Jun. 7--Mandy Dalton is a professional clown. She likes to make kids laugh.

"We're kind of the blue-collar workers of the entertainment industry. We get paid contractually," she said. "We're the ones that have to show up with a big smile on our face and make sure everyone is having a good time."

But she doesn't have any smiles left for General Growth Properties Inc.

On March 18, Dalton juggled, danced and made goofy faces for children gathered at Owings Mills Mall, just outside of Baltimore. On April 16, Chicago-based General Growth, the mall's owner, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection from creditors.

As a result, Dalton still is trying to collect her $200 fee.

When a company files bankruptcy, if it is big enough and well-known enough, it makes the headlines. If it has viable business prospects, it is given time to work through its debt and emerge from bankruptcy in a pared-down and presumably more financially sound state.

But the same can't always be said of all the smaller concerns left in the wake of larger bankruptcies.

As the pace of corporate bankruptcies quickens, an untold number of companies, many relatively unknown, find themselves caught up in the spillover effect, and their own fortunes are affected.

Typically, vendors that supply companies with goods and services are unsecured creditors, meaning they are at the end of the line seeking repayment when a company goes bust. Many of them go empty-handed. Some go bust themselves.

For the first five months of the year, 709 commercial bankruptcies were filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Illinois. That compares with 1,140 for all of last year, 749 in 2007 and 589 in 2006, according to data from Aacer, a bankruptcy data and management company. Those numbers don't include the large companies that often file for bankruptcy in Delaware.

The fallout from corporate bankruptcies goes beyond the potential loss of a storied name like GM or a longtime brand like Hartmarx, said Robert Lawless, a University of Illinois law professor.

The paper trail that accumulates in a corporate bankruptcy can fill a banker's box or a filing cabinet, but it invariably includes the names of businesses big and small that are owed money. The process of sorting it all out can take months or years. As a result, the outcome of the process is critical not just to the filing company's stakeholders and employees but also to any company that had a relationship with the venture.

"Who cares about the name on the door?" Lawless said. "What we really want to make sure is the assets and the jobs that a company like Hartmarx represents continue to be productive jobs and assets for the economy. And just because it's not the company you work for, that doesn't mean it doesn't affect you."

General Growth, which declined to comment, is a case in point. It is one of the nation's largest shopping mall operators and ranks as one of the biggest real estate bankruptcies in U.S. history. It owes big banks and bondholders billions of dollars.