I.O.U.S.A. Read Online Free PDF Page A

how diffi cult it was to reach “ political coalescence ” when the Clinton administration showed a federal surplus on the budget “ for the fi rst time in roughly 30 years. ”
    Warren Buffett joined us in an unassuming meeting room at his Berkshire Hathaway headquarters in Kiewit Plaza in downtown Omaha. Initially, we believed we only had 20
    minutes with him; however, when he entered the room he told us he “ wasn ’ t doing anything else today. ” By the end of the interview we had exhausted our list of questions and had over an hour of fi lm with him.
    The point of this particular literary exercise is simple.
    We wanted to show what Alice Rivlin, the fi rst director of the Congressional Budget Offi ce, meant when she said,
    “ People may think somehow that decisions are made by other people far away, but in a democracy that ’ s not really true. It is your representative in Congress or in the Senate that is infl uencing what happens — so it ’ s pretty important for people to pay attention to it. ”
    ■ ■ ■
    As the conditions of the once - vibrant U.S. economy began to take a turn for the worse, the American people seemed to be paying more attention to the country ’ s fi scal challenges. And when the debt crisis gained mainstream attention with the near default of Bear Stearns in July 2007, the I.O.U.S.A. project took another turn. By mid - September, we were forced to throw out the whole fi lm as we ’ d conceived it to be up to that point … and start again. The crisis we had been expecting was no longer “ going to happen ” but was, in fact, happening right then. We could read it in the headlines every morning before getting settled in the editing bay.
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    The Mission 11
    Having gone back to the drawing board, we were shocked when I.O.U.S.A. was among 16 out of 935 fi lms to be selected for competition at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in 2008. At the festival it became clear that the audience was in tune with the fi lm ’ s message, as it sold out every screening and we received standing ovations. Variety, the fi lm industry magazine, likened the fi lm to An Inconvenient Truth for economics. Kenneth Turan, fi lm critic for the Los Angeles Times, called it the “ scariest fi lm at Sundance. ” Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun lauded our project as having come from a
    “ new breed of documentary fi lmmakers. ”
    We subsequently took the fi lm to Dallas; Philadelphia; Jacksonville, North Carolina; Oregon; and Silver Spring, Maryland. At each festival the fi lm was received with critical acclaim. We screened at the Maryland Film Festival, in our home town of Baltimore, with the help of festival director Jed Dietz, whose offi ce is a stone ’ s throw away from our own. Jed was instrumental in helping us navigate the early phase of the project. Again, we were encouraged by the audience ’ s response. By this time, we began to notice new faces in the crowd. Former senators and members of previous presidential cabinets arrived and took part in question and answer sessions. We hope they were paying attention.
    David Walker, as he explains in the Foreword, was inspired by the fi lm ’ s reception. He was persuaded to resign his post at the Government Accountability Offi ce (GAO) to head up the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. His fi rst act at the Foundation was to acquire the fi lm from Agora Entertainment, the production company we founded to produce the fi lm, and subsequently to orchestrate the distribution of the fi lm.
    Through the Peterson Foundation
    ’ s efforts, the fi lm
    opened in 400 theatres around the country on August 21, 2008. The premier itself was held in Omaha, Nebraska, with a live simulcast satellite feed featuring Warren Buffett, Pete Peterson, and David Walker. During the two weeks following the event, the fi lm was screened at the Impact Film cintro.indd 11
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    12 The
    Mission
    Festival, and was one of