Being a filmmaker means knowing, and ignoring, your odds of success wherever you are on whatever you’re doing. Chicago filmmaker McKenzie Chinn knows this. She knows about the knowing, and the ignoring. And the doing-it-anyway, regardless of the odds.
Here’s an example, by way of Chinn’s exceptional 15-minute short film, “A Real One,” which she wrote and directed and is now streaming on YouTube. It’s about a lifeline of a friendship connecting South Side teenagers Lauren and Keisha, both graduating seniors, one of whom is caught in a surreptitious web spun by a predatory high school English teacher.
Chinn wrote an early version of “A Real One” in 2019 and pursued funding. Then came the pandemic. Chinn, best known as an actor, saw pre-COVID TV and film auditions dissolve into viral limbo. Every actor did.
But Chinn was a writer, too. The DePaul University graduate applied to the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, which annually casts a wide net for promising feature-length scripts. Chinn didn’t have a full-length version of “A Real One.” But she liked the challenge. The first step, she told me over a meal recently in the West Loop, sounded not too daunting: Submit the first five pages.
She wrote five pages and got invited to step up to step two, submitting a draft of the full-length screenplay. Chinn had two weeks. She wrote “like crazy,” she says, though as a firm believer in outlines, she had the outline and knew where her story about Lauren and Keisha was headed.
They liked it and Chinn joined the 2021 pandemic online edition of the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Sundance invited her to apply for the Directors Lab immediately thereafter. Maybe “A Real One” was, in fact, a real one — a feature film in her near future.
Chinn already had a produced screenplay to her credit, the easygoing rom-com “Olympia” (2018) that starred Chinn in the title role of a 30-ish Chicagoan at creative and romantic crossroads. That one she didn’t direct. But not long after, Chinn directed the music video “Mykele Deville: Type Love” featuring the poet and hip hop artist Deville (her fiance), and an elegant “poetry video” based on Chinn’s poem “First You Need a Body.”
She and her collaborators brought a lot of supple panache to both these videos. But Chinn tells me that when shopping the feature-length script for “A Real One,” the project’s lead producer — Lisa Masseur of Tessa Films — heard the same refrain phrased in different ways, over and over: Has McKenzie Chinn directed a narrative short yet?
“Everybody wanted some proof that I could tell a story from start to finish,” she says.
So she got to work. Chinn submitted her full-length “Real One” script to the Chicago International Film Festival’s Industry Exchange lab for the 2021-22 program. Meantime, with a boost from a $25,000 NBC/Universal grant via the Bentonville Film Festival in Arkansas, Chinn filmed the 15-minute version of “A Real One” in 2022. Chicago International Film Festival shorts programmer Christy LeMaster loved it and booked it for the 2023 festival. Chinn took home the prize for best live-action short that year.
When a short film wins the top prize at one of two dozen or so major film festivals, that film becomes eligible for Academy Award consideration. That’s step one. Every one of the approximate 11,000 members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can participate in the preliminary selection process through Dec. 13. Out of roughly 200 qualifying short films, 15 make the short-list, to be announced Dec. 17.
The final five nominees, along with all the other Oscar hopefuls in all categories, become public in mid-January.
Tough odds, clearly. But Chinn is very happy with the reception for “A Real One” in various festival screenings. Audible gasps, she says, greet the key narrative moments, among them the discreetly but perfectly staged reveal of the teacher much too close to his student, Lauren, played with heartrending grace by Eris Baker. The relationship between Lauren and her friend Keisa (Ireon Roach, equally strong) feels sharp, authentic and easy-breathing, even in the confines of the short’s compressed narrative.
This short, the so-called “proof of concept” paving the way for a hoped-for feature, achieves what Chinn set out to achieve, “which is something that says: ‘This is who I am. This is what I can do. Let’s go from here.’”
Says programmer LeMaster, who chose “A Real One” for the 2023 Chicago International Film Festival shorts competition: “She’s a brilliant all-around creative, a producer, a writer, a director, an actor. She has ideas upon ideas upon ideas. And ‘A Real One’ is amazing. It’s sophisticated and accessible, with beautiful formal aspects. So crisp. The two young women at the center of (the story) are so authentic, so enjoyable.” LeMaster adds that “it’s sort of a miracle that (Chinn) has made a movie with a message that truly matters to young people, and in a way that doesn’t become too traumatic for young people to watch.”
Born in Washington, D.C., Chinn spent most of her early years with her parents and her sister in Prince George’s County in southern Maryland. In high school, acting vied with writing for her attention, with acting winning out, though lately it appears to be more of a tie.
She stayed in Baltimore for a while, after undergraduate studies at University of Maryland in Baltimore County. “I loved Baltimore,” she says. “Easy. Fun. Rough around the edges, in a way I really like. Less pressure than D.C., too. As a kid growing up in D.C. I remember feeling a level of tension I didn’t really know how to identify. Once I moved to Baltimore I realized it was because D.C. is all about power. And if you don’t have it, you’re kind of a nobody. And I had a fear of being nobody.”
In 2008, she moved to Chicago for the Theatre School at DePaul University. “Chicago felt like this beautiful mixture of what I already knew: the excitement and shine of D.C., plus the relaxed feeling of Baltimore. So this is my Goldilocks city,” Chinn says with a laugh. Now 40, Chinn and Deville have an eight-month-old son.
Like so many stage-trained Chicago actors, Chinn has had just enough whatever-it-is — luck, plus long odds mixed with mixed feelings about economic prospects of an actor’s life —to come to a place of some frustration. She has done effective, distinctive work in all varieties of Chicago screen employment, from the avant-garde (Daniel Nearing’s velvety, nonlinear “Hogtown”) to the polar opposite (“Chicago Med,” where she made the most of her scenes as a dog bite victim). It was tough, she says, making the best of auditions for “another best friend, another supporting role. So. I figured it was time to make my own opportunities.”
She relishes the process of writing, she says, knowing there are “a lot of writers who hate writing but love having written something. I’m not like that. For me the trick is to make the commitment to not judge yourself while you’re writing. Don’t go back (midway) and read what you’ve written. The ‘Olympia’ screenplay was the first thing I’d written more or less without stopping, or re-reading partway. When I did read it, I realized it was very far from perfect. But it was not trash. And I was able to see the whole thing, the shape of it, and then start to hone it.”
Near the end of our talk, Chinn tells me that her ambitions, for too long, led to immediate strategizing about next steps.
“For a long time,” she says, “I wasn’t really present in my own life. It was Sundance Directors Lab advisor Karyn Kusama who reminded me not to think too much about yesterday’s problems, or worry about tomorrow’s. It’s enough to be present for what needs you today. That really hit me. My need to excel, or at least achieve, in both my career and my life, meant that I was always looking toward the next thing. I didn’t take time to be where I was.”
It helps in countless ways, she says. Work, life and the realities of “an unstable and fickle industry,” Chinn says, breathe a little easier when “you’re not living a life feeling like you haven’t accomplished the next thing yet,” whether it’s a poem, an acting gig or a directorial feature debut based on a beautiful short film.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
