LittleMsPurple.com
If you’ve read the Welcome page, you already know that my name is Ethan. But what you don’t know is that I’m addicted to politics. So addicted, in fact, that I wrote a 117 page screen play about politics in 2007 as the race for President was just getting started, you might call it writing for the moment. Due to my contacts within the film community, I was able to complete the impossible… I was able to get two mini-major studios and two “name” producers to read my script without an agent! The trouble?… none would touch it due to it’s political content.
You see, the story was about a fictional family who lived, breathed and worked in politics set in our non-fictional political environment. Real names and all. Needless to say, once the producer got to the “but” after, “This is the best script you’ve ever written…”, I knew it wasn’t going to entice a sale.
On to plan B!
You see, in my story, the lead character, Lillian West, creates a blog so she can anonymously “out” damaging information she comes across through her family and work connections… namely the New Hampshire phone jamming in 2002 and the outing of Valerie Plame… the covert CIA agent.
SO, what “plan B” consisted of was to create Lilly’s blog live on the Internet, write all of her back posts from Oct. of ‘02 and then blog as her through the November ‘08 Presidential race. Thus, www.LittleMsPurple.com, was born in Dec. of ‘07. Then in the early fall, I took it one step further by hiring an actress to play Lilly so I could shoot and then post video blog posts (vlogs) of my character critiquing the debates in addition to telling more of her story… I posted 17 of them.
I didn’t make any money off of this project nor did I get any meaningful publicity but this is an example of having a creative idea so powerful, even the knowledge that it probably wasn’t going to generate money or publicity wasn’t enough to keep me from doing it.
What it did do, though, was three things:
- It introduced me to some amazing people, whom I had never met, and who were seeking a similar goal of electing Obama. Some of them will follow along on this journey too.
- I was able to convince some life long Republicans, others I’d never met before, to vote for Obama.
- And I have to admit, it was pretty fun to be one small cog in a very large wheel toward CHANGE.
If after checking out www.LittleMsPurple.com you want to read the screen play that the blog was based on, shoot me an email (found at the right) asking for the script in the subject line and I’ll it send over to you in .pdf format in a jiffy.
