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. Production of the film began in Las Vegas and LA in the spring of 2009 and we started editing that fall. The end result was beyond my wildest dreams.
While the production quality is as good as the best of documentaries and the testimony is a scathing indictment of the worst federal agency in history, apparently that wasn’t enough for the festival circuit. Most of them wouldn’t look at it. With excellent publicity efforts by 42West, CNN has reported on the film, as has Fox, ABC, CBC. On the strength of the project I have been invited to speak on NPR and dozens of local and syndicated radio programs. But from the festivals? Crickets.
Right about now I’m sure I’ve got a few readers who are smelling “sour grapes.” But audiences seem to agree with me. We came very close to the audience award at the Kansas Film Festival, and the Q&A that followed was exhausting (as well as stimulating). In short, audiences have been gripped by it. Small wonder, for a subject that involves two million traveling Americans a day, whether they like it or not. Further discussion at another festival (name withheld to protect the guilty) revealed that its jurors were largely actors. I’m sorry guys, I can’t offer you future work … I can only afford to produce one movie in my life.
And let’s look at the plight of the old-school documentary for a second. Has the deluge of reality TV and the format of the little ‘ol documentary filmmaker on location while he questions unwilling interviewees (you know who I’m referring to) done much to enhance the medium, or has it limited it for the audience and “dumbed it down?” Documentaries, after all, tend to attract a different audience: truth-seekers. They actually want to know what’s going on — on a range of subjects. But the new distribution world tended to label Please Remove Your Shoes as “newsy.”
I’m beginning to think that it’s a prejudice associated with the topic more than the film. Maybe we’ve all been too conditioned to the endless talking heads after 9-11, and subconsciously just want to turn off the switch
So at the distribution stage, we find some strange resistance. Is it partisan? Don’t think so, we didn’t mention political parties even once. Smart money says (and I didn’t do it for the money) that if we’d reported on an airport at which the TSA was using renewable energy to power the body scanners that irradiate your genitals, maybe we’d have been accepted at Hot Docs, or Silver Docs, or Tribeca. Maybe festival organizers enjoy the “enhanced patdown.” I don’t know.
But at the end of the day there appears a certain ugly similarity between the tightly closed world of film festivals and our federal government: they’re both run by a relatively small group of insiders who want to control their agendas, inconsistent to the point of hypocrisy, and who (despite any evidence to the contrary) always “know what’s best” for their markets — audiences or citizens alike.
But we’ll get the word out regardless. Thanks to Meyer Schwarzstein and Brainstorm Media we are now situated on all the Video On Demand channels. We’re picking away at other opportunities and doing a lot of screenings to audiences who are aghast at the arrogance and presumptions of a federal government embodied by TSA. As I write this, a traveler somewhere who looks about as much like a terrorist as Tom Hanks or Ron Howard is being groped by a federal employee at the airport. TSA has become a jobs program that everyone in congress is too timid to close down. PRYS will help on this front, and we’ll be conducting some screenings in the halls of congress in January and February. TSA is anathema to the fundamentals of this democratic republic.
This is a story that simply has to be told. Or, if you prefer, we’ll call it a “message.” Sorry, Sam.