CHICAGO — No one writing, talking or sharing discoveries about film in Chicago brought the breadth of experience or the enthusiastic advocacy the way Sergio Mims did in his 67 years.
Mims co-founded the Gene Siskel Film Center’s Black Harvest Film Festival and its precursor, the Blacklight festival. He was a passionate champion of classical music, opera, MGM musicals and every corner of film history. He hosted “The Bad Mutha Film Show” on WHPK-FM, and taught screenwriting at DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center.
More recently Mims delivered a slew of delightful DVD commentaries on a range of “pictures” (his preferred word for movies), from “Lilies of the Field” to “Watermelon Man” and “Willie Dynamite.” In April, an appearance at the TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood afforded Mims the “overdue national recognition he clearly deserved,” in the words of Film Center executive director Jean de St. Aubin.
“It’s a staggering loss,” said Film Center programming director Rebecca Fons.
Mims, a Hyde Park resident, died Tuesday in Chicago. He had been in failing health for several months, according to his sister, Indianapolis physician Lisa Mims.
At the TCM festival, Mims introduced two Sidney Poitier films alongside TCM host and Mims’ longtime Chicago friend and colleague, Jacqueline Stewart.
“That was one of his Cinderella moments,” said Barbara Allen, filmmaker and longtime producer/engineer at WTTW-TV. She knew Mims for 40 years. “We can thank Jackie Stewart for that. She brought him out. And he couldn’t wait to do it again next year.”
“As long as I can remember, Sergio was a movie buff,” Lisa Mims said Thursday. “When I was a kid he’d bring me to the latest Bruce Lee martial arts movies in downtown Chicago.” Westerns, James Bond, blaxploitation, Mims relished it all.
Allen recalled, “He could tell you everything about film. Everything. Call him with a question about one movie, and he’d answer that question and then give you a million other answers to questions you didn’t know you had.”
News of his death provoked a passionate outpouring of memories on social media. “Through our tears, let us celebrate the incomparable, indomitable Sergio Mims,” wrote Stewart, the TCM host, longtime University of Chicago film scholar and historian and now director and president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
“Take your rest, dear brother. And we will keep the work of celebrating cinema, especially Black cinema, alive in your honor,” Stewart posted on Facebook Thursday.
The Gene Siskel Film Center’s 28th Black Harvest Film Festival, to be held this year Nov. 4-27, will be the first without Mims. An offshoot of the Blacklight festival co-founded by Mims in the early 1980s, Black Harvest will be dedicated this year to Mims’ memory.
“He was Black Harvest,” said de St. Aubin, who met Mims in 2003. “Other people moved out of town, to different things, but Sergio was a huge part of the Chicago film community to the end.”
Dwayne Johnson-Cochran, his cohort on Blacklight in the early and mid-1980s, described Mims Friday as “the impresario.” Johnson-Cochran, whose screenplay “Heist 88″ was filmed earlier this year in Chicago, said he likely met Mims when they both worked as production assistants in 1979 on the raucous filming of “The Blues Brothers.” In a 2018 Bill Ackerman “Supporting Characters” podcast, Mims described the experience: “Believe me, there was no safety on that movie.”
“We fought all the time,” Johnson-Cochran said Friday, with a warm laugh. He and Mims and Blacklight co-founder Floyd Webb locked horns all the time, “because it was all about our film aesthetics. I remember Serge and I were in the car, after a screening of Brian DePalma’s “Body Double,” and we got into it: ‘It’s a homage to Hitchcock!’ ‘No! It’s a rip-off!’ and he almost slugged me, right there in the car.”
In 2009, Tambay A. Obenson launched the Shadow and Act website devoted to Black cinema, with Mims a key critical and curatorial voice. “Every African-American filmmaker in the world was into Shadow and Act,” Johnson-Cochran said. “We couldn’t wait to get interviewed by Shadow and Act; I couldn’t wait for Sergio to call me. They had a huge influence on us all.”
Mims was born in Chicago in January 1955. A graduate of University of Illinois-Chicago, majoring in economics but far more compelled by the movies, Mims worked on several Chicago movie sets in addition to “The Blues Brothers.” He made it to the rank of second assistant to the director on the Los Angeles 1979 prison drama ”Penitentiary.”
Also on the “Supporting Characters” podcast, Mims wryly recounted his lasting regret over turning down a production assistant gig on a movie titled “The Babysitter Murders.” Later it was renamed “Halloween.”
Without Mims’ presence, next month’s Black Harvest, as film critic and longtime friend Nick Digilio wrote on Facebook Thursday, is “gonna be really, really rough.”
In addition to sister Lisa Mims, Sergio Mims is survived by his mother, Gladys Mims, and his sister Judith Mims, both of Chicago. Funeral arrangements are pending. A tribute to Mims is being planned at the Black Harvest Film Festival. A foundation in his name supporting Black writers is also in the works, Lisa Mims said.
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