“Share the Care” (Chicago Park District, 1941, 2 min, 35mm, b&w, sound, 24 fps)
ABOUT THE FILM
“Share the Care” is an 88-second public service announcement from the Chicago Park District about that perennial bugaboo of the commons: litter. Distributed to Chicago-area theaters, “Share the Care” is a charming example of the regional snipes, advertisements, and ephemera that gave movie-going a highly varied and local flavor in the era before television and subsequent national media.
The Chicago Park District was established in 1934 by an act of the Illinois State Legislature, which consolidated 22 local park districts in a single citywide jurisdiction. The newly-formed Chicago Park District inherited a sprawling assortment of parks, swimming pools, field houses, and athletic facilities, and film quickly became one tool among many to promote a shared sense of public identity and investment.
By the late 1930s the Park District notched some sixty million annual visitors across 136 parks, and the breadth of CPD’s civic offerings dictated a range of film activities. The Park District assembled a library of 16mm silent stock shots to supplement the lectures and talks that were a staple of CPD programming. The contents of these films were freely re-used and re-shuffled for whatever lecture topic was at hand.
The Park District took a similar approach to its 35mm silent athletic films, which aimed to “illustrate the form that the champions use in such activities as diving, tennis, baseball and tumbling.” The athletic footage was used for slow-motion analysis for coaches and students, but it was not strictly exhibited or distributed as film; select sequences were also re-printed frame-by-frame in booklet form in the CPD’s Modern Recreation Series. For both projects, film was simply a raw material to be mined for a broader audio-visual educational experience. The footage, shot by Park District staff, does not appear to have been shaped into any final or fixed form.
The Chicago Park District’s public information films were altogether more professional. These 35mm sound films were distributed to local theaters and produced by Chicago Film Laboratory, Inc., a local industrial film shop whose client roster included American Airlines, International Harvester, the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs, and the Elgin National Watch Company. The Park District saw the project in lofty, democratic terms, describing itself in Business Screen as “the first organization in the city to tell Chicago, through the medium of moving pictures, about Chicago people and what they are doing. This is also at least one of the first times that such a thing has been done in any city. The pictures are in fact a kind of local Chicago newsreel through which important achievements are brought to public attention …. After seeing the film [the viewer] not only wants to participate in the recreational activities that it depicts, but he also feels a tingling of pride that he lives in a city that is not only beautiful, with its 28 miles of shoreline, but that is most progressively leading the world in providing recreational facilities and programs.”
The initial trio of titles – “Fun on the Lake Front” (aka “Fun on the Water”), “Sports” (aka “Thrills and Pleasures in Chicago Parks”) and “Fun for All – and All for Fun,” (aka “Fun for Everyone”), all produced in 1939 – fulfilled their remit by playing 165 theaters and spreading the Park District gospel to an estimated 1.5 million Chicagoland movie-goers. The films were also shown in 16mm reduction prints at CPD facilities. “These pictures have truly opened up the eyes of Chicagoans as to the work and advantages of their parks,” the Park District reported in its Business Screen spread. “One person in a theater, after seeing one of them, was heard to say, ‘Well, there is apparently nothing you can’t do in the parks.’” After the success of these films, which ran three to four minutes apiece, a thirty-minute epic was planned by CPD and Chicago Film Laboratory Inc.– Gardens in the City, a reference to the Park District’s Latin motto, Hortus in urbe.
“Share the Care” came two years later and is a more compact, less ambitious film–a snipe made to be shown between trailers and other advertisements at local theaters before the feature attraction. Narrated by WGN radio announcer Norman Ross, “Share the Care” breezes past the parks’ many recreational activities before settling into a folksy invitation to join the ‘anti-litter crusade’: “Do you know anything more aggravating than a littered spot for recreation? Littered lawns are a poor reminder of pleasant outings, aren’t they?” The historical record is comparatively sparse on “Share the Care.” It does not appear to have been produced by Chicago Film Laboratory, Inc. The only contemporary reference is a copyright registration filed by John Clarence Richardson of Chicago, a freelance newsreel cameraman. The extent of its exhibition and dissemination is unknown, but it remains a compelling example of the way that municipal governments utilized film to impart civic cooperation.
ABOUT THE PRESERVATION
Chicago Film Society received a donation of a 35mm nitrate fine grain master of “Share the Care” in 2021. In 2024, CFS received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation to preserve the film. The preservation was entirely photochemical, with a new duplicate negative created at FotoKem and a new optical negative produced at Simon Daniel Sound.