Hello everyone,
Re: PROGRESS REPORT
Laura Moretti and the rest of our Team AMERICA (Lisa, Alison, Lori, and me) are so grateful to you all for your response to our appeal to help us finish what we now also consider a project that you made possible. We could not do it without you.
You’ve helped us raise just over $22,000. Wow! Still, as grateful as I am for what you’ve already given, we need about $3,000 more to meet our target of $25,000. So, if you know anyone else out there who may be able to help us reach our goal, we would be over-the-moon. As you know, this is a not-for-profit project, absolutely free to everyone and will be available on a multitude of social media platforms.
We are now so very close to finishing … just awaiting an additional score from our musical director, Hugh Burns, along with a few license clearances and some bits and pieces. We can’t wait to get it out there prior to voting day, November 3rd.
Speaking of which, and I can’t emphasize this enough, I know you may have already voted by mail or will vote, but please, make sure you encourage all of your friends, neighbors and strangers to do the same. The right to VOTE is the greatest gift we have as citizens.
I gotta tell you, this project, AMERICA, has been an extraordinary journey and very exciting. Laura Moretti, my brilliant editor, and I began with no script, nothing on paper; just an idea based on a song I recorded 40 years ago called AMERICA.
Though I’d never released it back in the day, suddenly with all the division, polarization and violence that is tearing away at the heart of our beloved country these days, it seemed to me the right time to use this song as a simple window … into the soul of America. I decided to use the song as the basis of a short film documentary, retracing and reminding us all of some of the highs and lows of the American experience of equality and justice for ALL Americans.
Over these past few months, the production regimen has proceeded like this: Every day, with the exception of Thursdays and Sundays, starts with a 5:30pm Skype call from my home in London to my editor-in-chief, Laura, at her home in Chico, CA. That’s 9:30am her time, an eight-hour time difference, and she won’t talk to me before breakfast. Then each day, with no compass to guide us, little by little, we walk into the unknown and somehow manage to put a story together, section by section, using the photos and video clips that Lisa Adair in Texas has sourced and the licenses for which Alison Knox in Australia has cleared for us and for the upcoming press releases that Lori Keefer in Illinois will be disseminating for us. What a team!
The point is this: I couldn’t have done this on my own. I’ve had such wonderful support from all these people and, as for Laura Moretti, what can I say? The process has been a joy … defined by great respect for each other and our goal. We have approached the project humbly and with great care. Hopefully, with the resources that your gifts have put at our disposal, we have managed to document a brief story that represents both the best and even the saddest of the American experience … a nation, nearly 350 years old, still seeking “to create a more perfect union.”
Thanks again for your belief,
—David