Ben Hollis Invites You to the DVD Release Party of Ingenious, Magical “Wild Chicago”

From 1989 to 1992, Ben Hollis brought Chicago the best stories on television.  The tales were more intriguing than teachers with meth labs, more seductive than cool impenetrable ad men, and funnier than any modern family.   Ben Hollis’s gem was called Wild Chicago and never before and never since has television been so wild and so Chicago.  

With the backing of a sometimes nervous WTTW (Chicago’s PBS affiliate), Hollis and co-creator John Davies scoured the streets of Chicagoland.   Each week’s show highlighted their glorious finds: everyday citizens who made their passions a reality.  Was the passion eccentric? Offbeat?   Exotic? Unheard of?  Welcome to Wild Chicago. 

But make no mistake.  Hollis was not interested in fun at his subjects’ expense.  His mission was to celebrate that spark of individuality that sets off one human being from another.   Each week, Hollis uncovered joy, genius, danger and plenty of humor.      

There was drag racing on Elston Avenue,  “Tiger Moves Man” (you never saw martial arts quite like it), the “Skull Man” (and his appropriately carved molar) and a rock star clothing shop.  The “Rat Lady” told us why she prefers rats to people.  Tyner White, a resident of the now defunct Maxworks hippie commune, shared life philosophies worthy of Plato as he shivered in the cold, his hands restlessly twisting scraps of wire.   

Margie of Margie’s Candies recounted what happened when the Beatles dropped in.   Viewers were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at Moo and Oink, purveyor of Chicago’s most famous late night TV jingle.  And in a recurring segment, which WTTW’s legal department eventually made him stop doing, Hollis spent time on the beat with Police Sergeant Joe Kosala, the two even stopping at one point to explore an “adult” theater.  This is just a small sampling.  Each week, fans sat rapt as one discovery after another unfolded. 

Although other hosts succeeded Hollis after he took a hiatus in 1992, no one matched his ability to connect and to radiate such genuine interest, warmth and love for the adventure of it all.  Eight Emmy awards testified to his success as did his legion of fans, including Gene Siskel,  Studs Terkel who personally presented Hollis with the Studs Terkel Community Media Award, Chicago media expert Robert Feder who called Hollis “a local legend,” and Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Kogan who wrote of Wild Chicago, “It became an immediate hit, one of the most interesting and successful locally produced shows in Chicago television history.”    

And now, this month, Hollis has a long-awaited announcement.  He has partnered with WTTW to create The Golden Age of Wild Chicago, Volume 1, a DVD compilation of the best of seasons one and two.   This treasure trove may be the best gift of the year: not only from Hollis to fans, but also to anyone on your list who enjoys being reminded of the life-giving power of being yourself and of saying, “nyaaahh!” to conformity (i.e. this is a great gift for everybody).

Part of this gift is too big to wrap:  an invitation from Hollis to you to attend the DVD release party and screening at Chicago’s palatial Patio Theater on Sunday, November 17 at 3:00 p.m. for the wildly low cost of $5 per ticket (see details below).    After the screening, Hollis and Davies will conduct a Q and A session and DVD signing.   The DVD will be available for sale and it’s a must-buy.    You’ll want to see it on the big screen, but you’ll also want to bring it home for repeat viewings and to listen to the fascinating commentary by Hollis, Davies, Kogan and Roger Adler who composed Wild Chicago’s distinctive music.    

There are other priceless bonus features:  the original 1987 pitch tape and an unprecedented and hilariously incongruous foray into Mayor Daley’s gift collection and bathroom.  And … wait!  Is that Stephen Colbert?!  Yes, it is, in a segment called “Dumb Question” which catches a then unknown Colbert sunbathing in Lincoln Park.

A test run in October at the Music Box Theatre had the audience laughing and cheering.  They were mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings who wouldn’t remember the show when it aired, but became instant converts to the Wild life.  As Kogan says, Wild Chicago is “a work of genius that echoes through the years” and today “comes off as incredibly fresh.”      

