THE DAY THE REVOLUTION CAME TO TOWN (AND FILMED) >>>

Movies are just fluff, right? Rest stops for escapism before easing back into our daily routines. They rouse our emotions for a short while, but the fire cools soon after. Rarely do we allow them to adjust our actions and change us in some fundamental, lasting way. If a film possesses this revolutionary spirit, it would surely rock the sociopolitical order.

Filmmaker Joe O'Connor is working on his own "revolution" of sorts, with the perfect city as his stage: our state capitol. He wrote and will soon direct The Day the Revolution Came to Town, a parable on the power (and danger) of ideas. His protagonist, an everyman generically called Guy, disrupts the status quo and ends up fighting for his life.

For inspiration O'Connor watched other anarchist films, which he found inaccurate and unsatisfying. While, according to O'Connor these pictures "deliberately mislead the audience" by portraying a hate-spewing, destructive outsider, he says he "wanted to turn [this] image on its head by showing how mainstream society is violent to those who do not neatly fit into it." Law and order may quell the opposition born on its fringes, but it also breeds that same intolerance at its very core.

Already O'Connor has disproved my theory; film did in fact spur him to action, responding with his own reactionary art. Maybe when Revolution does come to town (hopefully in regional festivals this year), his work will in turn call others.

To join this project, cast and crew auditions will take place on two separate dates: April 3 from 12-4 p.m. at Seattle Center's Theater Puget Sound (Room B); and April 10, same times, inside the Evergreen State College Communications building. For more information email oly-imc@riseup.net.