"I used to spend summers with Uncle Nick as a kid," Pissios, a former real estate developer, tells me. He hung around the Cinespace Toronto soundstages. "That's how this whole thing happened. A few years ago, I was building condominiums by the United Center." Then came the mortgage and housing crises and the bad economic weather. Pissios went to Toronto for a wedding and saw his Uncle Nick. "And he said, 'How's things going?' I told him, 'Not so good. It's slow now.' And he said, 'We've always talked about opening up a studio in Chicago. Let's test the waters. Start lookin' around.'"
Pissios scouted, concentrating on 100,000- to 200,000-square-foot buildings for sale. Then he saw the vacant Ryerson plant layout, all 1.5 million square feet of it, near 15th Place and Rockwell Street in the North Lawndale neighborhood. Uncle Nick liked the potential.
With help from the state, the city, the cooperation of the Teamsters and tens of millions from Mirkopoulos, Cinespace is getting known and garnering business. The Starz series "Boss" shot two seasons here and awaits word on a third. NBC's "Chicago Fire" is currently shooting. The scripted MTV series "Underemployed" wrapped last month.
Feature films, Pissios says, are terrific. But when Cinespace books a TV series, that's a lot of sets to build and actors to feed and jobs to help shore up the local show business economy.
"TV work has a bigger impact economically than most movies," says Illinois Film Office managing director Betsy Steinberg. "We all want very much to continue landing movies here. TV, however, even if it's less sexy in some ways, really creates the jobs."
She says Pissios has done well: "He has tremendous enthusiasm, a true passion for the business."
With Cinespace's soundstage capacity, a big-budget film project can exploit Chicago's wealth of urban exteriors and, instead of relocating to soundstages in Toronto or LA or London for the rest, settle in right here for a few more weeks or months. "When 'The Dark Knight' (2008) or 'Transformers 3' (2011) come to town, the publicity's great. They shoot the locations, and then they leave," Pissios says.
He hopes to change that. Though Pissios says he can't yet comment, "Jupiter Ascending," the next project from Lana and Andy Wachowski ("The Matrix," "Speed Racer"), looks good for a lengthy Chicago shoot in 2013. Most of that will be exteriors. Some soundstage work will be done in London; the rest, at Cinespace.
"Nick always told me, 'You have to be a farmer,'" Pissios says. "In Toronto, 50 percent of the business comes from Ontario-based projects. For now, here in Chicago, all our work is coming from Los Angeles. But we work with all the local film schools, give away space to college kids, do tons of outreach. In a few years' time, hopefully these kids get into the business, sell their ideas and then shoot in Illinois. That's how we'll measure our success: If we walk onto one of our soundstages, and a Chicago production is under way. These kids are the seeds, and we're the farmers."