Nearly twenty-five years after creating Wild Chicago, Hollis is still wildly original.  He returned to television to host Wild Chicago’s Illinois Road Trip, Ben Loves Chicago and Ben Around Town and has been a contributing reporter to 190 North.  He also advanced the definition of “wild,” ingeniously deciding it stands for “What I Love Doing.”  He has launched all sorts of ventures with the concept, including a live interview show where he brings audience members on stage to find out, Wild Chicago-style, “What’s it like to be you?”  

Please read on for an interview with Ben Hollis himself about the secrets of Wild Chicago and what his life is like today.   Click on the links below for the sneak peek trailer, for tickets to the Patio Theater event and to learn how to purchase The Golden Age of Wild Chicago for home viewing.

Q: What made Wild Chicago wild?

A: The word “wild” has had quite an evolution.   From the beginning, I always thought “wild” meant a natural habitat, away from the Gold Coast, away from Michigan Avenue, away from the P.R. agencies trying to push their agendas on TV. 

John Davies and I always had an affection for the off-beat, the eccentric, the unexplored.   We use the metaphor of looking up at the second stories of buildings when you were driving by or walking by, and seeing the interesting signage in their window.  The quintessential one we saw was “The Institute of Lie Detection.”  We wanted to know, “What the heck is that?”   It was a guy who took his lie detector to businesses or maybe people would come to him, and he would subject them to the test to see if they were stealing and that kind of stuff.   Former law enforcement guy.  He’s not in the DVD because we used too much popular music to make it possible.  But that’s what “wild” meant first: where the unvarnished, authentic, unpretentious people are because there is a wealth out there.  

When the show started to air, I found that a lot of people were equating wild with crazy, weird, dangerous, naughty.   In fact, one guy came up to me on the street and said, “I just love your show, Ben.   You crack me up.  But how do you keep a straight face talking to all them weirdos?”   And I remember feeling angry at that moment because I didn’t see them as weirdos.    They were my people.  I was connected to them.   I felt affection for them.  I related to them.   But I thanked him for his comment and that was it.  Now years later, wild means something else.

Q:  Oh, yes.  W.I.L.D.  …  “What I Love Doing.”

A: Yes.  It was such an organic thing.  What I think made people  interested in the show was the passion people had for what they were doing,  no matter how off the beaten track it was, how unorthodox their habits, their hobbies, their passions;  from a guy making leather underwear to the ladies in their basement inventing things to swallow to make you lose weight.  They were both kind of weird, but I didn’t use the word “weird” as a means of separating me from them or them from the general public. Every single one of us has probably got our own wild, weird eccentric thing in the closet.  Or maybe it’s right out there in front.

Q:  What is important about being wild?

A: Wildness is our natural state.  I have an improv background from Player’s Workshop of Second City where I got my training and directed some shows and taught.   I learned that wild is a natural state.  It’s the state where we access our greatest talents and connection to the source that supplies the power, the genius and the talent that everybody has in their particular way. 

To not be wild is to be all varieties of problems.  Being afraid all the time.  Marching to someone else’s tune.  These are things that cause problems and so much pain for everybody.  So getting in touch with that wildness is important for living your best life.

Q: It should be taught in school!

A: Yeah!  Ha!  That’s a great idea.  I do a program called “Lessons from Wild Chicago.”  I speak so passionately and affectionately about these folks doing what they love doing.  [Once,] a lady came up to me and said, “I’m a schoolteacher and I think that this should be a curriculum.”

Q:  In Tyner White’s segment on the Wild Chicago DVD, he says, “I’ve trained myself to like what’s necessary.”   He said that, even though his life looked far from easy.  That was one of the most profound statements of mental strength I have ever heard.

A: You’re right.  It’s awesome.   He’s one of our “All Stars.”   So many people, me included, could dismiss him as just being eccentric.  But that eccentricity means, “Pay attention!”, because how many of the population are walking zombies stuck in old habits?

