U.S. Supreme Court: Chicago’s Gun Ban Struck Down

Right to Carry Group to Hold Rally in Chicago

As gun violence in Chicago rises and Mayor Richard Daley continues to squash the Second Amendment rights of Chicago residents, supporters of Right to carry legislation will rally at Tuley Park Field House on June 30.

The event is being sponsored by IllinoisCarry.com, an online action group and discussion forum dedicated to seeing legislation passed that will put Illinois citizens on an equal footing with residents in 49 other states. The meetings will feature speakers with a wide level of experience and interest in the area of Right to Carry in Illinois.

The organization is working to get the word out to residents of Chicago that the right to carry a firearm for personal protection is fundamental and citizens of Chicago are being denied that right as compared to 49 other states.

“It has been widely recognized that the desire for passage of a Right to Carry law enjoys broad support across most of Illinois, but in Chicago itself  the issue is not as well understood ”, said Valinda Rowe, a spokesperson for IllinoisCarry. “The objective of the meeting is to build both understanding and support for Right to Carry legislation. It is hoped that those attending this meeting will be a catalyst for change and help build support in Chicago for the issue.”

Rowe said the right to carry is an equal rights issue for Chicago women who “are often the victim of the most serious and heinous crimes.”

Chicago IllinoisCarry spokesman Gerald Vernon says currently it is a felony to carry a loaded firearm for self-defense in Illinois and believes “no one should have to choose between being a potential victim, or a potential criminal.”

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to present its decision on Chicago’s handgun ban in the next few weeks, something Daley vows to fight, even if the court rules against the city’s current law.

The meeting will be held Wed. June 30, 2010, 6:30pm – 8:30pm, Tuley Park Field House, 501 E. 90th Pl., Chicago, IL.

For more information contact Gerald Vernon at 773-415-1814.

Remembering ‘Blues Brothers’ 30 years later

30 years ago, ‘The Blues Brothers’ hit the big screen, crashing their way through Chicago. In the process, they cleared a path between Hollywood and the city

John Belushi walked into Jane Byrne’s office, sweat beading on his forehead. Dan Aykroyd waited outside the door. He gave Belushi, a Wheaton native, the breathing room to appeal to the mayor, hat in hand, local boy to local girl. Belushi was nervous. Byrne expected him to be. She sat at her desk stone-faced and silent, she recalled, offering no relief.

Belushi and Aykroyd wanted to shoot a movie in Chicago, but, as everyone knew, Chicago government wasn’t exactly amenable to movie production. There wasn’t an official policy or anything. Movies did shoot here. Brian DePalma shot The Fury here a year earlier. A lot of commercials were shot here. There was even a cottage porn industry in River North. But the cooperation needed for a large-scale Hollywood production — the kind Belushi, Aykroyd and director John Landis had in mind, only bigger — was out of the question. It had been for years.

It was 1979, and Byrne had just started her term. Mayor Richard J. Daley, the reason movie studios usually didn’t consider Chicago a viable location, had died three years earlier. Byrne, now 76, remembered that Belushi “looked kind of fat, a sweaty guy already, but he wore a suit jacket and I thought he looked sick, to be honest. To the point that his hair was getting wet. I was a fan of his. But, of course, I wasn’t going to say this right away.”

So, for a laugh, she let him drown. She thought it would be funnier if she “acted like the first Daley, nodding like Buddha.”

“I know how Chicago feels about movies,” the comedian said to the mayor. Byrne nodded. Belushi said the studio would like to donate some money to Chicago orphanages in lieu of throwing a big, expensive premiere. “How much money?” she asked. He said, “$200,000.” She nodded again.

