“It was a great time,” says filmmaker Jim Sikora, recalling the 90s punk scene he hopes to re-create in his new feature, I’ll Die Tomorrow. “Chicago was the cheapest date. There was such immediacy to the music. Everything on Touch and Go at that time was just brilliant. . . . I’ll Die Tomorrow is a distillation of all these things. It’s why I’ve wanted to do it for so long.”
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He’s been trying to get it rolling for a decade already. Originally titled “Torment Street,” the movie will star Shannon as the terminally ill Wayne Sloan, once a front man for a 90s punk band and now the world-weary kept man of a Chicago socialite. Getting into his 1972 Delta 88 convertible, Wayne is carjacked by a young woman who’s fleeing her drug-dealer boyfriend, and she and Wayne wind up on a picaresque nocturnal journey through Chicago and northwest Indiana.
In Nuremberg he and friends from his unit hung out at cafes frequented by punks and skinheads. “These places were officially off-limits,” Sikora says. “They were considered subversive and anti-American. A lot of GIs would go there and get into fights.” Drool, his first fully realized film, showed one of these punks shooting speed in Zeppelin Field, once a rally site for the Nazi party, and according to Sikora, the short’s debut screening at a local music hall ignited some tempers. “I wasn’t trying to make a political statement,” he says. “But I realized the power of movies to galvanize people and create dialogue, even if you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
According to Sikora, he’s spent the last decade “just trying to stay afloat” and “doing everything from videography to house painting to messenger work.” Yet he hasn’t been idle as a filmmaker. In 2006 he adapted for the screen A Red Orchid’s production of Brett Neveu’s play The Earl; he’s still looking for a distributor for the film, which premiered at the Gene Siskel Film Center in 2007. Film editor Tim Barron is currently cutting The Critics, an adaptation of a 1998 play by Adam Langer that Sikora shot ten years ago with the original Chicago Dramatists cast. (Langer profiled Sikora for the Reader in 1996.) Last winter Sikora worked with Nile Southern, son of screenwriter Terry Southern (Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, Easy Rider), to edit the video projections for Prop Thtr’s adaptation of the John Ford classic The Informer, and he recently traveled to Texas to interview filmmaker Richard Linklater for Dad Strangelove, Nile’s forthcoming documentary about his father.
Sat 6/5, 10:30 PM, Viaduct Theater, 3111 N. Western, 773-296-6024, viaducttheatre.com, $20.
