere at the
16. Todd-AO
70mm-Festival 2022
Various Large format and
70mm Films
in70mm.com's Library
Presented on the big screen in 7OMM
Peripheral Vision, Scopes,
Dimensions and Panoramas
Schauburg Cinerama, Karlsruhe,
Germany. Home of The Todd-AO Festival
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Frame
grab from "Here's Chicago. The City of Dreams"
“A lot of Chicagoans we interviewed
were first shy about expressing their true feelings for the city,”
said Hearne. “They’re so used to being put down. But when we prodded
them, they displayed pride and a developing consciousness that Chicago
really is a world class city.”
Hearne’s crew exposed 32,000 feet of 65mm negative for The City of Dreams, with
ample aerial footage from around the city. Chicago’s architecture receives pride
of place. A voiceover breezily acknowledges the wonders of Rome and Paris, only
to aver, “If you want to see the 20th century, you come to Chicago, because
these are the monuments of our time.” (The film cheats a little by including the
striking Bahá'í House of Worship in suburban Wilmette in its architectural honor
roll.) The film closes with a photomontage that recounts the city’s history.
The City of Dreams takes ample advantage of the 65mm frame, capturing the hustle
and bustle of the Loop, the elevated trains, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange,
the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, and more in crisp, detailed widescreen
compositions that provide a vivid sense of urban life in the early ’80s. A brash
and sprawling entry in a genre more often geared towards delivering facts from
the local Chamber of Commerce in made-to-order, small-gauge recitations, The
City of Dreams reminds us that 70mm exhibition in its heyday encompassed more
than Hollywood road show presentations. The format was also used in theme parks,
trade shows, and other non-theatrical contexts, leaning on highly-resolved
cinematography and multi-channel magnetic sound to provide the deluxe treatment
to engines of American commerce. (As if to emphasize that lineage, The City of
Dreams was projected in an auditorium with no seats, “as viewers stand against
railings à la Disneyworld” according to one contemporary observer.)
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Frame
grab from "Here's Chicago. The City of Dreams"
The legacy of The City of Dreams is inevitably tied up in the broader project of
Here’s Chicago!, a profit-minded but heartfelt tribute to a city that scarcely
returned the favor. The exhibit opened on 17 May 1983, complete with a woman
dressed as Mrs. O’Leary promenading down the Magnificent Mile with her cow, the
alleged instigator of the Great Chicago Fire. Running continuously every half
hour from 10 in the morning to 10:30 at night, Here’s Chicago! initially
attracted sparse attendance and mocking coverage in the local press. Alfred
Borcover, the Chicago Tribune’s travel editor, paid a visit a month after the
opening, touring the pump, the Great Fire-themed Hall of Flames, and the Cheerie
O’Leary Gift Emporium, which he summed up as
“an abundance of junk made in Hong
Kong, Japan, and Taiwan without any relevance at all to Chicago.”
Of Heartbeat
Chicago and The City of Dreams, Borcover observed:
Both presentations, accompanied by quadraphonic sound, are visually exciting.
But when the whole world knows about Chicago’s warts - Al Capone, the violence
during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the depressing slums of the
South and West Sides, and the comic/sad politics—why pretend they don’t exist?
In fact, the content and fortunes of Here’s Chicago! were shaped by political
considerations, comic, sad, or otherwise. As a provision of the lease, the Byrne
administration had veto power over sensitive subjects and invoked it during the
planning of the initial exhibits. (Far from a campaign tool for Bryne, Here’s
Chicago! did not open to the public until several months after Bryne had lost
the mayoralty to Harold Washington.) Subsequent administrations took a lighter
approach: Mayor Eugene Sawyer raised no objections to an Al Capone-themed
exhibit, and called Here’s Chicago! “a crown jewel in our city” upon proclaiming
10 August 1988 to be William F. Harnett Day.
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Frame
grab from "Here's Chicago. The City of Dreams"
But newfound civic respectability only went so far. When Hartnett and Hearne
were barnstorming the city in 1982, they predicted Here’s Chicago! would attract
1.5 million visitors annually. By 1988, they were closing in on two million
visitors in total. Journalist Rick Kogan visited Here’s Chicago! that January
and devoted half his Tribune column to a novelty “where most Chicagoans have
never been.”
Hartnett acceded to the new reality in a 1990 interview.
“We opened in 1983 and
nobody came. It’s picked up every year since …. Our customers fill out a form so
we have a pretty good idea of where they’re from: 7 percent Chicago, 26 percent
suburbs, 53 percent out-of-state, 14 percent overseas.”
It wasn’t enough. In 1993, the City moved to revoke the 20-year lease, citing
$400,000 in accumulated real estate taxes and interest penalties. Here’s
Chicago! claimed breach of contract and sued the City for $3 million. After a
Cook County judge threw out the claim and awarded petitioners $31,626, Here’s
Chicago! closed in March 1996. On 18 May 1996, Here’s Chicago! auctioned off its
remaining assets, including a fog machine, an Audiotronic Abraham Lincoln robot,
a popcorn popper, the 100 Years After the Fire mural, and the 35mm/70mm Kinoton
projectors that once ran The City of Dreams twenty-five times a day.
Nearly a quarter century after its closure, Here’s Chicago! is scarcely
remembered by locals or tourists. With the partnership that developed The City
of Dreams long dissolved, the film is an ungainly orphan -an oddball among 70mm
productions but an epic outlier among city travelogues.
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"The City of Dreams" Credits
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Frame
grab from "Here's Chicago. The City of Dreams"
This film is dedicated to the people of
Chicago whose vision and spirit have made this project possible
"Heartbeat Chicago" and "The City of Dreams" were produced and directed by
Ted Hearne. Here's Chicago Productions. Excecutive Producers: William F.
Hartnett, Jr. & Ted Hearne. Here's Chicago! The City of Dreams (1983) has
been Preserved by the Chicago Film Society. 70mm scan and digital
restoration: Helge Bernhardt. Project coordinators: Julian Antos, Kyle Westphal. 65mm/70mm
Laboratory Services by Andrew Oran. Special thanks to Helge Bernhardt, Nicholas Bergh,
Paul Rayton, Mike Quintero, Andrew Oran, and Iver Burke. Project Funding: National Film
Preservation Foundation. Digital soundtrack: Iventure Studios.
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About the Restoration and new 70mm Print
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Frame
grab from "Here's Chicago. The City of Dreams"
The original negative of Here’s Chicago! The City of Dreams is not known to
survive. A 70mm print in the collection of the Chicago Film Society (struck in
1988 on low fade LPP stock, with a six-channel magnetic soundtrack) represents
the only copy known to be extant.
This 70mm print was scanned in 6K by Helge Bernhardt, who also performed
extensive digital restoration and color correction. The restored version was
recorded back to 65mm negative at FotoKem. Audio restoration was performed by
Inventure and serves as the basis for the new DTS soundtrack, configured and
optimized for playback on modern 70mm exhibition equipment.
New 70mm prints were struck at FotoKem. Two 70mm prints were made, one for long
term archiving and the other for general distribution.
Funding provided by National Film Preservation Foundation. Special Thanks: Helge
Bernhardt, Nicholas Bergh, Paul Rayton, Mike Quintero, Andrew Oran, and Iver
Burke.
23. June 2022 World premiere, Music Box, Chicago, USA
2. October 2022 European
premiere, Schauburg Cinerama,
Karlsruhe, Germany
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