“And so he kept talking,” Byrne recalled. “Finally, I just said, ‘Fine.’ But he kept going. So again I said, ‘Look, I said fine.’ He said, ‘Wait. We also want to drive a car through the lobby of Daley Plaza. Right though the window.’ I remember what was in my mind as he said it. I had the whole 11th Ward against me anyway, and most of Daley’s people against me. They owned this city for years, so when Belushi asked me to drive a car through Daley Plaza, the only thing I could say was, ‘Be my guest!’ He said, ‘We’ll have it like new by the morning.’ I said, ‘Look, I told you yes.’ And that’s how they got my blessing.”

And that, more or less, is how Chicago became a regular location for movie production.

On June 16, 1980, 30 years ago today, “The Blues Brothers” premiered. Keeping with Belushi’s promise to eschew a flashy debut, it screened in Norridge for local crew and politicians only; the musical- comedy-action-film about two bluesmen on the run opened nationally a few days later. There will not be a parade to mark this moment, but there should be. Not just because, as film critic Gene Siskel wrote in his four-star review in the Tribune, it is “the best movie ever made in Chicago,” etching iconic images in the imagination (Daley Plaza surrounded by hundreds of police and soldiers, a car chase in a shopping mall); not because it serves as a reminder of a city long gone, with nods to everything from the Illinois Nazi party to Maxwell Street to the swanky, now-defunct restaurant Chez Paul; not even because, as Aykroyd said by phone earlier this week, “it changed the way Chicago looked on film, and probably turned a lot of people on to Chicago in the first place.”

But because without “The Blues Brothers” — “which we conceived as a love letter to the city,” Landis said — Chicago might not have had much of a film industry. Or rather, it might have taken longer to develop. We might not have had the 900 film and TV productions that have shot in Illinois since 1980, spending an estimated $1 billion, mostly in Chicago, according to the Chicago Film Office. Comparatively, before 1980 (not including Chicago’s healthy silent film industry in the 1910s and ’20s), fewer than 100 features were shot here, and usually only for a scene or two. Indeed, if you have ever worked on a film here, recognized your office in “The Dark Knight” or pondered the havoc “Transformers 3,” which starts shooting next month, could wreak on July traffic, thank “The Blues Brothers.”

“I still hear from people who say they were 9 but they were in the background of this or that scene,” Aykroyd said. “And you know what I tell people? You know the four stars on the Chicago flag? I tell them the stars represent the Chicago fire, the city’s founding, the first Daley and ‘The Blues Brothers.’”

It closed Lake Shore Drive. A car was dropped from 1,000 feet. A mall was demolished. “I remember the 1968 Democratic Convention,” Landis said, recalling the police beatings in Grant Park that still characterized Chicago in 1979. “And here we were getting permission on outrageous requests: Shut downtown streets? Yes. Allow 90-mile-an-hour car chases with 50 vehicles? Yes. ‘How do you propose (doing) this?’ they asked. Weekend mornings. ‘OK.’”

“I remember old-timers thoroughly amazed at what the city was allowing,” said Mark Hogan, who served as an electrician for production of the film, “because Daley wouldn’t have closed a lane of traffic for a film, and now they had entire streets closed.” Hogan is now business manager of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees Local 476, which represents more than 800 crew members on Chicago sets. Before 1980, it had 300 members. Jane Alderman, a well-known local casting director who retired last year, said, “All the things Chicago has to make a movie, like crews of people who know what they’re doing, just didn’t exist at that time.” In fact, the Chicago Film Office was microscopic — a minor part of the mayor’s press office — and hadn’t established itself until interest from “The Blues Brothers” led to both a need for movie productions to run more smoothly and a need to attract more movie business.

Ron Falzone, an assistant film professor at Columbia College Chicago, was an intern in the Chicago-based Illinois Film Office in 1979. A year earlier, he said, the most his office could brag about was an architecture poll that ranked Chicago among the most beautiful cities in the world. “Then ‘Blues Brothers’ arrived and became this dividing line in terms of what was possible. What it said to Hollywood was: ‘Chicago will do whatever you need to get a movie made here. Just please clean up after yourselves.’ That was the message we sent. And the right film received it.” Said Rich Moskal, director of the Chicago Film Office since 1996: The over-the-top scope of “The Blues Brothers” (a $32 million film when $8 million production budgets were average) served as “a lesson in how to develop a (film) office and deal with the industry, while respecting concerns of the community. It was before my time, but, as I understand, it got made the way movies were made here then — a mix of carte blanche and finding permission through back channels.”

