DATELINE: Minneapolis, the National Media Reform Conference, held by the Free Press.
DAY 1 — June 6, 2008
A half hour before the screening, I still hadn’t received my entrée, so I went to the bathroom. On my way, I looked inside the theater. The chairs were set up, the projector was on, but it was blue, because there was no DVD player.
I went down to the front desk, slightly unnerved. As I lingered at the reception area while the one guy working was on the phone, in walked Dan Rather. Just like that, with a rollaway suitcase. There was a woman with him, his news assistant. He wasn’t going to be helped any time soon, because I was tying up the hotel’s resources looking for a DVD Player.
I went over. “Hi Mr. Rather, My name’s John Ennis, I’m a filmmaker, it’s a real pleasure to meet you.”
He warmly grasped my hand, and took me in. I explained how much I appreciated his HD Net show on The Trouble With Touchscreens, which he seemed to really appreciate. I mentioned that I was about to premiere my own documentary on election theft. He seemed struck and happy to hear about such a thing being done.
And that’s when I slipped Dan Rather a condom.
My exec producer Holly had a moment of spontaneous genius a couple weeks before, and insisted we order condoms with wrappers that looked like the Election Protection buttons. “Don’t get screwed at the polls – freeforall.tv” They had proved to be a great icebreaker handing out at the conference, where a bunch of similar-minded news geeks are very approachable for such discussions.
Anyway, I handed it to Dan, and said, “I’m sure you could use some Election Protection.” He looked at it, and threw back his head and laughed. He said he couldn’t come to the screening tonight, but was glad to hear about my movie and wanted to see it. He even said all Dan Rather-like: “Free For All,’ that’s a good name, John.”
I was so tickled I forgot that he’s actually in the film at several points. And while none of it is from his HD Net special, a lot of that footage might (or might not) be from a certain HD Net special. No, I show Rather blowing off exit polls in 2004, scoffing at the striking irregularities, when he was still smarting from getting his hide tanned over that National Guard story.
That National Guard story about Bush, by the way, will be proven the greatest Rove backstab and simultaneous deflection ever. He ended Rather’s career while distracting from W’s striking “lost time” in the Texas Air Guard with the other rich kids. Someday Dan will be vindicated.
Anyway, I’m sitting in the theater waiting for a DVD player, looking at how empty it was. I heard the door in the back opened up, Oh phew, the DVD player. I turned around and no. It was not the dude from the hotel. It was Clint Curtis.
Clint Curtis is perhaps the most outspoken whistleblower about the hackability of electronic voting machines to flip an election. He wrote the software to do it. When he learned it wasn’t to troubleshoot software security, but to reverse the outcome of a Florida congressmen’s race, he refused to help, and instead reported his boss and the Rep. Tom Feeney. Curtis proceeded to run against Feeney, lost narrowly, then methodically gathered the affidavits of enough voters to disprove the official election results.
His story is election reformist legend. He’s well covered in Uncounted, another great recent doc on election fraud, also screening at the Conference this weekend.
Clint is very distinct in his light blonde hair and moustache and expressive demeanor. He was immediately recognizable to me, as he would be to however many other election geeks there are like me out there. I asked, even though I already knew.
“Are you Clint Curtis?” Clint looked surprised I would know who he was.
“Yeah! How’d you know? Are you the director?”
“Yes.”
“Am I in this?”
It sort of seemed like he was doing a walk-on appearance in my world, or like something in a Charlie Kaufman film. I explained that since he was so well featured in Uncounted, I felt like I could show other things in my film. He said he didn’t like seeing himself onscreen anyway.
There was a really enthusiastic response from the people who attended. The film got a lot of solid laughs, surprising me for an activist conference. Many people complimented the tone as well as how the tactics of election fraud are detailed. We got a lot of offers to blog about it, someone from Link TV wanted to broadcast it, and people from different parts of the country were offering to help screen it locally.
People offered feedback on how to improve the film as well. An across the board recommendation was to cut out an indulgent animated piece at the end, which I will heed. Beyond that sore thumb, the critiques were minor and helpful.
And then came my exchange with the two old women who strolled over to me, with a hint of tipsiness in their sway and empty cocktail glass, which we had comped our audience. They proceeded to demand to know if I thought these election issues were not important because I was joking about them. This was serious stuff; to let people laugh I was defeating the purpose of educating them, and making them think they didn’t have to do anything about all this. They threw the word “cognitive dissonance” at me as if I had broken one of the fundamental rules we learn in grade school.
I tried to respectfully point out the possibility of reaching a broader audience through humor.
“What do you want people to do after this?” she kept asking me. I said, pass it on to friends, she said, no, to do. I pointed out what we listed in the film. She shook her head. She was adamant that once they laugh and relieve that anxiety, they wouldn’t go out and do anything. When I offered further points about humor as a tool to enlighten, they turned away in a huff. “Well you asked for our opinion.”
There was a vocal contingent at pretty much every event. So outspoken, some audience members would take the mike during Q&A’s and sometimes dominate the conversation with their own theories, opinions, URLs. After a couple outstanding doc screenings, I saw audience members complain that there wasn’t more about their personal favorite social cause in the film, and how the filmmaker should change it.
