My filmmaking partner Suki and I were coming back from a film festival in Thailand back in the fall of 1999. We both noticed a very small article on one of the back pages of the International Herald Tribune that talked about a campaign bio of GW Bush being pulled from the shelves.

A couple of weeks later I got a press release at work (I worked at a small alt culture web site) announcing that a small publisher that we worked with would be re-releasing the book. "Fortunate Son" had been the first campaign bio of Bush. It turned out that the book had been pulled because the author had been outed as a convicted felon (he hired someone to kill his boss). This news emerged because an afterword to the book speculated that GW had been arrested for cocaine possesion in the 60's but that his father had gotten him off. This allegation got the book a lot of attention. This attention led to the discovery of the authors past.

At this point GW was running but the election was a full year away and he didn't appear to be too serious a candidate. Cocaine was a big topic until the book came out. After that it kind of disappeared as an issue.

When I got the release I called up Sander Hicks, who ran Soft Skull, and asked him if I could shoot as he worked on his project. "Sure, just come by on Saturday when I do the sweep and mop, you can film me then." He hung up. I had to call back to find out that he was the super of the building that he lived in, squatted the basement of the building as his office and that one of his duties was sweep and mop the halls of the building each week.

Suki and I started shooting that weekend. We were immediately interested because we knew that the film would shine a light on media, and how we consume and process information. We realized right away that we had an interesting character in Sander. We didn't realize how interesting until we'd stuck around for a year.