“Who cares about Howard Dean anymore, Heath?”
I’ve been getting that a lot even as we approach DFA’s 5th birthday party.
I’m “deantv,” or Heath Eiden, the director of “Dean and Me: Roadshow of an American Primary.”
My wife and I are at the end of our rope.
We sold 16 acres of Vermont farmland to a developer to keep this film alive. We have no more land to sell.
We need your help.
This historical archive of our community's Democratic action is important. A tragic comedy shot in Cinema Verite’, we hope to share it with you at Netroots Nation.
My production team, Iris Cahn and Deanna Kamiel of the SUNY Purchase Film School have given all they can to date.
This is the story of the making of the film. We hope you will be compelled to pre-order your copy of the final cut so we can send it out for popular review.
$25,000 is our goal. Expenses are explained below.
You'll get into a raffle for a free week stay at a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
It's "Stone Soup" time. Will you help us?
Please read on...
UPDATE: PS: I'll be interviewed tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern By Cenk Uygur for The Young Turks show!
..............
This is the story of the making of the film. We hope you will be compelled to pre-order your copy of the final cut so we can send it out for popular review.
$25,000 is our goal.
Expenses are explained below.
You'll get into a raffle for a free week stay at a hotel in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
It's "Stone Soup" time. Will you help us?
Please read on.................
If there are so many in Washington, D.C. who wanted Howard Dean out of the cocktail Party, there must be a reason for it, right? He stood up alone for us on a soapbox in the public square and said proudly, "I'm here to represent the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party," when no one else would under the shadow of war. As much as D.C. would like him to just go away now--he's not going to. He's going to continue to stand up for us and fight the good fight on issues like health care. It's up to us now to stand up for him, and here is another way to do just that. This is the story of what it took to make this film so far and why it is important that we put the finishing touch on it to make it accessible to the next generations. This is about us as a community and why we care enough to respond to the kind of integrity and courage leaders like Howard Dean and President Obama stand for. You'll come to understand why this had to be done from an objective, outsider's lens. In this first part, we hope to gain your trust above all else. However, my family can't take the burden alone anymore. We need your help.
Part I: The Beginning
We Won!
I hitched a ride down to the Lincoln Memorial on the eve of President Obama’s inauguration day to shoot the final scene of the film we've been touring festivals with for the past year.
Ironically, it will be the opening scene of the final cut, six years later.
“Who really cares about Howard Dean anymore, Heath? That’s the question you’re going to run into from distributors under this brutal economy.”
I certainly couldn’t afford another trip down to D.C. so
the question kept ringing in my ears. Still, this was the historic moment we had all worked so hard for and it was important for the integrity of the film. I couldn’t miss it.
This particular V.P. of acquisitions at a left-friendly L.A. studio has been great with his candor. He’s a huge fan of Howard Dean. “One of the most dynamic politicians I’ve ever seen,” he said.
However, he also said he can't get his partners to come on board unless they see some real proof that people really do still care about Dean and his grassroots supporters.
“And, wouldn’t Dean be proud if the film about his campaign is supported by the same movement that organized around him?”
The Reality.
You see, unless you have the Obama film right now, or have a proven business model like one of our automatically recc'ed heroes, Michael Moore, political documentaries are considered “too risky” a genre to justify the cost it takes to market them. That’s why, the producers of “Dean and Me” are asking for your help to put the finishing touch on it by pre-ordering the film.
This is the first time I’ve had to beg, frankly (I’ll explain why we're at this point as this story develops). You did help us stay alive back in 2005 when your contributions paid for our web site before we even had a rough cut under way (I have not forgotten you!).
This film was shot and edited in the style of Cinema Verite’, or “film truth." As the audience, your intelligence is respected as the film does not provide you with explanatory narration, nor does it shamelessly seek to glorify Howard Dean with overly gushing interviews and crying violins. You see Dean for who he was in 2004 and beyond. 1960’s “Primary,” produced by Robert Drew, shot by Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, and edited by D. A. Pennebaker had a big influence on me as the director via my film mentor SUNY Purchase Film School, and The New School's Deanna Kamiel. That film involved JFK and Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin Primary.
"Dean and Me" take you across the country for Dean's entire 2004 primary season in places like; Vermont (Burlington, Morristown, Stowe), New Hampshire (Concord, Laconia, Manchester, Nashua, Plymouth, Walpole), Boston, Mass., New York City, Minnesota (Minneapolis. St. Paul), Iowa (Carroll, Des Moines, Mason City), Washington, D.C., and Madison, Wisconsin, etc.
This is a slice of OUR time; this is one of OUR time capsules. You jump into the car with us for a comedic roadshow and explore how our American primary system really works behind the traditional media's manipulation of it.
