Jack McCoy, The Microcinema Founder – The People Issue 2024

Jack McCoy, 28, is the founder and owner of Sweet Void Cinema, a production company and microcinema in Humboldt Park. McCoy grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and came to Chicago in 2014 to study cinema at Columbia College Chicago. He’s lived in various neighborhoods across the city and currently resides in Lincoln Square.

Sweet Void Cinema started conceptually in 2020 as a collaboration between myself, Jon Anderson, Jose Perez, and Aliya Haq, as a production company first and foremost. Aliya Haq came up with the name—we had dozens of meetings trying to figure out what to call it. We had a feature fall apart in early 2021, so we had a little bit of excess money. We had talked about having a space that would have enough room for a screen, and then we found this place that was pretty perfect. We slowly, over the course of the next year as we were producing shorts, started developing it as a theater. I think it was late 2021—Jose, Jon, and I took a U-Haul up to Milwaukee to a theater that never opened, and they were selling all these mint-condition theater seats. We had this guy, Jack Stearns, come in and build out the rest of the theater. One of our employees, Lino Gil—his wife, Jamie Nance, is a wonderful artist. We had her paint this mural in the space. 

The microtheater side of [Sweet Void] started to really take off, as we were really dedicated to screening work that was as accessible as possible for people. At first, that really meant free. As we started working this year with Josh Mabe and [Reader contributor] Joshua Minsoo Kim, we’ve done some more paid screenings that are really just to give experimental cinema that hasn’t really been screened in the city a place to live. At least to me, it seemed pretty clear that there has been a lack of this type of work being screened in the city.

Our mission as a production company is to create work that speaks to everyday Chicagoans. We’re trying to make films by and for Chicagoans. We have a couple of transplants like myself, but a lot of the people that we work with have lived here their entire lives, like Jose Perez, who lives in Little Village. We just produced his feature last year, What Rhymes with Magdalena? [2024]. When it comes to the type of work we’re trying to screen, experimental cinema is a big thing that has definitely drawn in some audiences, but in general, we’ve been trying to make it as accessible as possible for Chicagoans of any level of professionalism or genre to be able to get their work screened.

We have this monthly shorts festival that started in late 2022; basically, we accept anything that was made by a Chicagoan. If they made it in the city, if they edited it in the city, whatever—we screen it. Really, Sweet Void Cinema is about accessibility and giving young filmmakers—or old filmmakers—a chance to get their work either produced or screened. (I’d like to throw out there also, we are technically vertically integrated, so we beat Sony to the punch by about three years. That’s a bit of a joke, but it’s also honest.) 

[My day-to-day work] is different based on the week. Like this week, I have [to] quality check a feature I directed back in 2022 that we’re trying to submit to Slamdance. I’ve had to hunt down a home base for Harvey Pullings [II]’s shoot next weekend. I’ve had to coordinate an experimental film festival [called Peripheries] that Nick Swanton [put on] along with Joshua Minsoo Kim, M. Woods, and Elise Schierbeek from Video Data Bank. Joshua with [experimental music newsletter] Tone Glow had a screening on Friday and Saturday, so I helped run the Saturday screening. On Wednesdays, we have a screenwriting workshop that I run. What else? It’s really kind of strange, on a daily basis I don’t really know what I’m actually gonna be up to. Then I’m also starting to think, “What are we gonna do next year? Are we gonna do a feature?” I’m not sure; who’s to say?

The screenwriting workshop has been going on at Sweet Void since January 2022, and I’m more proud of it than anything else we do here. Every week, somewhere between six and ten people have joined in person or virtually, and collectively, we’ve written hundreds of pages. Two of the three shorts we’re producing this year are from the workshop—Jay Villalobos’s Brain Rot and Jason Nimako-Boateng’s Dogs, Foxgloves and Other Slowly Dying Things—and I wouldn’t be surprised if a couple of the shorts written this year end up on our docket next year. It’s become a good way for film students, graduates, people who never went to film school, or people with a passing interest in it to learn and grow as writers. I went through the screenwriting program at Columbia College and found it to be rather lacking, in discipline from the teachers and in rigor from the students. Here, we have cultivated a motivated community which pushes each member to grow, and grow we have! I’m very proud of the group. 

My love of film came from, largely, the movies I grew up with, which were a lot of blockbusters, like James Cameron movies, dumb action movies with Bruce Willis or Harrison Ford (who my mom loved). I sort of moved, when I was in college, toward more of the arthouse people, like Ingmar Bergman or Michelangelo Antonioni. I definitely, with the pandemic, was watching too many movies. Being able to quantify how many movies I’d watched in something like Letterboxd, I found pretty recently, was something that was very unhealthy. If I’m watching like three features a day, that’s not . . . that’s not very good. [Laughs] And I do think there’s a serious problem with filmmakers right now, where it seems like the primary thing they care about are their movies—as opposed to, say, real-world issues, or, I don’t know, religion, or their family—and you see that really reflected in their movies. And I think you see a certain cost come into the movies themselves when that’s the case. So personally, this year, I’ve been trying to be able to square what I care about outside of film with film itself.

[Since] the pandemic hit, I’ve been particularly . . . nervous, I guess, would be the right word, and wary of getting sick again. I had cancer; I did six months of chemotherapy back in 2018. So I’ve really been pretty strict with a mask policy, both on our production end and in our theatrical distribution. At certain points, we’ve had people COVID test before coming into the theater. We’ve had to shut down the theater a few times if cases have been particularly bad or if someone in the office has gotten sick. But it’s definitely been challenging. Since basically very few other places in the city have any type of COVID policy, there’s a bit of a weird anachronism that I think people sometimes feel coming in—they’re like, “Oh, I need a mask?” Well, yeah, you do.

Really, I think it comes down to the city and the state and the federal government never really having handled it and feeling like it’s my responsibility in the space that I do control. But I also know, like, the moment you leave the space, that there is absolutely no control over it. It’s just a bit frustrating.

What I would like to do is allow Sweet Void to be more of an autonomous entity and be able to really just focus on writing and directing, since that’s what I love the most. Still programming at the theater would be nice, as well. With Sweet Void, I’m hoping that it can be a center of microfilmmakers being able to get a start in the city. Chicago’s been where a lot of really phenomenal filmmakers have come out of at many different times in history. It seems like right now there’s a real dearth of any type of cultural innovation, and I think that’s largely due to rent prices—people being priced out of different places like New York or LA that have historically been real centers of culture. 

I think for the film world, [Chicago] is a pretty perfect city. Rent isn’t astronomical, so I think there’s an actual chance for working-class people to make movies here. Getting permits and locations is significantly cheaper, as well. And the tax incentive here in Illinois is really great—I think it’s the second best in the country.

Even as meager as the money that we have [is], we have a real opportunity for people who don’t ordinarily get the opportunity to make work to be able to make work—ideally, good work, a thing that people across the country and the world would want to see. I guess that’s a lofty ambition for Sweet Void, but I’m hopeful that there is some type of future trajectory for it to play that type of role. Or at least maybe signal to people who have large amounts of capital that they want to put into movies to be like, “Ah, Chicago, that makes sense.”

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.