John Logue, the main character in my film Blue State (premiering at Tribeca), considers himself to be an influential political blogger. He has given up his job and his girlfriend to devote himself full-time to Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. He documents his experiences campaigning in the swing state of Ohio, and his subsequent road trip to Canada after Bush wins, on a blog he calls "The Donkey Revolution-dot-com."
I am thrilled to be invited to write a blog for the Huffington Post--even for a short time--because HuffPo has some similarities to The Donkey Revolution: both are left-leaning websites; both started around the time of the 2004 Presidential campaign; both were fueled by a desire to give Democrats a greater voice among the political chattering classes, and by an even stronger desire to get Bush the hell out of office.
But there are a few crucial differences:
First, lots of people read the Huffington Post every day. No one reads The Donkey Revolution.
Second, the Huffington Post is a real website that features the blogging efforts of real people. The Donkey Revolution, on the other hand, was invented two years after the 2004 election as a prop website for our film Blue State. The character, who writes the blog, John Logue, is a fictional character. You see, we needed a site for our lead actor Breckin Meyer to be able to use during filming, so we bought the domain name www.thedonkeyrevolution.com and had a friend of ours create a graphic of a rabid-looking donkey with bloodshot eyes and a comical "hee-haw" that greets you when you first visit the site. During my few free moments during preproduction, I wrote a few fake blog entries. It was a strange form of stress relief I developed as we prepared to shoot the film.
Needless to say, the shots of the blog were not my DP's favorite setups during production. I don't think Phil Parmet--a 64 year-old veteran of Barbara Kopple documentaries, a war cameraman in Beirut in the early Eighties and on Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains the Same--was particularly excited to find himself in a Super 8 Motel in Winnipeg filming screen shots of this blog on my old ibook screen. Thankfully, he got to show his cinematographic skills elsewhere in the film.
At this point you might be wondering why the Tribeca Film Festival would choose to include a movie about a guy who writes a blog. Doesn't sound like the most cinematic subject matter. But there is more to the movie than that. What is Blue State about? It's about a committed political activist who, while working on the Kerry campaign, finds himself compelled to follow through on his promise move to Canada after Bush gets re-elected. It stars Breckin Meyer and Anna Paquin, and it is not a documentary.
Since I began working on this film and started telling people its premise, many people respond that they had friends or family who made the same promise during those heady days of 2004, in the months before our country so sagely re-elected our president. But few, if any, of them actually made good on their promise...although there was reportedly a spike in visits to Canada's immigration website.
So Blue State started with this simple "what-if" premise, but it became something else--a love story, a road trip film, a coming-of-age story. I wanted to tell an entertaining, funny, compelling story that also captures some of the confusion that our generation seems to struggle with whenever we try to make a difference in the world. We know what we believe in--ending the war in Iraq, fighting for a clean environment and energy policy, holding the government and corporations to a standard where they act as responsible global citizens. But we don't always know what we can do personally. This is the dilemma that John Logue faces, and it leads him on a somewhat misguided trip north.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing occasionally about my experience premiering Blue State at Tribeca. I'm looking forward (through my fingers) to seeing and hearing how audiences react to the film. I hope it spurs some interesting discussions.