We knew early on that filmmaker Ken Burns supported this historical film and wanted to see a larger film on the media (we did it, Mr. Burns!). We know audiences love the film. We know critics love the film. We know that film festivals so far in Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Connecticut support the film. Even the media covers this film with joy despite the fact that the cameras are turned on them too.
And you know what? All of this support for a film that, technically speaking, isn't finished yet.
I'd Had Enough On The Sidelines
Soon after moving to Vermont from NYC in 1999, it had become clear to me that my beloved Democratic Party was becoming a shadow of its former self. At least in the past, Democrats knew what they were supposed to say they stood for. Democrats were simply giving up on long-standing core Democratic Party principles in favor of staying in power for power's sake.
Instead of offering the American people an alternative vision for the future of our country, we started seeing more and more Democrats acting like Republicans without respect for the people who actually elected them. The term "Bush Lite"
would soon be coined after the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the White House on a 5-4 split based on ideological lines. This, despite Al Gore winning the popular vote.
Meanwhile, the idea that the "4th column" had some sort of responsibility to the public with regards to fairness, objective reporting, or doing actual, you know, research and reporting had been quickly deteriorating along with the Democratic Party's allegiance to K Street instead of Main Street.
In the wake of President Clinton's Telecommunications Act of 1996, the already dwindling number of media companies acted quickly to consolidate even more. The emergence of cable news offshoots like CNN had challenged the eyeball counts of the big three, and finally, covering so diligently the O.J. Simpson feeding frenzy, the traditional media "jumped the shark" and merged with the tabloid media. Even though I was now in Vermont to witness former Republican Senator Jim "thanks Jim" Jeffords switch
parties to caucus with the Democrats (and throw the Senate back to the Democrats in May, 2001), it was clear that BushCo’s intentions were anything but governing with "compassionate conservatism." I really didn't need any evidence of that looking at the roster of thugs they had assembled to win the election. The "No Child Left Behind" education steaming pile and the Bush Energy Task Force were just two pieces of the mounting evidence that they had no intention of governing--they were quite simply out to destroy and take as much from the government as they could by any means. And boy were they good at it from day one.
It was also becoming dangerously clear that any future child of mine was going to be living in a country that would have much less opportunity for him or her than I had if these madmen weren't stopped somehow. Without any opposition by the Democrats, you know, “the party of the little guy,” huge tax cuts for the wealthiest in our country were passed seemingly without debate. The evidence just kept mounting that our own leadership team had simply succumbed to the same forces of privilege that the Republicans were taking their marching orders from.
It was becoming apparent to me that the "great" conservative movement spurred on by Barry Goldwater’s defeat in 1964 and harnessed by President Reagan was peaking in terms of its racist, corporatist, sell-out, “only the strong survive” philosophy of the extreme right wing. Yet, dare I say, even Reagan’s legacy was being exploited by the new brand of neo-conservativism that had just suckered Americans into thinking they were getting more of "the great communicator" under the Roman helmet of the “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” candidate, George W. Bush. The right cupped their ears while Bush started humming “onward Christian soldiers." Americans were being prepared for a more overt perpetual war.
Back To The Beltway
I’d studied and earned a B.A. in journalism at The George Washington University at the end of the Reagan Administration and through President George H. W. Bush’s Administration. I interned and worked throughout the swamp that is D.C. and slithered around Capitol Hill for various institutions; CBS News Nightwatch with Charlie Rose, The United States Trade Representative, MCI Communications, the Christian Science Monitor’s “World Monitor” program.
I ended up in the White House for a spell as a gaffer for a small network that provided President Clinton’s outside satellite communication feeds. I wired Hillary for satellite feeds and gabbed around with the lifers in the White House. I even got in trouble once for using the CNN reporter’s wall phone.
I studied journalism under real old-time professional journalists like Professor Charles Puffenbarger, who had a distinguished career at the Washington Post before it became a talking point rag for the Bush White House war machine. I studied on the back of the Lincoln Memorial and marveled at the power of the press that was the shiny glass Gannett building across the Potomac in Arlington. In recent years they’d just introduced color to the print newspaper business en mass and sold their USA Today rags in boxes that looked just like—TV’s!
Symbolically, that shiny building has since become a headquarters for the defense contractor, Northrup Grumman as the war business booms and the news business consolidates. I suppose it’s no coincidence that one of the last times I visited the Lincoln Memorial, when Bush was still living down the road, I noticed that the once cool, occasional fly-by of a helicopter along the Potomac River has since become a “superhighway” for the Pentagon. It’s the only way to travel with your Congressperson.
Then It Happened
In May, 2001 my wife Sandra jumped into bed screaming for joy with a positive pregnancy test in hand.
My world had just ended. Or, was it was just beginning?
