DU'ers -- Please help us finish our film on campaign reform!

[TOOLZ]

Hey D.U.'ers! Can you help?

We're trying to film the 2010 elections and expose Citizens United, but we need help to reach our pledge deadline in the next couple days to be able to do it! Please help us on Kickstarter http://kck.st/cAOSkM so that we can follow the money and finish this film! We need grassroots support, because corporate media will probably not be the outlet for this muckraking documentary.

For the last four years, I have been working on my documentary about why we need campaign reform. My film PAY 2 PLAY: Democracy’s High Stakes (http://pay2play.tv) was inspired by meeting great candidates who still struggled to succeed because of the devastating costs of running for office. I realized that if we ever want to improve America, we have to level the playing field for public office, so I wanted to show how badly it was needed. The issue has exploded this year with Citizens United, and I began to explore this infamous Supreme Court ruling and investigate the right-wing media group itself.

Right now I am in the home stretch of raising the money needed to cover the 2010 elections. I have only a few days to reach my pledge target on the website Kickstarter to be eligible to receive any of the donations made so far. Please take a minute and contribute what you can: http://kck.st/cAOSkM

I am learning what new candidates have to face: asking everyone they have ever known to contribute to their campaign. And yet, this is exactly what my film is about: how the demands of demanding money not only drive out the good candidates and distract them from policy, but this also open the doors wide for corruption. I am now doing "call time" like the candidates I have been following in Ohio since 2006.

I am also learning how inspiring it feels to find people who support our project because they also believe that clean elections are urgently needed in America.

One newcomer candidate said to me: "A true politician can ask unflinchingly for a thousand dollars—I don’t know if I’m there yet." You can see this candidate, Surya "Chili" Yalamanchil, currently running against Rep. Jean Schmidt (R) and his one-man campaign in action here: http://pay2play.tv/?page_id=50

My doc PAY 2 PLAY goes from the Citizens United decision to the campaign trail in Ohio. It compares the corrupting process of running for office to an updated board game like Monopoly -- it also delves into the dark origins of Monopoly itself, and how the original game predicted the financial meltdown we face today.

This is an essay film, a polemic that will weave together revelations about the corporate grab at our elections with powerful character stories of progressives trying to run for office, illustrating the barriers to democracy that we need to change.

I am also asking you to share this with your friends, co-workers, family, and social media. That is how this kind of campaign works, and how it succeeds!

My sincere thanks,

John Ennis
PAY 2 PLAY: Democracy’s High Stakes
http://pay2play.tv



About Myself:

My last film FREE FOR ALL! (http://freeforall.tv) exposed voter suppression and election fraud throughout Ohio in 2004. It took years to make, but we have been streaming it online for FREE because the information is too important, and you’ll never get it through the mainstream media. It opened the eyes of Roger Ebert, who said that FREE FOR ALL! was "engrossing, even enraging...has a lot to say."

The documentary also followed me co-founding Video the Vote (http://videothevote.org), an activist effort to organize volunteers with video cameras to shoot and report polling problems on Election Day.

This year, I was named the Executive Director of Public Interest Pictures (http://pipdocs.org), the 501(c)(3) documentary production company that produced Hacking Democracy and Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election. I am honored to be continuing PIP’s mission and vigilance in exposing electoral injustice with my current film PAY 2 PLAY.

Also on the subject of campaign reform, I just wrote these pieces on the Huffington Post:

Huff Politics: "When Karl Rove Squeals, You're Doing Something Right" http://huff.to/a5krwj

Huff Comedy: "Truth in Campaign Advertising?" (VIDEO) - http://huff.to/bPM1VS

Thanks for all you do!

John Wellington Ennis
www.johnennis.tv