Berwyn’s Caffe Palermo: The auteur inside the coffee shop
April 3, 2014 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
And there’s something you should know about the guy who just made your cappuccino: Vito Brancato may be one of the funniest and most imaginative filmmakers you’ve never heard of.
Caffe Palermo, 6510 Ogden Ave., is a front. Sure, you can get a really good cup of coffee there, as well as a homemade Sicilian cannoli, but the cafe is also known as “Cafe Gangster” in the film world. It serves as a sound stage, editing studio and full on film production company.
On any given day one walks into Caffe Palermo for a cup of coffee, they’ll find owner Vito Brancato behind a computer, working on his latest film. The 44 year-old Chicago resident opened Caffe Palermo in 2001 in what was once a cigar store, mainly to pursue his artistic passions.
“I needed a job, and [former tenant] Ronny Vrhel was moving down the street [to Cigars and Stripes] and said “why don’t you take over my space?” Brancato recalled. “So, I gutted it and opened a coffee shop. I wanted something small that I can operate with as little work as possible, so I can work on my films.”
The interior of Cafe Palermo is romantic to say the least. Lacy lingerie and other clothes hang across the ceiling on a clothesline and noirish film posters line the walls. Even the outside looks like your stepping into an Old World cafe off the streets in Italy.
Caffe Palermo offers an array of drinks and food, from lattes to hot ham and cheese “sangwiches” and specialty drinks such as the Cafe Nutella (made with Nutella and the Tony Montana (lots of caffeine).
But it is the film, not espresso, that define Brancato.
He began his foray in film on the Sports Channel with the first independent wrestling show in Chicago, he said.
“I used to promote wrestling, I wrestled, with Chicago Champions Wrestling in 1987,” Brancato said. “It ran for five years, but half way through the run, we started doing little comedy skits on the wrestling show. I was getting bored with wrestling.”
They started getting more of response for the comedy than the matches, Brancato said, and it soon became a full fledged comedy show called On Edge with the Razor – hosted byBrancato under his former wrestling name.
“It was like a really hard-edged Saturday Night Live, but Razor, was the central character,” he said. “Everything was written around this character. It really built a nice little cult following, but I couldn’t break into bigger media. We were kind of stuck.”
From there, Brancato produced his first feature, a low budget 80-minute film called, “The Life and Times of Tony D.” In the years since, Brancato has written and directed at least 20 different films and multi-episode series, he said. Among them, “Blackstone,” is a short film originally broadcast nationally on PBS on the anniversary of the JFK assassination.
