Sun-Times columnist Bill Zwecker was the first to report last week that Brenda Sexton is leaving her high-profile job as head of the Illinois Film Office at the end of the month and that her successor is Betsy Steinberg, a vice president at Towers Productions who “worked on the governor’s re-election TV commercials.” The purported political connection didn’t exactly come as a shock, but at least Steinberg has chops in the film industry–when Sexton got the job four years ago there was a fuss over what looked like Illinois politics as usual. A real estate broker, she’d been married to entrepreneur Blair Hull, a major Blagojevich backer at the time. But the next day Zwecker tucked a correction into the middle of his column: “While Steinberg’s impressive 18-year filmmaking career does include producing, writing and directing a ton of award-winning documentaries for everyone from A&E to the History Channel to PBS and MSNBC, she did not (as I incorrectly reported) have anything to do with Gov. Blagojevich’s TV commercials for his re-election campaign.”
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OK, so how was Steinberg selected? Andrew Ross, a spokesperson for the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (which includes the film office), told me Zwecker’s original statement was a “complete mistake.” According to Ross, Steinberg was chosen for the plum $90,000-a-year gig strictly because “her background and experience match the demands of the film office” and she was “in a top position in one of the top production companies in Chicago.” The governor’s office “reached out” to her, he says; no one else was interviewed. When I asked Steinberg how she came to the governor’s attention during a phone interview that was chaperoned by Ross, he jumped in to answer: “We’re always on the lookout for the right people for the right positions.” (He didn’t say how it serves the public interest to have one state employee monitor the statements of another. But I digress.)
For all the initial griping about Sexton’s appointment, she’s credited with getting the legislature to approve a financial incentive intended to put Illinois back on the playing field in the highly competitive film-production industry. The so-called tax credit, passed in 2003 and beefed up when it was renewed last summer, has succeeded in rejuvenating television ad production here, underwriting 20 percent of the costs of commercials for companies like Sears. But so far it’s failed to attract many feature films, which are courted with direct rebates in some other states and Canada. No one from Hollywood has rushed in to film during a Chicago winter except for actor Vince Vaughn, who’s here now shooting Fred Claus. And so far there are only two other films slated for 2007.
The “revitalized identity” consists primarily of a redesign of the library’s elegant old logo, a filigreed round seal that looks like it might have come from the hand of Louis Sullivan. The new logo, currently being phased in, looks like it could button your jeans or get you a ride on the subway. Landor values labor on the project at $90,000.
