Chicago film's score earns it a ticket to festival
Windy City comedians and actors screen first film, "Tapioca," at the Park City Film Music Festival
ANNA BLOOM, Of the Record staff
Article Launched: 01/18/2008 04:40:40 PM MST

Chicago actor Mike Houlihan, left, stars with Ben Vereen, right, in Tapioca which makes its...
On the streets of Park City, Clay O'Brien says people don't recognize the telltale signs of his Chicago dialect, where the vowels like the letter "A" fall flat so that "cot" sounds like "cat." In Utah, people notice a difference in the sound, but they can't quite place him. "They think I'm from Boston," he says, laughing.
O'Brien and fellow cast members of the independent film "Tapioca" gather today for their one-night Saturday screening at the Park City Film Music Festival. Veterans of the town's small-theatre comedy clubs and 40-seat theaters, their provenance is unmistakable in their film. Filmed in Chicago bars, car dealerships and comedy clubs, in the film, anyone who has an accent that differs from O'Brien's generally ends up sounding pretentious.

"Tapioca" is the brainchild of Mike Houlihan, a Chicago thespian with 30 years of stage experience whose one-man, two-hour autobiographical monologue, "Goin' East on Ashland," (a funny title to the citizens of the city who know that the only legal move is to drive west) enjoyed a six-year run. "Tapioca" is his first film, shot, he says, with a below of $200,000.

In its original iteration, "Tapioca" was also a play, and one that united Houlihan with his twin sons in a series of comical sketches about being homeless in the city in 2004. "Tapioca" means "tapped-out," "tap-city," "broke," according to Houlihan and it comes from saying Houlihan remembers his father using whenever someone asked him for money.

On the stage, "Tapioca" was brash, and Houlihan wanted something more sophisticated and dimensional for his film. To develop the movie's characters, Houlihan decided to write a seven-week series of articles about the homeless for the nonprofit newspaper, Streetwise, a Chicago publication that is sold by and benefits the homeless. There, touring the shelters beneath viaducts and streets, he met countless characters, some wearing more than six hats on their heads, layered on top of one another and others preaching fire and brimstone on corners with a microphone quirks that eventually made it into the script.

"I was going to adapt the stage show into a script for the screenplay and so I wanted to get some insight into that world," he says. "The stage show was very superficial. I think in the film we get into the guts of what being homeless is about and 'man's inhumanity to man,' but in a light way, I hope."

The result is a more humane sense of humor: The harsh, trash-talking, blowhard protagonist, Pipes McGonnigle, played by Houlihan, loses his job as the advertising personality for a car dealership when a Streetwise vendor puts a curse on him. He becomes one of the homeless people he liked to mock, descending into the dark underbelly of Chicago. A St. Peter character tells him that if he helps others, he will also be helping himself, and, until he does this, McGonnigle will wrestle with self-loathing and anger.

"Being offensive is easy, but it's also very easy to get sappy about it and we didn't want that either," says Houlihan. "In my head, I used to think, go head walk away when they ask you for money, but someday you'll end up just like them' and we wanted to sell that message in a way that someone wouldn't feel like we were preaching to them The message comes through, I think, but it's not shoved down your throat or anything."

In addition to nearly his entire family his sons Paddy and Bill, and his wife, Mary -- "Tapioca" stars Ben Vereen, an Emmy- and Tony- award winning actor, Tim Kazurinski, former Saturday Night Live and Second City actor, Paul Kelly and Mark Borchardt, who star in the 1999 film, "American Movie."

But what brings "Tapioca" to the Park City Film Music Festival, which emphasizes the relationship between music and movies, its original score and soundtrack.

"Ryan Cohan just made a brilliant score and it elevates the film," Houlihan says. We shot the film and we were all finished and we interviewed three or four guys and we just gave it to him, he ran with it, and did it a wonderful job."

Cohan, a pianist, has composed music for commercials for the Sears, Nissan, Toyota, Budweiser and talkshow host Oprah Winfrey. His score is accented by gospel singer Lena McClin and her choir, and a closing number by Otis Clay, who was just recently nominated by his Hurricane Katrina adaptation of his song, "Walk a Mile in My Shoes."

"Tapioca" screens today, Jan. 19 at 6 p.m. on the second level of the Main Street Mall, at 333 Main. Tickets are $10 and can be purchased at the door or by logging onto www.parkcityfilmmusicfestival.com.

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