I like to say, too, that the city of Chicago and our culture could use a shot of Wild Chicago, maybe now more than ever.  There is so much homogenization. But the true wild Chicago is still there.  You won’t find it on Clybourn anymore, you know.  You’re going to have to move a bit farther out into the wilds to see it.  It’s there and it’s just as vibrant and fun and exciting as ever, but the population, I think, has forgotten about it.  

The shows that came on TV after Wild Chicago, if they had Wild Chicago in mind, they got it wrong.  They were thinking in terms of just the places.  They weren’t thinking about the people and the interesting, fascinating aspects of people in their natural state.  Maybe the economy necessitated this, too.   Television required sponsorship and so the content was going to be defined by the people paying for it.   That was never the case in Wild Chicago. 

We were fortunate to choose the places we wanted to choose.  It was extremely democratic by virtue of people sending in their suggestions.  We loved the handwritten envelopes that came in and the handwritten letters that told us about the thing they did or what their neighbor did versus a fancy envelope from a well-reputed P.R. agency on Michigan Avenue.  No knock against those folks, but what turned us on about Wild Chicago were these places that today wouldn’t have the financial resources to buy time on TV.  

Q:   What is wild about you and has it changed over time?

A: Well, strangely enough, my wildness has yielded a life that’s quieter and simpler. I get up earlier in the morning than I ever did before.  I go to bed earlier.  I live quite a squeaky clean lifestyle in terms of no smoking, no drinking, basically no craziness.  In the last couple of years, I made a big change in my lifestyle around food and I just eat so healthy now.  I haven’t had sugar or caffeine or flour for two and a half years.

Q: Was that hard?

A: Strangely, it wasn’t.  I had the willingness to give it a shot and then found that it wasn’t that hard.

Q: I keep thinking I should do that and then I never quite do it.  Or I do it for three hours.

A:  It’s an uphill battle in our culture.  But you know, since the W.I.L.D., “What I Love Doing” concept emerged, it serves as a challenge to me all the time.  I ask myself, “Am I living that wild life that I espouse and that I represent?”  It’s a standard that I have to hold myself to.

Q: How did you decide to make that big change?

A: I was just not happy with how I was feeling taking in that stuff.  I’m a crazy Coca-Cola addict and it was bringing me down.  You know what it was?  I wanted to clear the decks, clear my mind and be ready for the work that I felt I was being called to do, which was talk about the wild life and then things like putting out this DVD and the digital download and this big event. 

Q: What is your favorite moment on the DVD?

A: It’s “Tiger Moves Man.”   I’m putting together the trailer right now and he’s saying, “This is the leopard palm to the head. Boom! This is the heart-stop punch.  Boom!  Bang! This will break your sternum!   Boom!”  

Then suddenly we cut to a formal, serious studio photography shot of “Tiger Moves Man” all dressed up with his wife.  It cracked me up and it cracked up a big audience at the Music Box Theatre over the weekend when the “Found Footage Festival” guys were in town.  They’ve adopted Wild Chicago as one of their favorite things.  So I got to be in this movie theater with a lot of people and listen to their reaction and they were just cracking up like crazy, particularly at that moment.  So I’ve used that moment to open the trailer. 

So that gave me a great boost, look at how well Wild Chicago plays in a movie theater.  Which then gave me ideas about how this could possibly be a cult midnight-type show.  It could be anything.  Bottom line is it’s funny.  And that was a crowd of people in their twenties and early thirties.  Most didn’t even know Wild Chicago from the time it aired.  That was another nice indicator.

I would say, too, for audiences, people reading this in their twenties or thirties, you may be interested in what Chicago was like or certainly a part of Chicago years before you lived here and see how it seems to be different from your experience, just to pick up a different kind of vibe about what was going on and what was possible and how awesome it was.   

Q: What is it about Chicago that it is so conducive to the “Wild” spirit?

