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But the studio’s bread and butter has been series television - primarily Fox’s Empire, which alone rents seven sound stages, and NBC’s franchise of Dick Wolf first-responder dramas ( Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., Chicago Med). Spike Lee came to Cinespace to shoot Chi-Raq, as did the folks behind the well-regarded Obama romance Southside With You. Divergent was shot at Cinespace, and so were Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and two Transformers movies ( Dark of the Moon and Age of Extinction). “I’m doing it - it’s done!”Įleven years after his uncle saved him and eight years after the studio’s founding, Cinespace Chicago has grown into one of the largest film production rental facilities in the world, with 31 sound stages in Douglas Park and another three just opened in Little Village. He thinks he can start constructing the elaborate façades indoors this winter and have them mounted to the building exteriors by summer, at a cost of no more than $2 million. The street closures brought some 75 irate residents to a meeting with aldermen, city officials, and Cinespace representatives, but Pissios is undeterred. Pissios, now president of the studio he helped Mirkopoulos start here, has been talking about these sets for years, but only in mid-2019 did he win the city permits to close off 15th and 16th Streets and turn his collection of industrial and office buildings into a real fenced-in studio lot. And then around this corner” - he points east, along 16th Street - “is gonna be Chinatown, and then the other one’ll be New York.” “That over there, when you first walk in, is gonna be London. “This is gonna be Main Street, USA.” He turns and looks toward Cinespace’s northernmost building, at the corner of Ogden Avenue. He points out the buildings on the east side of Rockwell Street, the studio’s main drag, whose exteriors he plans to convert into blocklong street sets. The bearish 46-year-old stands just inside the main entrance of Cinespace Chicago Film Studios in the Douglas Park neighborhood of North Lawndale. Pissios can see the future right in front of him. Photos: (Mirkopoulos) Nuccio DiNuzzo/ Chicago Tribune (eviction notice) Michael Zajakowski Pissios’s “uncle” Nick Mirkopoulos, who bankrolled Cinespace Chicago and looms large at the studio the eviction notice placed on Pissios’s house, back when he owed $13 million to creditors. In my mind, it was just going to get worse.” “Nobody had told me that for three years. “He put his hands on my shoulders and said, ‘It’s going to be OK.’ And I started bawling,” Pissios recalls. The two men had coffee at the old-school Greek Islands restaurant on South Halsted Street in Greektown. He also gave his demoralized nephew an assignment: Cinespace wanted a footprint in the United States and needed someone in Chicago to scout a 100,000-square-foot building to house three sound stages. From there, he had his “nephew” drive him to a bankruptcy attorney’s office, where he put up $25,000 to cover Pissios’s filing. He asked Pissios to pick him up at Midway. Mirkopoulos had more: He was coming to town to straighten things out. “I’m driving home with my wife,” Pissios remembers, “and she was like, ‘What the hell you got to lose?’ So here I am sending this guy my loan documents, and he calls me up and says in his big, thick Greek accent, ‘Alex, I got your stuff.
“He’d say, ‘How’s the real estate business? Making a lot of money?’ ”Įventually, Mirkopoulos explained that he’d heard about Pissios’s troubles and asked him to send copies of his loan documents. “When he saw me at the wedding, he kind of jabbed me,” recalls Pissios. “Uncle” Nick had emigrated from Greece to Toronto in 1968 and started an electrician business with his brothers in 1990, after many years as a successful contractor and then developer, he’d founded Cinespace Film Studios, a giant film production complex in Canada. At the reception, Pissios was approached by his grandfather’s cousin Nick Mirkopoulos.
Then, in June 2008, a cousin in Toronto prompted him to reply to a family wedding invitation and, hearing of his financial woes, sprang for a rental car so Pissios and his wife could attend. His wife had gone back to work as a dental hygienist, and Pissios spent his days changing diapers and driving the kids to school.
He was 35, his career was finished, and his old associates had written him off. A developer of residential properties on the North and West Sides, he’d been taken down by the real estate crash of the ’00s when the final tally came, he would owe creditors $13 million. It’s a story he’s polished until it gleams like a rhinestone. (see “ Behind the Bar: Molly’s Pub”)Īlex Pissios had already received a red eviction notice on his house in Hawthorn Woods when his luck finally turned. Above:The Cinespace Chicago president in front of the Molly’s Pub set from Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D.
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