Chicago Tribune - March 25, 2005
Mary Schmich

Circumstance one: English spent 29 years with a partner who eventually died of AIDS.

Circumstance two: His partner was African-American.

Three: One day last month, he was standing outside the Magic Johnson Theatres in L.A., where a movie he'd produced was showing in the Pan African Film Festival.

Unless you count his talent for schmooze and an exuberance that rides between exhausting and irresistible, English isn't exactly the guy who comes to mind when you hear "movie producer."

Since the 1960s, English has dealt real estate on Chicago's West Side, and for many years was in the neighborhood's tiny minority of white residents. He and his partner, Joe Towe, raised the two children from his marriage there. Joe died five years ago.

"Anyway," said English, recalling the day a few weeks ago at the L.A. film festival, "I was standing in front of the theaters--I don't know why, I don't smoke--and I saw this woman standing there, and I started talking with her."

He told the woman--Karen Shapiro, Chicago-born, L.A.-raised--how he'd just sunk a bundle into a movie he'd helped to make, based on a play, "Runt," he'd seen in Chicago. He said it was a good movie, but he didn't know how much more dough to pour into that sieve.

In turn, she told him about the movie she'd produced, which for two years had been waiting for a distributor, even though it had appeared, and won awards, at film festivals like this one. It was called "Beat the Drum," directed by David Hickson.

"Come see it," she said. He did. Ever since, he's been promoting it more than his own film.

"The story is so compelling, we all came out of the theater changed," he said. "I'm 61 years old. I don't think you're going to get too many changes in your life at this age."

That day, up on the screen, he saw the story of a South African village boy whose family members had died one by one of a mysterious curse. Determined to find his uncle and buy his grandmother a cow, the boy sets out on foot for Johannesburg. He meets roadside prostitutes, a nice truck driver, some mean gang members and eventually, in the city's violent, crowded fringes, learns the curse has a name: AIDS.

The movie moves between the sunburned villages of the golden African countryside to the chaos of urban tenements and traffic jams. Radiating from the center of it all is a valiant boy with a face that commands the screen.

Before he saw the movie, English hadn't thought much about AIDS in Africa, or all the children it's left orphaned. Watching it, he connected the dots between Chicago's West Side and Johannesburg, between the sickness that killed the man he loved and the one decimating parts of Africa.

So he began beating the drum for "Beat the Drum."

"Joe has brought renewed inspiration to me," said Shapiro, who marvels that he has devoted more time to her movie than to his. "He has truly blessed me to continue going."

English has held showings in his Chicago apartment and is angling to get the DVD to powerful people who understand movies as entertainment that can enlighten.

He has pressed a copy into the hand of someone who knows Bill Clinton. Someone who knows Kofi Annan. Someone who knows the ultimate wizard, Oprah.

"And today," he said on Thursday, "I'm taking a copy to Maggie Daley."

My inner movie critic would call "Beat the Drum" a flawed jewel. It sometimes sags into sweetness and didactic dialogue, but the actors are very good, and the landscapes and faces are as stunningly luminous as any I've seen on screen. Watching it, you can't help but find the threads that join South Africa to Chicago, that link white and black, that join those who think AIDS is someone else's problem and those who know it's not.

At a minimum, it's worth showing to every Chicago schoolkid.

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