Dennis Foley settles into a booth at Top Notch Beefburgers of the South Side and orders a tuna melt. It is that odd hour, 10 a.m., between breakfast and lunch. Anything goes.
For most, what goes at this 70-year-old dining institution at 2116 W. 95th St. are hamburgers. Top Notch was selected as having one the 100 best burgers in the United States in George Motz’s 2008 book “Hamburger America,” a burger previously noted in Foley’s charming and informative 2004 book “The Streets and San Man’s Guide to Chicago Eats,” one of local publisher Lake Claremont Press’ best-selling titles ever.
“What I like most here, though, are the milkshakes,” Foley says.
He wrote the book while working as an electrician for S&S and it includes 100-some of his favorite local spots. Top Notch gets a “three fork” rating out of a possible four.
Foley knows food, and now he is getting accustomed to the movie business.
He wrote the screenplay for “Old Bob,” which will be filmed here from July 27 to Aug. 8, directed by cinematographer Michael Kudreiko, whose camera work can be seen in such films as “Exit 33,” “Jingles the Clown” and “Born of Earth.” The cast includes James Russo (“Donnie Brasco,” “Django Unchained” and many other films), local comedian/actor/writer Pete Burns and a few kids who were selected after they auditioned at the Beverly Arts Center.
“It’s a movie about hope, really, and how some little kids come to the aide of a former high school teacher, that’s Bob, who is in bad shape after a tragedy,” he says. “It’s about baseball and there are cops involved and, well, I think it’s a good story that will hit a lot of people.”
This is not Foley’s first stab at the screen. Inspired by watching the compelling HBO series “The Wire” a few years ago, he wrote a pilot for a TV series he envisioned based on his S&S experiences. It was titled “The Blue Circus,” and though it won a top prize in a California-based screenwriting contest it did not immediately generate any interest from networks or studios.
“I wrote some more scripts for that series, and then I got the idea for ‘Old Bob’ and wrote the first draft in a furious four days,” Foley says.
Many revisions later he started letting friends and relatives read it. They liked it and so, through one relative, it made its way to Kudreiko, who also liked it and passed it along to Russo.
He liked it, too, signed on to participate, agreeing to work for scale and an executive producer credit. Thus did this movie start to take shape.
“We haven’t met face-to-face but I talk to him on the phone more than I talk to my wife,” says Foley, smiling. “He’s coming in three days early to get the lay of the land.”
Foley has now finished half his tuna melt, gotten the rest of it to go and is driving around the Beverly neighborhood. In the back seat of his car is some of the equipment he uses when coaching teams of youthful age in the arts of lacrosse. As he talks and drives, his knowledge of the twisted one-way streets of the area indicate a guy who knows his way around.
He grew up one of six children in the St. Sabina neighborhood. He went to St. Laurence High School in Burbank and was the starting center for a very good St. Laurence basketball team. As a Tribune story from early in the 1977-78 season noted: “There isn’t a better pair of players on one team than (Jim) Stack and (Kevin) Boyle, but Foley is the guy that will make St. Laurence tough to beat this year.”
He went to college and graduated from law school in 1985, practicing for the next decade until getting his license suspended for two years for some minor trouble. While he worked for S&S he enrolled in Columbia College’s master of fine arts program in creative writing. At the urging of one of his teachers, Sam Weller, he put a novel on hold and started to expand some journal entries into what would become his first book.
His next book was a departure from that joyful food-filled romp. “The Drunkard’s Son,” with its enigmatic subtitle, “A Chicago Story/Part Memoir, Part Not,” is, as Foley says, “a mem-fic,” part memoir and part fiction. By any description, it is a compelling and surprisingly humorous book. Shortly after its publication in 2012 he said: “As a little kid, my father was my idol. He’d take me to the tavern with him, and I would hear and learn things that maybe a little kid shouldn’t learn and hear. But you remember certain things, and those things that stay with you mean something. Bringing them back to life can be difficult, but it’s helped me come to grips with my relationship with my father.”
The father his long dead, Foley lives in Beverly with his wife, Susan, a schoolteacher, and their sons: Mike, a freshman at his father’s alma mater, St. Laurence, and the older boys, Matt and Pat, both out of college and pursuing careers.
He spends his days, when not involved with “Old Bob” details, working as a lawyer again, with an emphasis on real estate, talking at schools and coaching and refereeing lacrosse, which he calls “basketball with sticks.”
Foley’s car passes house after lovely house. Beverly is the only area in the city with a terrain containing hills, spreading across and out from the 30- to 60-foot-high Blue Island Ridge, created more than 12,000 years ago when the glaciers retreated.
Its roots are English and Protestant but it has long been home to a large Irish-American Catholic community and many Irish establishments, including a good number of bars. One of them, Horse Thief Hollow, is in the process of crafting a special “Old Bob” beer.
“The local businesses have been great,” Foley says. “We’ll shoot scenes at Ellie’s Cafe (a coffee shop near the Rock Island Metra stop), Janson’s Drive-In (a famous hot dog joint on Western Avenue), in Mt. Greenwood Cemetery and along 103rd St. and the Evergreen Park police station. Baseball scenes will be at the schools and in the parks.”
It takes money to make a movie. The budget for the recently released “Tomorrowland,” for one grotesque example, has been pegged at $180-$190 million by Variety, Box Office Mojo and others.
“Our budget is about $78,000,” says Foley. “And I just hate to ask people for anything.”
But already investors have raised about $50,000, and Foley launched an Indiegogo site (indiegogo.com/projects/old-bob) to raise the rest. As of earlier this week there was $16,055 pledged toward the $27,600 goal.
Foley talks about his new book, a thriller titled “Faces On the Wall,” a thriller set in Chicago and set for publication this year or early next. He then parks his car and walks toward one of the fine lawns in front of one of the fine home in Beverly and kneels down in the grass next to a sign. It is the sort of lawn sign most frequent seen during political campaigns, but this one is for the movie. He has pounded them into 100 lawns, and counting.
“It’s nice. People see them and then call me and say, ‘Hey I want one of those signs,'” he says. “Look, I may be biased. Of course I am. But I think we have something good here. I am hoping the movie will be something we can all be proud of, a movie that tells a great story while showcasing Beverly.”
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
Twitter @rickkogan
