Phil Campbell
Filming around Seattle just now is the indie film Grassroots, described by its makers thusly: “A short-tempered, unemployed music critic who likes to dress as a polar bear thinks he can harness the power of the people to ride the monorail to political victory in Seattle.”
Grassroots is based on a book called Zioncheck for President, by erstwhile alt-weekly reporter Phil Campbell. It’s a hilarious, scarring, gadfly of a book built on the premise that all politics is local loco. Or maybe it’s just that the people who decide to go into politics are “tetched” in some way to begin with.
Campbell contrasts his management of Grant Cogswell’s ill-fated City Council campaign with the rise and all-too-literal fall of U.S. Rep. Marion Zioncheck, a Depression-era Washington state firebrand. Nothing is airbrushed out.
Campbell was at work at his day job in late 2006 when he got an email from his editor at Nation Books, saying that Stephen Gyllenhaal had read Zioncheck and was interested in making a movie from the book. After meeting up with Gyllenhaal at a hotel bar, Campbell signed away all the rights–“He can make the movie he wants. I didn’t want to impose any restrictions on how so-and-so had to be portrayed, me or anyone else.”
The movie’s cast now includes Jason Biggs (American Pies), Lauren Ambrose (Six Feet Under), Cobie Smulders (How I Met Your Mother), Cedric the Entertainer (as Richard McIver), and Tom Arnold (as the bartender). Presumably Capitol Hill’s cafes and bars–in which much campaign strategizing takes place–will play themselves.
Campbell himself is visiting town this week–he lives now in Brooklyn, and works in Manhattan–for an appearance at the Sorrento’s Night School series with The Stranger‘s philosophical eminence Charles Mudede. It’ll be a “discussion about capturing the spirit of time and place in both words and film,” and Campbell will also read from his new satirical novel set in Memphis in the age of global warming. It’s this Thursday, July 8, and doors open at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free, but you must RSVP to kerri.benecke@hotelsorrento.com.
Tell me a little about your new book.
It’s a global warming satire. It’s set an indeterminate number of years in the future, in Memphis, Tennessee. It is an exercise, in a way, in speculative fiction, looking at a world a little different from our own, but also very similar. It’s based on some hypotheses I heard right around the time Al Gore came out with An Inconvenient Truth, people speculating what would happen when the polar ice caps melt. One particular professor in Memphis said, “Well, Memphis will be beachfront property. Mississippi will be underwater. So it takes that idea, What would Memphis look like if suddenly it were a coastal town? Some funny things come up from that.
[Campbell may not be able to see the future, but he does know Memphis personally, from having lived there for four or five years, working as a feature writer at the Memphis Flyer.]
It’s a regional story, in how a town changes, but there’s also the global implications of the melting of the ice caps, and the rising heat and humidity. There’s a story about the Florida climate refugees who come to Memphis, and want to make a new Miami out of it. There’s a Memphis city council member who’s trying to fight that–for a number of reasons, some not so altruistic. And there’s a young man from Chicago who moves to Memphis. He’s a city planner and he’s sort of thrown into the cultural stew–he meets a bunch of young Southern “city-slackers” that live in his apartment building.
It’s a wide-ranging story that’s focused on a few different characters, but essentially it’s speculative fiction. There are a couple of rules I adhere to–one is that there’s an ocean there at Memphis’s door. Mississippi’s gone, Alabama’s gone, Georgia’s gone, Florida and Louisiana are mostly gone. There’s that fact of life. And there’s also the fact that it’s so hot that everybody needs air conditioning. But air conditioning is hard to come by because new rules have been laid down about the amount of power you’re supposed to use. And the poor have less access to air conditioning, so the young slackers are always struggling to find air conditioning.
You throw those two facts out there, and you create this new city. I didn’t realize how ambitious it was until I started getting into it. You make one rule, and it has implications across the entire town.
So what makes it satire is that people are still very much people.
Yeah. Exactly. You know, Stephen Gyllenhaal [director of Grassroots, poet, father of Maggie and Jake] read it–he and I have been talking the past few years, exchanging scripts, I’ve been reading his drafts of the movie–it’s funny, he said, “This is a disturbing book. It’s disturbing because people just keep living. People just ‘get along’ in this situation. They don’t really think about it.”
That’s what I wanted to achieve. When I started putting together this idea, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road had come out, and that book–along with several other things in the culture–made me think, Man, we are really obsessed with the apocalypse. It’s a joke, in a way, that all we think can happen is that the world is going to end and we’ll be fighting like dogs, in the most barbaric way. I don’t believe that. Cormac McCarthy’s book is great, don’t get me wrong, but the general American obsession with the apocalypse, it seems to me, is the reaction of an impoverished mind. Things keep going, they change. People keep living and surviving.