Lucy Salenger leaned toward the widescreen TV in her Hyde Park condo and set her tortoiseshell frames on her nose. Jake and Elwood Blues, Belushi and Aykroyd, 30 and 27 when the film was shot, were hugging at the gates of the Joliet Correction Center, which Salenger had pushed Landis to use. Salenger — “the woman who built the film industry in Illinois,” as Oprah Winfrey once described her (Winfrey later hired Salenger to help build Harpo Studios) — was the head of the Illinois Film Office in 1979. “Oh, look at those guys,” she said lovingly, clapping a hand to her cheek. She hadn’t seen the movie in years, she said.

“I would fly to Los Angeles and ask studios to just visit,” she said. “And they’d say, ‘Aren’t dust balls running through Chicago?’ I’m from Southern California. I know the temperament, but Chicago offered new visuals, (film) equipment was getting light, more films were on location. Why not here?”

This meant picking up hesitant directors at O’Hare to scout locations, driving Robert Altman and Sidney Poitier around “in a state car with no shocks.”

Many of the people instrumental to production of “The Blues Brothers” said the biggest hurdle to clear was Daley’s legacy. He had a reputation for not cooperating with prospective filmmakers because he feared Hollywood would only exploit Chicago’s gangland history. Landis heard that Daley once saw an actor playing a Chicago cop take a bribe and resented the image. Others say his resistance to production even lost Chicago the show that became “Streets of San Francisco.” Dominick Frigo, the Chicago police lieutenant in charge of special events in 1979, said Daley meant well, but when Frigo became the primary go-between for filmmakers and the city, he would get into arguments with his superiors about the necessity for film production.

“They would say, ‘Are you crazy? We can’t assign police to a movie,’” Frigo, 83, said. “I would say, ‘We’re losing a lot of money over this.’ I would explain that movies are going to be set in Chicago regardless. But we could control those images, and get the money back into the city.”

Nevertheless, Frigo was not in awe of filmmaking. Assigned to “Blues Brothers,” he insisted police cars not involved with a stunt be driven by off-duty officers. He organized the chases on Lake Shore Drive and remembers tourists accidentally driving into the scene. He said he once grabbed Landis by the shirt because a police officer in the film “used foul language.” “I didn’t approve and said, ‘I don’t know if you ever met anyone from Chicago, but we don’t take this crap.’” He also remembers having to talk city departments into performing the smallest of tasks, such as opening a fire hydrant for a scene.

Still, when production reached Daley Plaza — a sequence shot over Labor Day weekend requiring tanks, helicopters, several hundred actors and costing $3.5 million, according to news reports at the time — Landis found himself without permission from Cook County commissioners to shoot in the old Cook County building. So he said he visited Sidney Korshak, a powerful Chicago lawyer and fixer with mob ties (who died in 1996). “Within 24 hours, I got a call, and we were set,” Landis said. As for Belushi driving through the corner windows of the Richard J. Daley Center, Julie Chandler was location manager and recalled a $17,000 bill to replace the glass. “We couldn’t get anybody to come out because they would not work Labor Day. They would only come out at 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning.”

By the time production wrapped in October, word had made it to Hollywood about “The Blues Brothers” shoot, Salenger said, and three more movies began filming here — Steve McQueen’s “The Hunter,” “My Bodyguard,” with Matt Dillon, and Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” though the latter filmed mostly on the North Shore. While Landis was crashing Chicago police cars along Lower Wacker Drive — Universal, which made the film, bought more than 60 of the vehicles — “The Hunter” was driving a car off the Marina Towers into the Chicago River. Decades later, Moskal said, it’s not unusual for his office to get calls from producers asking if Chicago has anything they can destroy, a question he ties to 1979. “But today I would hate to have the reputation as a place where filmmakers can do anything. Within reason, maybe,” he said. “On the other hand, flip a truck end over end down LaSalle (as in “The Dark Knight”), that sends a particular message.”

