Blogger Erin Chase:“I stood there, an American citizen, a mom traveling with a baby with special needs formula, sexually assaulted by a government official. I began shaking and felt completely violated, abused and assaulted by the TSA agent. I shook for several hours, and woke up the next day shaking.”
Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano:“I think we all understand the concerns Americans have. It’s something new. Most Americans are not used to a real law enforcement pat-down like that.”
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,when asked if she would like to go through the new pat-downs: “Not if I could avoid it. No. I mean, who would?”
Almost four years ago and long before the “body scanners," it occurred to me that the Transportation Security Administration was an abusive, unsupervised, and frighteningly secretive agency, worthy of serious criticism. I decided to write a book. Two years later “Please Remove Your Shoes” had become a movie, and the film had altered course significantly from the one I drafted in January of 2008, as a first-time documentary producer.
Much more interested in the context of airport security than the execution, I wanted to explore how we had become so paranoid that we would accept TSA’s “tinhorns” at the airport. What had been the role of the media? Was there a sociological twist to 911 that made it impossible for the “land of the free and home of the brave” to see through the demagogues and the security “experts” that suddenly appeared behind every bush? (pun intended). After nine months of on-camera interviews of scholars of the media, security critics, sociologists, and a cadre of ex-TSA whistleblowers, I thought I’d captured my film. But I was in for a real shock.
In the course of looking for an editor, I had discovered a professional editor/producer of commercials who was looking to branch out. Rob DelGaudio also came with a production crew and a writer -- an offer too good to refuse. But as he explained as gently as he could, my work to date was static, of poor technical quality, and most important -- the interviews had been conducted without a shooting script or any sense of where I was trying to go with the story. A story consultant I hired confirmed the problem: the reels and reels of interview tapes I had “in the can” at best could be used for a series of twenty-minute docs. As an attempt at a feature-length film they would have been a crashing bore. Perhaps Sam Goldwyn’s classic quote could be modified: “If you’re going to produce a message, at least make sure it entertains!”
So we started all over again. We were able to use my footage as screen tests to isolate the interesting characters, and Rob’s writer, Rocco Giuliano, helped us focus on the most compelling story from which to interview a group of six ex-military government employees who had eventually fought back against a bureaucracy that wouldn’t even let them do the jobs they had been assigned.
