Annoyance Calls a Summit
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In what sounds like a concept for one of their own send-up sketches, Annoyance ventured out in search of capital just as the dot-com bust blew it away. When the high-tech backers that were their initial targets vanished, they moved on to entertainment investors and ran up against another obstacle: “No one in the entertainment community seemed to think this kind of business could succeed in Chicago,” Estlin says. They chewed their way through prospect lists and collected stacks of form-letter rebuffs, including one from Time Warner saying it “doesn’t invest in this kind of business.” By the end of June they decided they’d have to be more creative. That’s when they came up with the banana plan.
“After spending July doing that,” she continues, “we said we need to get the entertainment community together and address this.” According to Napier, Chicago has a trio of problems. First, “the financial community in Chicago has no education or inspiration to invest in entertainment production in this city.” Second, “Chicago has a hard time believing it can do serious production”–though, he adds, such “disparate entities” as Oprah and Joan Cusack are. And third, Los Angeles and New York think of Chicago not as a production center but only as a source for talent, which they “cherry-pick” at will. In 12 years of directing at Second City, Napier says, he observed the talent drain hundreds of times. The most aggravating instance came when four of the seven actors in a television pilot he shot two years ago were picked up for network or cable shows, leaving him with a product difficult to market.
Peggy Chambers called to dispute our story two weeks ago about the origins of the Gold Coast Art Fair: she says it was brewed up in her coffee shop at 103 E. Oak. A couple of regulars were sitting around one winter night in the mid-1950s, Chambers says. “Frank Oehlschlaeger, who owned the art gallery next door, was there, and Lou Mariano, who wrote a column for the North Loop News. We were talking about summer, and we said we ought to have an art fair right here on Oak Street. We went to a carnival store and rented booths for each artist. It went over great, and we did it for two or three years before it was taken over by Arnie Matanky. Soon after that I had to close the shop–the Gate of Horn wanted the space for a saloon. But my husband got the little triangular park where State Street and Rush Street meet named for Lou, and it’s still called Lou Mariano Park.”
