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Love story shines on Cleveland
(by Barbara Christian - October 19, 2011)
WINDOW ON MAIN STREET, BY BARBARA CHRISTIAN
Love story shines on Cleveland
I am in love with Ivan Schwarz, and it doesn't matter that he's married and has two kids or he looks a bit like an unmade bed or that I am not alone in my adoration of this man.
Did I mention there were 150 other people who fell in love with him, all at the same time? This mass outpouring of affection happened last week during the opening of the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival, when he took the stage of the Chagrin Valley Little Theatre to profess his love for Cleveland.
Be still my heart. Cleveland? How could this be? A man in love with a Rust Belt region fallen on hard times? And he's not even from here?
Ivan Schwarz, formerly of Los Angeles, has so much faith in the region he now calls it home, is raising a family here and, as executive director of the Greater Cleveland Film Commission, is building a new industry based on pixels, not pig iron.
This is the same Ivan Schwarz who spent 20 years in Hollywood working on crews attached to such top TV shows as "Entourage," "My Name is Earl" and "From the Earth to the Moon" mini-series and who was on track to grow his career in La La Land, where movies are king of the world.
In a few short years, this same Ivan Schwarz brought millions of dollars into our region. This summer, downtown Cleveland became location for filming of "The Avengers," the destined-to-be blockbuster action flick. Before that it was "Spiderman" and "I, Alex Cross" and others. Filmmakers are doubtless drawn here on the strength of this man's passion for our area.
This also is the Ivan Schwarz who successfully lobbied state lawmakers for tax incentives that continue to attract Hollywood to Northeast Ohio. To raise the area's profile and profit, he is poised to ask for more.
And this same Ivan Schwarz is actively engaged in negotiating for the old American Greetings plant in Brooklyn, Ohio. It could become state-of-the-art production space for our region's new film industry, which he says will top out at 1 million square feet.
But as much as we in the audience loved what he was telling us and for his confident can-do spirit, Ivan was not ready to return that love unconditionally. Instead, he gave us tough love.
Why do we, who live in Northeast Ohio, have this pervasive inferiority complex? he asked. Get over it, he said. We have a wonderful area loaded with good people, not to mention a quality of life that is second to none. What it doesn't have, he said, is young people who stay here and make it their home.
This Ivan Schwarz, who is committed to the ideal the film industry, can retain and attract youth to the region, because "it's cool." And he knows, as crucial as it is for a vital new film industry to replace our rusty one, just as important is the added value that will come from ancillary businesses and educational opportunities that will feed into it.
As he said this, we, his audience, swooned with delight.
Ivan Schwarz came to the Cleveland area in 2006 as a location scout for HBO films. He saw the things here we continually fail to see. He now calls Cleveland home and recalled the day he left Los Angeles, and watching it disappear in his rearview mirror. "We never looked back," he said. "We have no place to go but here." How could you not love a guy like Ivan Schwarz?
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