featured interview:
Swing State Ohio
A conversation with Loren Larsen and Jed Wolfington
(February 2007)
As pundits everywhere salivate over every possible scenario for the 2008 presidential campaign, a new documentary by a quartet of young filmmakers is encouraging voters to not forget the lessons of 2004. Swing State Ohio has been quietly making the screening rounds at colleges across the country, and is now available to the masses on DVD. The hour-long film will also be coming to more screens across the country, thanks to a newly signed deal with Brave New Theaters, an organization that has helped bring exposure to films like Iraq for Sale and The Ground Truth.
Swing State Ohio stands out from the glut of material on the 2004 election—and the decisive impact of Ohio’s electoral votes—because of its lack of an ideological or conspiratorial axe to grind, as well as its on-the-ground, at-the-moment vitality. Rather than recruiting talking heads to analyze the election after the fact, the filmmakers set up camp all the way back in September ‘04, before it was clear that Ohio would indeed be the pivotal state. Without any press credentials, the four producers—Jed Wolfington, Loren Larsen, Lauren Davison, and Paul Davison—hit a campaign trail of their own, making connections, hustling for access, and eventually scoring interviews with the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy, since-elected Sen. Sherrod Brown, Karen Hughes (who didn’t make final cut) and the elusive and controversial Ken Blackwell, then Ohio’s Secretary of State. But the loudest voice in Swing State Ohio belongs to the individual voter, represented in a colorful assortment of interviews held on farms, on campuses, and in homes.
Photograph (L to R): Paul Davison, interviewee and former Ohio Rep. Rob Portman, Loren Larsen, Lauren Davison, Jed Wolfington
How did your vision for Swing State Ohio change between your initial concept for the film and the finished product?
Loren Larsen (producer/correspondent): We went into the process thinking we were just going to make a film about a swing state as citizen journalists to better understand the process. I’m a political science major and I wanted to really see the process in action. We didn’t know that it was going to come down to Ohio. When we first started producing the film, it was on a very broad spectrum: what makes a swing state swing? As we got a couple weeks in, we realized that [the presidential election] really was going to come down to Ohio, and we had to switch our focus to how the candidates were being perceived there.
How did you decide how much of yourselves to put on screen, and how much of your personal politics to wear on your sleeve? For example, there’s one memorable shot of Loren reacting to Kerry’s ill-fated comment about Cheney’s daughter during the debates.
Jed Wolfington (producer/director): In that particular scene, Loren’s reaction so perfectly represented the majority of reactions. I spoke to someone who had seen the film at a showing in California, and, in his mind, that was the key moment in the election. We didn’t want to totally strip Loren and Lauren of their personal views. We knew that the audience wasn’t necessarily interested in hearing their views outright, but if they could infer their views based on things that they did, we felt that would be genuine. It’s a choice of narrative voice.
Were Ohioans burned out from the spotlight?
LL: The people that we spoke to were definitely not burned out. They were frustrated—and, by the end, they were nervous. We went there in late September, and you could feel the fervor everywhere you went in the state. Everyone was tuned in, and people were eager to talk to us. By the end, they became more wary of the candidates and the system, but they were still eager to speak.
Didn’t caution flags go up when people found out that you were individually from New York and California and Washington?
LL: Yeah, a lot of times. We tried to explain to people that the mission of the film was to be as bipartisan and objective as possible. Occasionally people would ask us about our political orientation, and that was something that we went back and forth about with each other: whether to talk openly about that. I found that people were more willing to speak with us once we told them where we stood. I’m liberal, I’m a Democrat, and I found personally that when people would ask about our politics and we said we didn’t want to talk about that, nobody was buying it. But when we said, “This is where we stand, but we’re genuinely open to hearing contrary opinions, and we want to make sure those different opinions are incorporated into the film,” then people were really eager to speak to us and present the other side.
Did you find that you got better answers by allowing people to answer without interference or by challenging them on certain points?
JW: That’s a really good question. I think we’d always start with open-ended questions, and then, if they didn’t go where we wanted them to go, we would be more specific in our questioning to really try to get them to explain themselves. That was less due to technique and more because we didn’t know the nuances of the issues they were discussing. We did our homework, but we weren’t experts on any given matter—and that led to genuine, organic questions that we felt the audience would want to know themselves.
As a viewer, you’re almost conditioned to expect craziness out of conservatives when they appear in documentaries by liberal filmmakers.