As does a 30 percent tax credit for productions in Illinois, enacted in 2008, though competition among states for films has grown so intense that New York now offers a 35 percent credit and Michigan offers a 42 percent credit. In 1979, the only thing Chicago had to offer, Salenger said, “was the ability to try and cut red tape.”

Few claim “The Blues Brothers” changed filmmaking here overnight — retired casting director Alderman, for instance, pointed out that the industry has gone through dramatic swings, generating $24 million in 2003, $155 million in 2007. But few debate that those 14 weeks of production in 1979 were the turning point. Indeed, to Byrne, “The Blues Brothers” should be remembered as no less than the dawn of contemporary Chicago, “part of one big push to remind people how attractive their city was.” “I didn’t see it any different from sidewalk dining or Taste of Chicago,” both of which started during her term, she said.

Landis, however, doesn’t remember it as a bright, new civic dawn. By summer 1980, he was one of the hottest directors in Hollywood. His previous film was “Animal House.” “The Blues Brothers” was then one of the most expensive movies ever made (and became a blockbuster). But as he entered the lobby after the Norridge screening, he said the tension seemed elsewhere.

“These two Cook County commissioners approach Jane,” Landis said. “And they start shouting at her. They were really abusive, and you could see her getting mad. ‘How could you have let them do this?’ they screamed. ‘They ruined the floors! Troops on Daley Plaza!’ It was the most bizarre scene. She’s saying back, ‘They replaced the floors!’ A guy’s shouting, ‘No way we let this happen!’ She’s saying, ‘It happened months ago! And you didn’t even notice!’”

Byrne said she doesn’t remember this exchange. “But it was long ago, a different time.”

Read about Dan Aykroyd’s “Blues Brothers” memories and check out photos of the filming locations as they look today versus 30 years ago.

Daley Exploits Tragedy for Political Agenda

Exploiting tragedy for political grandstanding is a hallmark of the administration of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley.

On Wednesday a three-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, and a veteran of the War on Terror, was murdered by armed robbers on the streets. Following that tragedy Daley called a press conference to rail against firearms and the touting the citywide ban on citizens owning firearms within the city limits. He used his platform to urge the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the gun ban in the city, which is being challenged in the courts.

The Supreme Court heard arguments in March in McDonald v. Chicago, which challenges handgun bans in the city of Chicago and in Oak Park. The suit asks the high court to extend to state and local jurisdictions the sweep of its 2008 decision in the District of Columbia v. Heller case, which struck down a gun ban in the federal enclave of Washington, D.C.

During his press conference a reporter noted that in spite of the city’s strict firearm ban the rate of firearm-related murders in the city jumps annually. The reporter asked the mayor the obvious question of whether or not the ban is effective.

Daley said the ban was effective and then for emphasis the mayor picked up a rifle from a table of confiscated weapons and said “If I put this up your butt, you’ll find out how effective it is. Let me put a round up your, you know.”

Daley went on to say it would be behoove those who want guns removed from the hands of the people if the justices of the United States were threatened with gun violence.

“Maybe they’ll see the light of day,” Daley said. “Maybe one of them will have an incident, and they’ll change their mind overnight, going to and from work.”

It’s an ironic statement calling for gun violence to end gun violence.

It is apparent Daley does not believe citizens can be responsible gun owners. Last month during a gun turn-in program Daley said there are too many guns in society.

“When someone has access to a gun, they use it,” he said.

What the mayor fails to acknowledge is most of the firearms used in crimes are not obtained legally.

Tribune columnist John Kass summed it up perfectly “In Chicago, the only people who are confident in their 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms are the criminals, the cops and the politicians.”