Colin Hughes, a former Riverside resident, felt he had a story to tell in film when he learned back in 2021 that North Riverside officials had a plan to save money by privatizing the fire department and replacing all its firefighters if they didn’t go along with it.
Even though the plan of then-Mayor Hubert Hermanek was rejected, Hughes, who’s 27 and has lived in Riverside on and off until 2024, has spent the time since to bring the documentary to life. It’s called Fire Department Inc.
“If the story wasn’t as compelling as it was, I would not have told it,” he said.
However, if you wanted to get more specific, Fire Department Inc. started with a $150 red light ticket at the intersection of Harlem Avenue and Cermak Road.
While googling how to contest this ticket, Hughes found several Riverside-Brookfield Landmark articles about how the red light cameras paid for the firefighter pension fund. Towns typically have a dedicated tax line item that goes into the pension fund, while North Riverside did not. Hughes then discovered the adversarial relationship between the firefighters and the village.
Then he learned of the plan of Hermanek to privatize the fire department to close the budget gap, and this Hughes believed was wrong. He decided to do something about it. Thus, the idea for the documentary was born.
Hughes has been interested in movies since attending Hauser Junior High School, where he was active with the school’s theater department. He stepped up to learn film editing when his teacher asked his students if anyone knew the program Final Cut Pro.
“ I said yes, even though that wasn’t exactly true, because I was interested in learning. I quickly picked it up, and from there, I loved it, “ Hughes said
Later he worked on films at Riverside Brookfield High School’s television department and in college.
The first step in making the documentary was creating a timeline and getting a list of the key players on both sides. Interviewing the firefighters proved challenging because, after a seven-year legal battle, they had concerns about Hughes’s movie making them look bad, which the director understood.
At that point, it seemed like the documentary might already be over. The firefighters didn’t want to talk to Hughes and his team. Hughes didn’t think they would get the mayor to speak to them. Still, Hughes left a message for Hermanek, explaining what he was doing and how he would love to talk to him. He got a call back about 15 minutes later, with the mayor agreeing to an interview tomorrow.
“And I frantically called my crew, like, ‘Hey guys, we got to go,’” said Hughes. “’This is a chance we’re probably not going to get again. We pulled that interview together, and then, all of a sudden, it gave our project some weight. We cut together a little proof of concept trailer that I could show the firefighters, ‘Hey, look, this isn’t going to be a hit piece on you guys. This will be a fair examination of what happened.’ At that point, it really took off.”
Editing Fire Department, Inc. began in 2021. According to Hughes, as hard as the production and filming had been, the editing was 100 times harder.
“If you’re editing a narrative film, it’s like putting together a puzzle, where you have a picture on a box, you have all the pieces, and you know that they all fit together,” said Hughes. “But when you’re editing a documentary film, you don’t have the picture on the box, and none of the pieces are cut, so you have to cut out the pieces so that they fit together and guess along the way how and if the pieces actually do fit together.”
After two and a half years of editing, Hughes said seeing what the editors did felt like Christmas. Now that the film is made, but with no studio-guaranteed distribution, the team has been getting the movie out through film festivals around the country. Find more information about where it’s playing on the documentary’s website at https://www.firedeptinc.com/.
