Project History: What America Needs

THE EARLY YEARS

1992: What America Needs started in 1992. I had just graduated from college and knew I wanted to tour the country and make a documentary. I toured that first year with another Minnesota filmmaker, Matt Gannon. We toured from Minneapolis to Boston , New York, Key West and Louisiana met a lot of people and had quite an adventure.

1993: I toured with Hunter Mann , a filmmaker and promoter from Washington State. We traveled and interviewed people from Minneapolis, Kansas City and finally ended in Denver, Colorado.

These projects never were completed into finished films but it provided me and the crew with a lot of research and life experiences for what would come later.

1994: In this documentary, filmed during a two-week road trip covering the length of the Mississippi River I toured with New York artist and filmmaker Matt Bakkom. We decided we needed to ask What America Needs along the entire length of the Mississippi river . We started at the headwaters in Lake Itasca in Northern Minnesota and traveled by car to Venice Louisiana - the last town in Louisiana delta. We posed our -What do you think America needs?- question to people we met along the river’s banks. The resulting footage was a poignant and thought-provoking tapestry of diverse opinions, insights and reflections-a sort of collective “state of the union” address delivered by individuals whose perspectives would typically go unheard and undocumented by conventional media.

In the 1995 film, the public cited three major concerns: loss of community, joblessness and distrust of politicians.

After filming in Super 8 movie, we edited this piece with sound artist Cine DJ K-60 (aka Chris Kubick). It is this film that became the first finished film “What America Needs -an Interior Expedition”.

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