An independent documentary called “Fire Department, Inc.” that follows the mayor’s disastrous attempt to privatize the North Riverside unionized fire department is underway.
Both Caley Fox Shannon, producer, and Colin Hughes, director and producer, grew up in Riverside and have connections to the film industry. Hughes is a software developer at Light Iron, a post-production company, and Shannon has been working on short documentaries while earning her journalism degree at the University of Maryland. However, this is the first time both of them are producing a feature-length documentary.
Hughes first heard about this issue in 2019 when he read an article in the Landmark. At that time, Shannon was working in L.A. for a documentary company. Both of them had to return to Riverside to be with their families during the pandemic.
“Colin and I both found ourselves back in Riverside at our parents’ houses at the beginning of the pandemic with not a lot on our plates,” Shannon said. “At one point we had a beer outside at Mollie’s and he had caught me up on the whole story of what was going on with the North Riverside fire department, basically right in our backyard, and told me that he was interested in following the story and did I want to get in on it and become his partner on the film. It’s definitely a really intriguing story for people who care about labor and for people who live in a village like ours, where local politics really matter.”
Hughes said they conducted sit-down interviews with over 15 people, including former Landmark reporter Bob Uphues, Chris Kribales, a North Riverside firefighter, former trustee Bob Demopoulos, current mayor Joseph Mengoni, former mayor Hubert Hermanek Jr. and others.
The story is this: After the 2008 financial crisis, the village’s financial problems deepened each year. By 2013, it owed a significant debt to the firefighters’ pension fund. The newly elected mayor then proposed to eliminate the pension plans by privatizing the fire department. However, the firefighters refused, and the mayor unlawfully terminated their contracts. This led to a five-year legal battle that could potentially change labor laws in Illinois and across the country.
“It was important for us to tell this smaller, in some sense, story of how that’s happening in our backyard here in Chicago land,” Shannon said. “The reason that firefighters are particularly important to talk about is because firefighters can’t strike because they provide a life-or-death service to the community. Firefighters can’t just go on strike to draw attention to their contract needs or their labor struggle in a way that unions like Amazon and Starbucks can do that makes the news.”
The documentary received some donations, but the majority of it is self-funded by Hughes and Shannon. The official budget is around $65,000, Hughes said. Besides Hughes and Shannon, the team consists of two editors, two composers, and a director of photography.
“We never put a goal [of donations] out because we knew we would never be able to hit it if we did,” Hughes said. “Fortunately, because we’ve been working on this for over four years, I was able to pick up overtime shifts at my day job and save money that way and living with my parents during the pandemic, boy that was you know and that was a great money-saving technique. It’s roughly four to one the self-fund to donations ratio.”
Hughes said the film will be around 80 minutes long. Although there is no official release date in mind because of the small production team, the film is in its finishing stage and the last thing left is to raise money for their last big expense to get a clearance to use the footage from the CBS news, NBC news and private archives.
Hughes and Shannon are submitting the documentary to various film festivals in hopes that a distributor will notice it and would like to pick it up.
However, Hughes said that even if that does not work out, they plan to do the distribution themselves and host a viewing in Riverside in the future.
