Cold Chicago Productions Ltd., run by Warren Leming, Kurt Jacobsen and Hugh Iglarsh, 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, apart from The Milagro Man, include the award-winning American Road (2014) and Velvet Prisons: Russell Jacoby on American Academia (with co-producer Hugh Iglarsh, 2013). Other projects in the works include a feature length look at the sway of eugenic ideas in American life, a short feature, and documentary portraits of renowned writer Clancy Sigal and of legendary actor/activist Ed Asner.
Kurt Jacobsen, director and co-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.
Warren Leming, co-producer and voice,
is a former member of the Second City Touring Company, musical director
and actor with Paul Sills' Story Theater Company, a founder of
the band Wilderness Road (Columbia and Warner Brothers), a theater
director, author of several books, and creator, with Denis Mueller, of many documentaries. He is co-director with Kurt Jacobsen of American Road and Velvet Prisons.
The Milagro Man delves
into the literary work and social activism of John Nichols. The film
spans his youth as the rebellious WASP descendant of a signer of the
Declaration of Independence through his early success with The Sterile
Cuckoo as both novel and screenplay to his relocation from Manhattan to
Taos, New Mexico in the late sixties to his subsequent outpourings of
novels, screenplays and non-fiction tomes. This Hamilton College
graduate and former hockey jock is firmly established in the national
consciousness as a regional (southwestern) writer with universal reach.
Moreover, he succeeds at the delicate trick of blending art with a social
and ecological vision. Nichols, born into a family of ardent naturalists, comes
across in this screen study as an engaging, sharp, humorous and
inspiring literary figure who cares about art for humanity as well as for its own sake.
His novels, aside from the famous trilogy, include The Wizard of
Loneliness (also a movie), A Ghost in the Music, American Blood, An
Elegy for September, Conjugal Bliss, The Voice of the Butterfly, The Empanada Brotherhood and, in 2012, On Top of Spoon Mountain. Nichols' notable nonfiction
works include If Mountains Die, Keep it Simple, Dancing on The Stones, and
An American Child Supreme: The Education of a Liberation Ecologist. He worked on screenplays for The Sterile
Cuckoo and The Milagro Beanfield War as well as having a decisive (if
uncredited) hand in the Oscar-winning script for Missing. He is former
editor of the New Mexico Review and has taught at the University of New
Mexico.