A: I think Chicagoans are really friendly people, open people.   There’s an exuberance here.  People really relish life.   That would be a really interesting thing for somebody to study because certainly it existed in Studs Terkel’s prime and farther back than that.  

Q:  I was surprised to hear on the DVD commentary track that Studs Terkel initially didn’t understand the show.   He said something critical about the suburbs laughing at the city and I was shocked because that doesn’t seem true at all.  Delighting in and celebrating, yes.   But laughing, no.  Did he eventually come around?

A: I think he must have because one of the proudest moments of my career was being the recipient of the Studs Terkel Media Award.    Studs handed it to me himself and gave a really nice speech, so he must have seen things differently after time.   He was responding, too, maybe after seeing the first show.  The show grew quite a bit even within the first season.  It gained some maturity and I learned more about how to do TV and how to ask better questions. 

The segments got longer.  The first big complaint of any critic was, “These are interesting places, why are you only spending a minute and forty-five seconds there?” and that was a good comment.  As I got more confident, I wanted to ask more questions and spend more time at the places.   I remember when we thought that three minutes for a segment was sacrilege.  That was just too much.  It grew and by seasons four or five we had four minute segments, even five minute segments sometimes.  It held up as long as it was interesting.

Q: You mentioned that you learned to ask questions differently.   What did you have to learn?  Because from the beginning you had such an ability to put people at ease.   I think that is one of the things that make the show great.   It’s rare in life that people feel so safe being themselves and don’t feel it’s too risky.

A: Thanks.  Well, I think that what you just talked about was something in my presence which I didn’t go to school for.  I don’t know how to calibrate it, it’s just there.  I’m grateful for that but I felt I could get better at formulating questions.  I’ve always been curious and thought that I asked good questions in other areas of my career before TV, but it was really about confidence, just thinking about in advance what I want to ask and injecting a playful spirit.  I invited people to play with me, really, in an unspoken way. 

In that regard, Wild Chicago was very much keeping in the tradition of Chicago TV going back to Stud’s Place, a show that was improvised, and to Dave Garroway’s TV shows.  The way I operated and put people at ease,  that was a Garroway kind of thing.  They called it the Chicago School of Television.  It was very unpretentious and willing to show you the hardware and what was going on behind the scenes.  So we would throw in a shot of the audio man or the mic would get in the shot and we would feel, “It’s ok.  So what?”  We weren’t laboring to make you think you weren’t watching a TV show, which is ridiculous. 

Q: Did you have any scary moments on Wild Chicago?

A: I don’t remember being scared so much.  I was scared on the very first shoot I ever did which was visiting the biker bar, Shooters.  I was only scared because it was my first day on the job and I’d never hosted anything on TV.   John Davies put the mic in my hand and said, “Go in there and start asking questions.” 

It’s a biker bar, but really the main clientele is off-duty law enforcement guys.  They’ve got their Harleys parked out front.  I go in there and it seems like nothing is happening.  I was used to live performing and so to be in a non-live performing situation where there’s no audience really was much more low-key than I expected.   I was just doing my gentle, quiet thing talking to people and then this guy who identified himself as “Weirdo,” strangely enough ...

Q: Oh, the guy with the tattoo!

A: Yeah!  He says, “Lean over, Pal.”  And he tells the cameraman to move in and he leans in and pulls down his lower lip and inside of his lower lip is his nickname “Weirdo” but misspelled.   Everybody just went, “Ooooooh.”  But back in the van driving to the next location we were all just roaring with laughter.  Actually, John and the crew, they were experienced in TV and they recognized that as a special moment.   To me, I didn’t know what it was.  I had no gauge to compare it to.  But they were happy, so suddenly I felt like, “Okay!  Alright! I didn’t do anything, but somehow that moment happened on my watch, so I’ll take it.”

Q: If you could interview anyone today for Wild Chicago, who would it be?

