Jackson called some of the most powerful decision-making executives across the painted hills of Hollywood and gave them “the opportunity” to read our script, but after several weeks of deafening silence it became clear that no one was going to give us twenty million dollars to make it. In fact, no one showed even the slightest interest in optioning the script, which is pretty funny (and still available). But the experience solidified our friendship—and I developed a lifelong affinity for good bud.
Years later I was living in New York City, where I’d moved to become a “serious writer,” which is to say a seriously unemployed writer. It was a year after 9/11 and the world as we Americans knew it had changed forever. The Patriot Act had just passed through Congress and was signed into law by the Bush administration; the terrorist threat facing the nation was quantified daily by degrees of color on charts and graphs; neighbors who you’d never met suddenly wanted a peek up your ass crack to see if you were packing a dirty bomb. New York City’s social anonymity suddenly became a thing of the past, with the harsh light of fear-driven paranoia casting ugly shadows in every direction.
It was against this backdrop that I sat down one morning to enjoy my daily ritual of black coffee, a toasted bialy, and the New York Times, when I noticed an article above the fold on the front page announcing the arrest and deportation of Godfrey Jackson. The story reported that Jackson had been apprehended in his Topanga Canyon home by federal agents and immediately deported to the storied detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for being a “Drug War terrorist,” an “enemy combatant,” and for being, most critically, an “illegal alien” (which qualified him for his stint in Guantánamo).
The newspaper story gave the details of the government’s preposterous assault, which featured several hundred armed agents descending on Jackson’s hillside Topanga mansion wielding assault rifles, billy clubs, and stun guns. Apparently, when Jackson confronted the commandos, demanding to know the charges, they zapped him in the groin with a stun gun, threw him twitching into a large burlap sack, and flew him straight to Guantánamo.
The federal agents informed his flustered wife Leona and their belligerent son Munsey that Godfrey Jackson had spent his life promoting the use of marijuana and by doing so had been identified by the office of the attorney general as an “illegal terrorist alien”—and because he was not a citizen of the United States he would be held in a steel mesh cage, exposed to the elements for “as long as it takes,” and all the while surrounded by “towel heads” with an affinity for “back-door action.”
Sending Jackson to Guantánamo for being an illegal alien was an outlandish act, perpetrated by a too-big-for-her-boots US attorney who, like most US attorneys in the history of US judicial overkill, was solely intent on making a name for herself, in this case during the nation’s heightened War on Terror, by getting Jackson to do a “perp walk.”
There was just one catch in the brilliant US attorney’s otherwise flawless prosecution: Jackson was not an illegal alien. He was born in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in the Jewish suburb of Squirrel Hill; he was a US citizen, and could prove it. His grandmother and parental guardian may have been a scandalous, toothless hooker, but she was also born in Pittsburgh and she had the paperwork to prove it.
Initially, these facts didn’t make a difference to the US attorney, who had pursued Jackson’s prosecution with a relentless, feverish intensity for the better part of two years, spending a whopping $136 million of government funds in the process. She and her team had acted “well within the law,” she announced during her makeshift press conference in the Guantánamo Bay rec room to a smattering of press corps. Besides, the government’s action was by its very nature de facto “extrajudicial,” ergo she could do whatever she damn well pleased and if anyone had a problem with that they could join Jackson in his tiger cage for a friendly game of hide-the-salami.
I watched the media circus unfolding on the evening news, bewildered as hell and high as fuck, while Jackson sat behind the prosecutor’s podium with a large, growling attack dog situated inches away from his terrified face.
When the US attorney brazenly overstepped the law to bag her “illegal terrorist alien,” she failed to consider yet another hard fact: a law stating that 25,000 signatures petitioning for the review of a US attorney’s reckless prosecutorial actions elicits mandatory congressional oversight, and this can potentially lead to the prosecutor’s removal from office. And for that to happen, all it takes is a little publicity.
Upon learning about this law from my politically radical next-door neighbor Plotkin, I flew out to California, picked up a video camera, and hit the streets. Over the next several months, I conducted several hundred man-on-the-street interviews, focusing on a US attorney’s office run amok. I also conducted several celebrity interviews, including Pepperpot, Noam Chomsky, and an unexpectedly passionate and angry Rosie O’Donnell. Then, with some help from an editor friend, I stitched together these interviews with archival footage from the Guantánamo press conference and a few news shows and sundry bits, and created a polemical documentary structured to touch the hearts and minds of enough clear-thinking citizens to force the review of the US attorney’s “Jackson Action.”
I sent the cut to the The Daily Show and crossed my fingers. Two days later, Jon Stewart introduced an edited version of my call-to-arms, and within three days my petition had swelled to over 250,000 signatures!
Several days later, with no explanation whatsoever from the US attorney’s office, Jackson was transferred out of Guantánamo and sent to the LA County jail for possession of an undisclosed quantity of hashish. While no formal charges had ever been brought against Jackson for hash possession, and while the review of the US attorney’s office as mandated by our ample signatures was never mounted, Jackson was back on American soil (albeit in prison), where due process plays a part in prosecutions, however minimally.
Jackson languished behind bars for the better part of a year while the dust settled and the government covered its tracks. Meanwhile, I continued to film Jackson’s journey, and by the time Leona, Munsey, and I picked him up from jail, I was ready to rumble.
Three months later, The Incarceration of Godfrey Jackson was accepted to the Sundance Film Festival.
We arrived at the premiere in a half-ton pickup truck with Jackson tied to a stake, atop a bed of kindling, ready to be burned like a witch in Salem. The theater was packed and the screening ended in a several-minute standing ovation. As Jackson and I looked around the room at the cheering crowd, it became immediately clear to us that we’d finally achieved the goal we’d set out to achieve fifteen years prior: Jackson was back on the map and I was on it with him!
Trays of pot brownies were served at the premiere party. The Artist Formerly Known As Prince showed up to join in the celebration. People danced into the wee hours to the bumping beats of a live band. Robert Redford himself danced on the bar with a Native American chief, who gave me the nickname “Young Sunrise.” It was the high point of my life—but it didn’t last long.
FabFilms was quick to come to the table, intent on acquiring worldwide rights for a whopping six million dollars. But when I crunched the numbers, after taking into account the money I had already spent and how much I’d have to lay out to meet the distributor’s delivery requirements, I’d owe them money! Jackson agreed with my reasoning; he’d spent his entire career getting bamboozled by the bean counters. The only problem was, my agent adamantly refused to negotiate our deal and simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. On the last day of the festival, the deal I turned down was announced in all the trades. Everybody I’d ever known called to congratulate me for winning the jackpot and was subjected to my story about the corrupt realities of media distribution and accounting practices. But none of this ultimately mattered because Jackson and I were a unified front. We organized an impromptu press conference at the Salt Lake City airport, where we announced to the press and a random assemblage of UGG-booted film industry nitwits that we were going to show the next wave of independent filmmakers how to distribute a film without giving in to the corrupt Hollywood suits. We’d taken on the government and Hollywood was next!