ABOUT THE FILM
Son of working class Jewish radicals, and
raised on Chicago's tough West Side in the 30s, Clancy
Sigal has done everything a profoundly rebellious
spirit could do in a lifetime: street-smart city urchin, Chicago precinct worker, union organizer, auto worker, UCLA grad, Hollywood agent, McCarthyism
target, European emigre, Fleet Street journalist, novelist, sturdy leftist who loathed party lines, skeptical devotee of antipsychiatrist R. D. Laing, consort of Doris Lessing, National Book
Award nominee for Going Away ("Kerouac with politics"), screenwriter of Frida, In Love and War and other films, and professor emeritus of journalism at USC. An extraordinarily articulate gadfly who shook up things in every milieu - from British coal mines to Hollywood sets - he encountered, Sigal was going strong up to the day of his departure in 2017. Nothing Sigal scribbled was predictable, except
for the compassion, dark humor and demand for social justice always at the core. His articles regularly appeared in The Guardian, Counterpunch, Huffington Post, London Review of Books and other outlets. A gadfly, incidentally, is, according to the otherwise erratic Wikipedia, "a person who interferes with the status quo of a society or a community by posing novel, potentially upsetting questions, usually directed at authorities." It could not be a more fitting designation for Sigal who otherwise escaped categorization.
Sigal spent several decades in
more or less agreeable exile in England. If America and Britain are two countries divided by a common
language Sigal is an acknowledged master of both idioms. Hinged on extensive interviews with
Sigal and associates, this feature documentary is an intriguing alternative history of
the late 20th and early 21st centuries on both sides of 'the pond,' peppered with provocative insights by the savviest and most frank of trekkers. Sigal is author of Weekend in Dinlock,
Going Away, Zone of the Interior, The Secret Defector, A Woman of Uncertain Character, Hemingway Lives, and, most recent, The London Lover. He is winner of a PEN Lifetime Achievement award.
The documentary premieres at the Santa Fe Film Festival in February 2023.
COLD CHICAGO PRODUCTIONS Ltd.
Cold Chicago Productions, run by Warren Leming and Kurt Jacobsen, in association with fiscal agent Near North West Arts Council of
Chicago, produces shoestring budget guerrilla documentaries, videos, theater, and occasionally unholy blends of all the above. Our documentary projects include the multiple award-winning American Road (2013), MIlagro Man: The Irrepressible Multicultural Life and Literary Times of John Nichols (2012), Velvet Prisons:
Russell Jacoby on American Academia (with co-producer Hugh Iglarsh, 2012) and Ed Asner: On Stage and Off (2019). Other projects in the works include a documentary Doing Things That Haven't Got a Name Yet covering 1960s experiences and their legacy as related by cultural and activist figures from around the Western world, a feature length look at the insidious sway of
eugenic ideas in American life, and a short feature based on an Ambrose Bierce story.
KURT JACOBSEN, codirector and producer, has published eleven books and written about cinema for periodicals ranging from the Chicago Reader to New Politics to the London Guardian. He has worked on documentaries in the US and Europe, including American Road, Velvet Prisons and the forthcoming Charlotte Bach Project from Malachite Productions in the UK.