A: The honest answer is whoever it is I don’t know who they are yet.  They’re the people who are creating wild music or have a particular odd hobby or launched a strange, different business.  But I don’t know them yet.  They’re not on the radar.  That’s the best Wild Chicago, when they’re not on the radar of the mainstream media.  It was never a show that said, “We have to talk to Jesse Jackson or we’ve got to talk to Mayor Daley.” 

Strangely enough, my last segment of Wild Chicago, with the exception of years later doing Wild Chicago’s Illinois Road Trip, which is a different kind of show in a way, but my last true Wild Chicago segment was at Mayor Daley’s office.  Even if we did something that looks like it was inconsistent with our credo of natural habitat, getting away from the lake and all that, we still brought a twist to it.

Q: Yeah! You looked at gifts people gave him and explored his washroom …

A: That’s right!   

Q: That was so cool.  Where else would you see that?

A: There was so much violence and so many ill feelings out there, but we had been having a really breezy time up until this point.  As I was forming my question, I saw his face turn like, “Oh no, what’s he going to do now?”  And I continued, “… all this ill feeling and the strife.  What can we do to bring Cubs and Sox fans together?”   And he lit up.  I think he was relieved, of course.  His expression, his face really told the story.  

Q: Which Wild Chicago guest would you most like to follow up with?

A: Oh, that’s a good one.  Maybe the people who lived under the Skyway.  There was a mom and a son. You can see they were definitely not living high on the hog.  A strange little house built under the Skyway.  Sometimes trucks are hanging over the edge right above their house.  The snow plows are pushing snow down onto their house and making gigantic booming sounds like bombs going off. 

They don’t appear to live an enviable life, but I loved at the end of it we say, “Thank you.  Great to meet you.”  And she says, “We’ll pray for you.”   We might have had our attitude, “Well, we’ve got it great,” but they could have been looking at us thinking, “Poor city slickers.  Poor North Siders.  Stuck in that rat race.”  But it doesn’t matter the reason.  They were kind, loving people as most of the folks I met were.

Q: What was your biggest surprise moment as host?

A: It was in the last season.  Mike Rossi was his name and he traveled around to race tracks.  Another really great guy.  He would sit on a pound of dynamite and blow it up.  He’d done this thirty-six times.  And he wanted to do one for Wild Chicago.  So we met him at a forest preserve in the southwest suburbs.   He didn’t have permission or anything to do it, so kind of dicey.  But he did it.  He had a heavy-duty steel metal seat that he sat on to protect himself, but still, you know … the sound and the impact.  It was outrageous. 

So he sits on it and then his wife detonates it.  She’s standing 50 - 100 yards away.  And she pushes the thing down just like dynamite in a cartoon and the thing blows up and all you see is a big puff of smoke and there’s a huge explosion sound and you’ve got to believe he’s going to emerge from that. 

We went running into the smoke and the litter of the dynamite, little bits of paper in the air.    And here he comes staggering out smiling, and he says, “There’s number 37 for Wild Chicago!” 

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THE PREMIERE SCREENING AND DVD RELEASE EVENT will take place on SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2013 at 3:00 p.m.  (doors open at 2:30) at THE PATIO THEATER, 6008 W. Irving Park Rd. in Chicago.  To purchase advance tickets, visit http://wildchicagopremiere.eventbrite.com/   Tickets are $ 5.

CATCH A SNEAK PEAK of The Golden Age of Wild Chicago trailer at:   https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wildchicago. 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF WILD CHICAGO WILL BE AVAILABLE AS A DOWNLOAD for purchase or rental at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wildchicago beginning November 17 at 3:00 p.m. to coincide with the screening.    If you are at the Patio Theater, you can even download it with your phone right there!

YOU CAN PURCHASE The Golden Age of Wild Chicago on DVD beginning Monday, November 18 by going to:  www.wttw.com/wildchicago

IN CELEBRATION of the upcoming premiere, fans have been recording video testimonials to Wild Chicago.   To post or view videos or to connect with Ben, join Facebook’s Wild Chicago page. https://www.facebook.com/groups/46902718815/?ref=br_tf.   The videos can also be seen on YouTube.