Chicago theater vets are ready for close-up

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May 22--CANNES, France -- Congratulations. Your movie has been selected as part of the 59th Festival de Cannes. So why settle for secondhand accounts of your film's reception? Even if it's on your own dime, why not just go?

This is what a couple of Chicago theater veterans, Tracy Letts and Michael Shannon, thought to themselves. And this is why, on a windy Saturday with the lettuce flying clean off the sandwiches on all the nearby outdoor cafe tables, Letts and Shannon are drinking cappuccino and espresso, respectively, in between smokes, on the second-floor lounge of the Noga Hilton here on the main Cannes drag, the Croisette.

If you've seen any number of Chicago plays, you probably know their work. Letts is a Steppenwolf ensemble member. Shannon has originated roles in Letts' three full-length plays: "Killer Joe," "Bug" and "Man From Nebraska."

They're in Cannes to see "Bug," the paranoiac love story being released later this year under the Lionsgate banner. Letts wrote the play a decade ago, and Shannon originated the role of a Gulf War veteran who may have been subjected to insidious military experiments. He played the part in London, Chicago and New York. Under the direction of another Chicagoan, Dexter Bullard, the New York version of "Bug" ran for nearly two years.

In New York, "Bug" attracted some major-league fans. Mike Nichols was one. Another was Chicago-born William Friedkin, best known for "The French Connection" and "The Exorcist." Friedkin optioned the play and hired Letts to adapt it. Despite pressure to use a better-known actor for the male lead, Friedkin stuck by Shannon. For the record, deadpans Letts, "I tried to get Michael muscled out."

"That's interesting," Shannon replies, in an even deader deadpan, "because I tried to get Tracy muscled out."

Weeks prior to the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina, Friedkin shot most of the modestly budgeted $4 million film in sequence in a converted high school gymnasium in Metairie, La. The director says he thrived on the claustrophobia of the play's motel-room setting. In a separate interview in Cannes, Friedkin -- who grew up on Chicago's West and North Sides -- says "Bug" spoke to him.

"It's very perceptive about how paranoia can hook somebody," he says.

Starring Ashley Judd as the hard-luck waitress, the film screened Saturday in Cannes for a press and industry crowd. That night the movie received its official unveiling as part of the festival's non-competitive Director's Fortnight. "After it was over," Shannon says, "Billy [Freidkin] took my hand and we walked down the aisle, and it was cool. I've never experienced anything like it." Early critical response has been passionately mixed, though the French press has been favorably inclined. The critic in Metro newspaper gave it three out of five palm fronds, and wrote that "contemporary author Tracy Letts" concocted a "well-crafted schizophrenic tale inspired by modern threats." "I didn't expect to be nerve-racked," Letts says, alluding to the Director's Fortnight screening, "but once the movie started, yeah, I was nervous watching people watch it. People didn't leave, though. They covered their eyes at the shocking parts, but they stuck with it and gave us a very nice hand at the end." (The industry screening was more divisive: When Shannon's character yanks out his own tooth amid prolonged and agonizing screams, a couple of dozen filmgoers bade farewell -- though early exits are not unusual in Cannes.)

Both men have spent time working, or trying to, in Los Angeles. Shannon, a familiar face from "8 Mile," "Kangaroo Jack" and other movies, acknowledges he deals with persistent low-level muscling from agents and managers to go west for good. Letts spent four years in L.A., taking small roles on TV and in film while writing one unproduced screenplay after another.

"I began to believe that they don't actually make movies out there," Letts says. "But Billy's treated both of us with tremendous respect and generosity from the beginning. He's the first person I've ever dealt with in the movie business who did what he said he was going to do. He called me and said, 'I want to make a movie of this.' And two years later, we're here at the Cannes film festival."

mjphillips@tribune.com

Michael Phillips' Cannes blog is at www.chicagotribune.com/cannes.

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