Coaxing film from a former steel plant

"I used to spend summers with Uncle Nick as a kid," Pissios, a former real estate developer, tells me. He hung around the Cinespace Toronto soundstages. "That's how this whole thing happened. A few years ago, I was building condominiums by the United Center." Then came the mortgage and housing crises and the bad economic weather. Pissios went to Toronto for a wedding and saw his Uncle Nick. "And he said, 'How's things going?' I told him, 'Not so good. It's slow now.' And he said, 'We've always talked about opening up a studio in Chicago. Let's test the waters. Start lookin' around.'"

Michael Phillips

August 30, 2012