Daniel Nearing knew what he was getting into when he set out to make a movie based on Sherwood Anderson’s classic 1919 story cycle Winesburg, Ohio. He’d loved the book since he read it as an undergrad at the University of Toronto in the early 80s, and he’d come close to making a straight adaptation in Canada in the 90s.
But this week, 90 years after publication of Anderson’s book, an audacious adaptation by Nearing and producer-cinematographer Sanghoon Lee makes its theatrical premiere.
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When Chicago Heights played in August at the Film Center’s Black Harvest film festival, Roger Ebert called it “brilliant” and wrote: “Nearing finds an approach that in 90 minutes accomplishes the uncanny feat of distilling the book’s essence.” The movie begins a weeklong run at the Film Center on Friday.
Nearing set the project aside and beginning in 1992 directed a string of documentaries and features for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, Discovery, Bravo, and the Sports Network on topics ranging from juvenile murder and paternal incest to Russian hockey players and Carl Jung.
“He closed the door to my office, and questioned me with serious concern and at length,” Nearing recalls. “He said ‘What’s going on here? You may not know what you’re taking on, trying to make a black film.’ He meant ‘you’re naive. You don’t understand the history of the culture.’” But reading the script, Sage was sufficiently convinced, and in fact agreed to play the role of the dying writer in the film.
“There were times in the script when we were forced to break away from Anderson’s stilted dialogue and exchange it for a more colloquial language,” she says. For instance, “my character, Elizabeth, had garnered a reputation in Chicago Heights for being promiscuous, and so at one point, she rather forwardly explains, ‘I’m not a ho.’”
They filmed in Chicago Heights, on the GSU campus, in Lockport, Evanston, and Chicago in the summer of 2008. They also cut in footage from Nearing’s unfinished Anderson documentary.