“So, we’re agreed then, if it’s a boy we’re going to name him Atticus, right?” said Sandra.
“Of course—this world needs another Atticus right now,” I laughed.
I had no idea Atticus would become a 5-year-old expert on butterflies at the time.
Nor did I know my son would come to symbolize the birth of our grassroots movement for me, personally. When Dean conceded, we kept fighting anyhow--the same way Dean soldiered on for Senator John Kerry. Dean kept his chin up despite the way the traditional media set him up for the so-called “Dean Scream” moment.
New York City
We had moved to Vermont to get out of the rat race in Manhattan and raise a family. We were finding it harder to think about leaving as the money continued to get better. There was a real threat that I might end up on a train for four hours a day commuting from the tri-state area. You know, the suburbs, where it wouldn't be so hard to carry a baby stroller up three flights of stairs. It just didn't sound appealing to us at the time as hard as it was to imagine leaving "fun city."
Sandra, the film's other Executive Producer, was a “garmento” in mid-town, selling whatever knock-off sweaters her regular clients would buy in quantity. I was in SOHO, playing “chess” with the new owners of the tech magazines I was selling advertising space for who had just bought us out from Scholastic Inc. We had been put on the chopping block because of the sudden drop of interest in the Goosebumps children's book series. It killed the price of the company's stock.
I had started out on the editorial side of publishing but had moved over to the dark side of advertising sales after noticing that all the business guys seemed to be having the most fun. Frankly, with all the fancy expense accounts, it was more fun since most nights I was also studying for my Masters Degree in Publishing from New York University. However, I never forgot my friends from the edit side. Some of them just couldn’t believe me when I told them, “start looking now!”
We were being sold to a predatory company. “These guys take no prisoners,” I warned. “Look at their history. They buy magazines on the block, remove any ethical line between the sales and edit side, chop the leaders’ heads off, slowly weed out only the bottom line necessary staff to cut the real costs down, and then find another buyer who is willing to look the other way from the inflated circulation numbers and lack of ethical standards.”
At one point, the new owner of the company came into my office and sat down and laughed at the plants hanging off my desk and the Elvis poster tacked to the wall.
The displays of defiance had been my little way of saying, “make my day.” He had come to apologize for the way his team had screwed up my termination as the Midwest territory sales representative by openly interviewing people in my Chicago office while I was in New York.
My assistant in Chicago, a nice person, gave me the heads up. The boss offered me another position with a magazine that he said had potential and dangled the “plum” of moving out to fantastic L.A. I declined and he ended up offering a pretty decent severance package so he could quickly get on with the rest of the hangings.
We said goodbye to Manhattan that Thanksgiving in 1998. The magazines were quickly sold. Soon after the tech boom burst, the publications ceased to exist at all.
Vermont
What made the transition to Vermont easier for us was that Sandra’s mother had told us that she couldn't handle the upkeep of her old farmhouse anymore and was going to sell and move back to family in Greenbrook, New Jersey. It had been pretty rough for Gail on her own up there for 8 years after her divorce from Sandra's father.
I'd never been to the Green Mountain state. Upon checking it out, I noticed there were no billboards allowed in Vermont. We were within two hours of Montreal, three hours of Boston, and 5 hours of New York City and it was this pristine farm country with splendid small towns and a tradition of independently spirited and open debate. Of course, it was summer at the time, but I was hooked.
We bought the 1832 leaning red farmhouse (that had once been a stage coach stop) and started working on its severe disrepair. The first thing I did was put storm windows in. Poor Gail. She must have been freezing up there, I thought. Then again, she's one of the those people who would drive you nuts because she was so positive about everything. You know the type.
It turned out Gail didn’t have to move back down to New Jersey, after all! Now she had family in Vermont and the promise of grandchildren. So she bought another small house right down the road in Stowe with the money from the farmhouse she sold us.
I had no idea what this would mean at the time, but let's just say I was learning what “family values” really means.
I started writing feature articles as a freelancer for the Burlington Free Press, of the Gannett family of thinning newspapers. It was really a great way to learn about the people and peccadilloes of the great state of Vermont.
I started learning about this pragmatic doctor and Governor Howard Dean who was always so concerned about balancing budgets. I thought that was a Republican thing? The country had been pulled so far to the right by Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay Republicans
that a buttoned-down centrist-Democrat from Vermont was looking about as left as I could hope for to take on Bush from outside of Washington, D.C. And, he lived down the road!
The whispers were only beginning to swirl about a possible run at the time but I thought here's a possible lightning rod for the Democrats who could really work the parades, pols, and diners in the neighboring state of New Hampshire.
Then It Really Happened
The attacks of September 11, 2001 hit while Sandra, nesting at four months, shopped for baby supplies in the big city of Burlington, Vermont. The entire world wept for America and offered their sympathy and support to take on the perpetrators.
