On the second floor of the River North nightclub Excalibur, a bank of 16 video monitors is lit in a checkerboard pattern, the dark screens carrying the title “Chicago Community Cinema,” the others flickering in unison with images from independent films. Below the monitors young people mill about, drinks in hand, schmoozing or just gazing around forlornly as the dance music pounds. Rows of white tables accommodate the evening’s sponsors, most of them film production or equipment rental companies, although a local screenwriting school and an off-Loop theater company are also represented. On one table a monitor demonstrates Flash animation; another table is decorated with head shots left by aspiring actors. In a corner near the entrance clusters the small menagerie of a professional animal handler–a caged binturong, or bear-cat, a snake coiled around a woman’s neck, and a small alligator, its jaws sealed shut with black electrical tape. A gray green iguana perches atop a branch, coldly eyeing the throng. What does it care? It’s already got an agent.
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The next meeting of Chicago Community Cinema takes place Tuesday, April 3, at Excalibur, 632 N. Dearborn. Doors open at 7 PM, and the screening is scheduled for 8. Ramone’s trailer will be screened again, along with Suburban Living, a short by Columbia College student Ian Hutchinson; Coquie Hughes, another local artist, will present her trailer for Gotta Git My Hair Did, a 90-minute comedy about a divorced woman running a hair salon in the basement of her mother’s two-flat. Admission is $7; for more information, call 312-863-3451.
