It’s been a long time since we’ve posted an update. We have several exciting announcements including that the end of the road is sight!
First of all, the film has a new name! While we liked the evocative feel of Radical Roots, we received feedback from multiple sources that, since our film is about the Co-op Wars, we should just call it The Co-op Wars. We found this logic unassailable, and are now very happy with a title that is both to-the-point and intriguingly dramatic.
Peter Coyote
Our other announcements have to do with exciting collaborators, the most high-profile of whom is Peter Coyote, who has graciously agreed to be our narrator! You may know Peter from his many film and TV roles, including in E.T.: The Extraterrestrial and Erin Brockovich, but he is also an Emmy-award winning narrator of documentaries, including eight by the legendary Ken Burns. We are blown away by the opportunity to work with Peter and are thrilled by the gravitas he lends to the project.
But Peter’s excellence as a narrator is not the only reason we’re glad he is working on the film - he also has a personal connection to our story. In the film, Diane (Soztek) Lynn relates how she was inspired by the example of the Diggers, an anarchic San Francisco collective known for their street actions involving free food and performance. As it turns out, Peter Coyote was a core member of the Diggers! Erik is now devouring Peter’s compelling memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, about his deep involvement with the Bay Area counterculture, including the Diggers and the legendary San Francisco Mime Troupe.
We got in contact with Peter through another exciting collaborator, Karen Everett, who is serving as our Story Consultant. Karen is a thought leader in the documentary world. She taught editing at the respected UC-Berkeley documentary production program for 18 years and is a director herself, and we are really benefiting from her advice on to how to structure the film. In fact, we were so impressed by her that we hired her company, New Doc Editing, to do the final edit of the film. We are currently working with New Doc Editing’s John Dilley, who will complete his work by early October.
Our other important collaborators are both named David. Minneapolis composer David Kesler, who did the music for our trailer, will serve as composer and music supervisor for the full film. This means he will not only be writing original music, but also selecting and integrating music from the period of our story, including songs from the great Willie Murphy.
The other David is Victoria, BC-based animator David Ochudzawa. A native of Australia, David will be creating our title sequences and perhaps a few other segments for the film. David was Design Lead for the film The Russian Woodpecker, which won World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.
Thanks to the work of these collaborators, we are looking at completing the film in November. We will be applying to film festivals from October through December and also working on planning our premiere screening sometime in the spring of 2020.
We are so excited to be nearing the finish line! Thank you to everyone who has helped along the way to create this important work of historical memory.