Then, a few days later, unscripted for the last time, I heard George W. Bush declare on National Public Radio that we Americans, all of us, were on: "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism."
"A crusade? God help us now, honey," I recall muttering to my wife as we drove over to a friend's house on the rocky coast of Maine for some contemplation under airplane-less skies.
This was the moment when I knew our whole nation was so vulnerable that they would follow a snake down a hole if they were promised false security. If we didn't find some leadership soon, I thought, outspoken Democrats like me would eventually be asking our neighbors if we could hide in their barns.
"Fear" had just become Karl Rove's re-election strategy for 2004.
The Painting
In 2002, Howard Dean was wrapping up his last of five two-year terms as the Governor of Vermont. As is the tradition for every governor, he had to commission an artist to paint his official portrait for the state capitol building in Montpelier. He chose local Stowe, Vermont artist Carroll N. Jones, Jr. whom I had befriended through mutual friends.
I approached Carroll and his agent and asked if it would be okay to film the process of making "the governor's portrait." They agreed knowing that I had previous experience making documentary films and that it could potentially make for a fascinating short film.
The process started with some photos 
on the shores of a glimmering Lake Champlain, near Dean's house in Burlington. It was a beautiful Fall day in Vermont. It was perfect for the photo shoot and important to get it done quickly because Dean didn't didn't have much time to sit around.
Then, the artist had to sketch the entire canvass 
from the pictures to create the entire panoramic view.
While filming the different stages of the painting being completed, Jones and I talked about what Dean might have been contemplating when he decided to pose for the pictures with the canoe paddle in hand and casual dress.
Jones talked about the many portraits he had done in the past and admired how this Governor wanted to try something different that would help express how strikingly beautiful Vermont is and that it has a reputation for healthy activity. He wasn't interested in hanging in a museum as a guy in a suit who's just "all full of himself."
While painting Dean's face, 
the artist commented that it “showed thought and contemplation.” That was the challenge the artist faced as he captured it in the tradition of Renaissance style painting.
Jones did not put the finishing touches on the painting until he actually met with the Governor at the statehouse to deliver the painting personally.
When the painting was officially unveiled, famed Vermont muckraker, the late great Peter Freyne said to me:“it looks like he’s ready to set out on a great adventure.”
Subsequently, I had my first interview with the Governor. 
I started a film called, “The Governor’s Portrait.” Technically, it's the same film in progress, it's just taken us six years to get to the finish line.
From there, I started to think of ways I could use the footage of him to help him in his rumored run for the Democratic Nomination.
By then, it was too late for me to jump out of the canoe. But where would I get the resources to keep the direction of a potential film going you'll hear more about that in the next segment)? Local historians were already warning me that this little obsession of Dean’s--running for President--would end very quickly. It didn’t matter: Dean was the only outsider raising questions about the direction our country was going in at the time.
Dean and Me
We didn’t have much of a map but we started paddling up river anyhow. We were determined to do something about the wrong direction our country was going in without real opposition from the Democratic Party.
Now, you’re not going to see the story of the painting in this movie. That’s another film. As producers we determined that it would take too much away from the heart of the story: the grassroots movement growing around Howard Dean's courage to stand up to the entrenched establishment power and "Take On The System."
End Part 1
Thanks to the Democracy For America officials for watching the film with us and letting us know how much you like it. Happy birthday DFA! In Part 2 of this series we will tell you about the concept behind DeanTV.org and my association with Aziz Poonawalla's original Dean Nation blog (including Ezra Klein, Anna Brosovic, Jerome Armstrong, Joe Rospars and others). The goal was to try and let people know that the Governor was more than just a 15 second sound bite as controlled by the traditional media. Here's a list of what we need to wrap this up and get it to you. Please pre-order your copy or donate whatever you can if you believe in this film so far. If we can please "save our stock footage" from deteriorating drives it would be a huge relief. Stone Soup: If you are in a position to donate resources other than money, like your time and studio to do the sound mix, or unused drives, a distribution warehouse, cover art for the DVD, legal work for the Errors and Omissions insurance, or a case of beer, please get a hold of us and we will quickly update our status.
We did it at our own peril, of course, but we thought this part of our history was this important:
Like the Distributor told me: We'd love to see this film finished the same way it started, with people so concerned about their country and the future of their children that they set aside their regular lives to find each other and work on a common cause and an idea bigger than themselves.
If anyone has any questions or ideas or personal comments, please feel free to email me directly: heatheiden@aol.com thanks for hearing us out!
PS: I'll be interviewed tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern By Cenk Uygur for The Young Turks show!
Heath Eiden, director, Dean and Me
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