Posted by chicagomedia.org on October 10, 2008 at 19:11:47:
Wisconsin plays role in Royko film
Back in the mid-1950s, a young couple from Chicago would occasionally drive from Illinois to southeastern Wisconsin to spend weekends at a relative's cabin by Bohner Lake, near Burlington.
As the young man later remembered, often they wouldn't arrive until after midnight on Saturday morning.
"But if the mosquitoes weren't out," he recalled, "they'd go to the empty beach for a moonlight swim, then sit with their backs against a tree and drink wine and talk about their future."
Sometimes he would strum a guitar and she would sing folk songs.
Years later, when the man became successful, they bought their own cabin on the lake. They especially loved the sunsets and hoped to spend decades enjoying the life they had made for themselves, but tragedy intervened.
At the time of the tragedy, the cabin and the story behind it became the subject of one of the best columns by one of the 20th century's most celebrated newspapermen.
Mike Royko was the young man strumming the guitar.
Over several days in the past week, a film crew from Royko's hometown of Chicago was in southeastern Wisconsin, shooting scenes for what they hope will be a half-hour dramatic film based on three of the almost 8,000 columns Royko wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning career at three Chicago newspapers.
The Wisconsin cabin column is the first one to be filmed.
The man behind the film project, Norman Skul, is the 48-year-old proprietor of an Internet technology business in Chicago.
Skul grew up in Chicago and while aware of Royko as a kid, didn't really get passionate about the columnist until picking up a book of Royko's collected columns a few years ago.
Skul was struck, as were millions of readers around the world -- Royko was syndicated in 600 papers -- by Royko's humor, honesty and street smarts.
Skul thought translating some of Royko's best work to film might be a way to introduce the columnist, who died in 1997, to a new generation.
He contacted Royko's widow, Judy, about the project, and her response was positive. Skul also enlisted talented and enthusiastic students from Chicago's Columbia College Film and Video Department.
No one is exactly sure where the finished product will end up. The Internet and film festivals are options. I would think Chicago public television might be interested as well.
There is precedent for turning daily newspaper columns into a short film. In late September 2001, New York's Jimmy Breslin -- the only urban columnist worthy of comparison to Royko -- wrote a column that was headlined, "A Smile Gone, But Where?"
In the column, Breslin recounted how every day for many months, on a pre-dawn stroll in Manhattan related to exercise, he would pass the same young woman at almost the same place on the street.
She avoided eye contact at first.
"Look at this," Breslin thought to himself. "She is afraid of a busted old valise."
Eventually it reached a point where they would nod and smile when they passed. But then came Sept. 11, and suddenly, like so many who worked or lived on those streets near the World Trade Center, the young woman wasn't there anymore. The columnist feared the worst.
The following March, months after that first column, Breslin finally saw her on the street near Ground Zero. "I had two friends who were missing," she explained. "I just didn't want to come."
Breslin said, "I'm glad you're alive."
The columns were made into a short film titled, "A Smile Gone, But Where?"
Norman Skul's problem with Royko is picking just three columns.
I think he might want to use Royko's classic on bureaucracy, in which a Chicago woman had received a summons to appear in court for child neglect.
The woman, who didn't have a child, contacted Royko, who told her it would not be wise to show up in court without a child. That would only arouse suspicion. Royko suggested she come to court with a monkey in baby clothes, so the judge might feel sorry for her.
"And who knows?" Royko wrote. "Someday you might be proud. The kid could grow up to be an alderman."
Filming the Wisconsin cabin column in and around Burlington this week, Skul said, it became clear how many people there still love and remember Royko. Several said they still had the cabin column on the refrigerator or in a scrapbook.
The Burlington chief of police told Skul: "Royko brought a softball team up here and spanked us."
Royko's first wife, Carol, who discovered the cabin with him, died suddenly after a stroke in 1979. His column, titled "A November Farewell," tells the tale from the point of view of an unnamed man -- clearly Mike -- preparing the cabin for sale after her death.
"Maybe a couple who love to quietly watch sunsets together will like it," Royko wrote. "He hopes so."
(Doug Moe, Wisconsin State Journal)