JW: That was something that we intended to do differently. Alexandra Pelosi just came out with Friends of God about evangelicals, and it was exactly what you’d expect; I saw it in DC and half the time, the audience was laughing at the people on screen. [Viewers] are refreshed to find reasonable and sympathetic views from either side. It’s the view you don’t get from the networks.
It was definitely to your advantage to have spent time there; it separates the film from others that are more focused on talking heads analyzing the situation after the fact.
LL: Yeah, there were other film crews that came in two or three days before the election, and let loose on Ohio with thousands of video cameras. But you can’t make up for the time spent there, pounding the pavement and living there with the people.
How hard was it to chop down to an hour runtime? Do you have any advice on how to sift through all that footage to find your film.
JW: I think most documentaries are 20 minutes too long—even very good documentaries. I would just say to people, “Have respect for your audience’s time and attention.” Set up a structure and stay loyal to that structure, and be merciless in cutting away anything that doesn’t fit. Function should follow form.
How much of a barrier was it to not be a credentialed member of the media?
JW: It’s encouraging how we were able to do what we did without credentials. If you’re persistent enough, you can get into these events. You need to know the right person to call, and you eventually you need to send them some letterhead with some sort of affiliation. But, for the most part, we found the process to be very transparent.
LL: We had a letter of interest from PBS; it wasn’t credentials, but just showed that we had been in touch with PBS and they were interested. We used that. Each day we’d meet people based on people we’d met the previous day; that group would vouch for us and get us into something even more important. We went to Ohio and we didn’t know a soul. We found a woman on Craigslist and we lived in her three-bedroom apartment for a month and a half. At first, we highlighted groups we wanted to target: pro-life groups, pro-choice groups, environmental groups, companies that were hiring and firing. We pounded on doors every day; some people let us in, and some people didn’t. But that’s how we developed our credibility. It was combination of knowing who to go to, climbing through the ranks, and knowing how to do that effectively. It’s not good enough to call and leave a message on a machine, because no one is calling you back. Make yourself a respectable nuisance, so people understand that you mean it and you’re not out to paint anyone in a poor light.
Right, and you might as well ask, because who knows who will wind up talking to you.
LL: Exactly. It can be embarrassing because you’re asking a lot of people for things. If it’s against your character to ask for favors, it can be a scary process. You really have to put yourself out there, because you get turned down—and sometimes you get turned down in really impolite and ungracious ways. But other times you get a surprise response, and the fulfillment you get out of getting that interview you thought you’d never land…that keeps you going. It gives you confidence to ask for the next one. I spoke to my dad regularly throughout the process, and he would say, “You guys are wildcatting your way through Ohio”—and that became a theme for us. We were scrappers, just wildcatting from interview to interview.
You spent a fair amount of time observing the campaign headquarters of both parties. Did you notice a difference in the way they conducted their business?
JW: There is definitely an organizational distinction between getting in with the Democrats and getting in with the Republicans. It’s very streamlined on the Republican side, and very decentralized on the Democratic side. You walk into a Republican campaign headquarters, and it’s more of a corporate hierarchy. People know what their jobs are from top to bottom, and the decisions come from the top, from the federal to the state to the local level. You can walk into the Democratic campaign headquarters and have no idea who’s in charge there, and that’s kind of the appeal, that energy and organized chaos.
LL: We thought that because of our political leanings, the Democrats would be much more open to helping us. In fact, it was completely the opposite; every time we wanted to get an interview with someone who was working for the Kerry campaign, we had to go through three different tiers of red tape to get a simple interview—and then sometimes it wouldn’t happen at all. In my estimation, that’s what stands in the way of a smooth campaign. It’s great because it’s egalitarian and everyone can get involved, but nobody knows who to turn to, and everybody thinks that they are in charge.
In your opinion, do the Democrats need to make a drastic change in their campaign strategy for 2004? Did they fail to get their message out effectively?
JW: You know, I think Kerry did a much better job than people gave him credit for doing. I think the Democratic message will be pretty straightforward, and will build off the 2006 messaging. The war in Iraq will be the most important issue, unless there’s some dramatic change in the next two years. The main thing that the Democrats are going to have to do, I think, is stay consistent. People are sick of spinning; even if they don’t agree with the answer, they want to hear a straight answer.
Did you encounter any resistance from the mainstream media?
LL: We were such small potatoes that no one really knew who we were. I’m guessing when people saw us talking to Karen Hughes, people thought she was doing us a favor because she knew our parents or something. (laughs)
— Interview by Adam McKibbin
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