Friday, November 7, 2008 10:17 PM CST
Early experiences prepared Gire for critic's role
By NATHANIEL WEST, Staff Writer
nwest@jg-tc.com
HOFFMAN ESTATES – Reflecting on a meeting with actor Daniel Craig last week in Chicago, film critic Dann Gire could hardly believe his luck.
“When things like this happen, you think back,” said Gire, 55. “There’s no way anyone would have guessed that one day I’d be sitting in a hotel room with James Bond.
“But stuff happens.”
Of course, luck is only part of the equation in Gire’s transformation from editor of the Charleston High School newspaper to film critic for one of the Chicago area’s leading suburban newspapers. The Charleston native also credited his success to the people and challenging circumstances that prepared him for a job that involves rubbing shoulders with A-list actors and reviewing the best and worst that Hollywood has to offer.
Now a resident of Hoffman Estates, Gire has been a film critic for three decades at the Daily Herald newspapers, based in Arlington Heights. He is also a founder of the Chicago Film Critics Association, of which renowned critic Roger Ebert is a member.
Gire also has been a longtime participant in the annual Embarras Valley Film Festival at his alma mater, Eastern Illinois University in Charleston.
“I’ve thrown the javelin much farther than I ever thought I would,” he said. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself.”
Son of Jim and Donna Gire of Charleston, Dann Gire graduated from CHS in 1971. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in communication from EIU.
In high school, he was editor of the Trojan Trumpet, and worked as a photographer and columnist for the Times-Courier. While at EIU, he moved up the ranks at the Daily Eastern News (which became a daily newspaper during his tenure there), eventually serving as editor-in-chief.
Just a few days after graduation in 1975, Gire started his job as the only reporter and photographer for the Casey Daily Reporter. “As a result of that experience, there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do,” he said.
“But you can’t do that too long. It was exhausting.”
Former EIU journalism professor Dan Thornburgh recommended Gire for a reporting job at the Daily Herald in 1974, and Gire became the first of many EIU alumni to work for the large suburban newspaper group. He started as a government reporter, and over the next three years, his beats included crime and Cook County courts.
In 1978, the Daily Herald expanded from a six- to seven-day paper, and added film, television and theatre reviews to “add extra interesting stories to the Sunday paper,” Gire said.
While at EIU, he had made several 16mm films, and also had taken classes in film appreciation and history, so he applied for the newly created film critic position at the Daily Herald.
“They picked me as the film critic because I was the most credentialed person on the staff,” he said, adding that he did not anticipate his college film experiences would come in handy like that. “Always go with your gut feelings on classes you think you’ll greatly enjoy, because you never know.”
Not that Gire met with success immediately as a film critic. “My reviews were pathetically awful,” he said. “I started out rough, but I learned quickly.
“I did every mistake that every beginning writer makes, but I only did each mistake once.”
Every step of the way, Gire said there were people “who were always in support of me, providing me with the discipline and confidence that I lacked.”
He now reviews nearly every theatrical release in the Chicago area. He said his wife, Peggy (daughter of the late Tom and Elaine Burke of Charleston) no longer asks him if he’s seen a particular film; she already knows the answer.
Gire is not sure if either of their daughters — 25-year-old Lauren Gire, an aspiring Broadway actress living in Harlem, or 21-year-old Morgan Gire, a junior at the University in Iowa who still gets together with high school friends to make their own movies — will follow in his footsteps as a scribe.
Dann Gire also said he may be among a dwindling breed of film critics who try not to let political views or tyrannical egos interfere with their reviews. “A lot of film critics (have) lost their Northern Star,” he said.
“The No. 1 job, the only one that matters, is to assess the value of a film. That’s it … Once you do that, the audiences on their own figure out whether it’s worth” seeing.
“Critics are not dictators,” Gire said. “It’s not the job of critics to order your readers to see something, or demand that they don’t see something.”
Still, he values a lively writing style. If film critics had their own Hippocratic Oath, he said it would be, “First, bore no one.”
Gire added, “Once you get over that one, everything else is just frosting on the cake.”
Contact Nathaniel West at nwest@jg-tc.com or 238-6860.
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