Rex Sikes' Movie Beat chats with feature and documentary filmmaker Michael Caplan

Michael Caplan's career began in the early '90s, when he worked as a producer of independent films in Chicago. In 10 years he produced 3 critically acclaimed feature films, including The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, & Peoria Babylon,starring David Drake & Ann Cusack. Throughout the decade, Michael wrote and directed several dramatic shorts that screened on PBS in Chicago and film festivals nationwide.

In 2003 he completed Stones from the Soil, a personal documentary about his father, who was one of 150 German Jewish teenagers sent to a farm in Germany by their parents during the Nazi period. The film aired on national PBS & at colleges nationwide.

Michael's next documentary focused on a Chicago magician and scholar named Eugene Burger. Michael traveled across the country to interview Eugene, Max Maven, Jeff McBride, Luna Shimada, Larry Hass, and other magicians and thinkers fostering a movement to return magic to its roots. A Magical Vision was completed in 2008, premiered at The Gene Siskel Theater.

Michael's current project, Algren, a film about the Chicago writer Nelson Algren, the National Book Award-winning author of The Man With the Golden Arm. His cast of interview subjects past and future includes Algren peers like Shay, Chicago journalist Rick Kogan, and screenwriter Bruce Jay Friedman; as well as likeminded contemporary artists including painter Robert Guinan, Salman Rushdie, and Wayne Kramer of MC5. Algren is scheduled for completion in 2011.

Caplan lives in Chicago where he received his Master of Fine Arts in Film from Northwestern University. He is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair at Columbia College Chicago in the Film & Video Department, where he currently teaches courses in documentary filmmaking, producing, film production and film distribution.

Stay tuned to Rex Sikes Movie Beat for other great archived interviews, cast and crew listings, events, festivals, premieres, and more at http://www.rexsikes.com

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