UW TEACHER FILMS HIS 'INDEPENDENT' ROAD TRIP

When Hanson Hosein and his wife pulled into the parking lot of a nondescript motel in Austin, Texas, they had been driving for more than a month. The idea for their film, searching for what might be left of America’s independent businesses, was as dead as the ghost town they’d recently driven through. They had no story. Their dog hadn’t stopped farting in days. The motel’s sign looked like a giant neon phallus. For the two filmmakers, Austin was rock bottom.

Hosein, the director of the Masters in Communication in Digital Media program and his wife, Heather Hughes, a news producer and anchor, had set out months before, in the summer of 2005, with a simple goal: travel the country and find out how local businesses were doing. The idea for their documentary film, "Independent America: The Two-Lane Search for Mom and Pop," was born.

They made two rules. The first was no traveling on interstate highways; they could only drive on secondary highways and country roads. The second was that they could only do business with independent stores — no trans-fat fries from McDonalds; no double-tall, non-fat, extra-hot vanilla lattes from Starbucks; no cruising Wal-Mart aisles for brand-name underwear or car tires — no business with Big Box corporations.

But America’s independent stores weren’t the only “Mom and Pop” story Hosein and Hughes were documenting. For them, part of the trip was their own tale, as independent filmmakers.

“The documentary had to tell a story,” Hosein said. “We felt that we needed a narrative. That was us. That’s why we made the rules. We wanted something bad to happen.”

Finding horror stories of Big Box companies forcing “Mom and Pop” businesses to shut down wasn’t necessarily a problem. But on America’s lonely, unknown back roads the trip was a different struggle.

The struggle involved keeping the windows cracked in the heat of summer due to overwhelming dog flatulence, stealing Wi-fi signals on Main Street in small towns to update their “Independent America” blog, and avoiding overzealous state troopers who seemed to pull them over just for fun.

Finding independent motels was also a mixed bag for the couple.

“Best Western is your best bet,” Hosein said. “Independent motels are either dirt cheap or boutique expensive.”

After driving all day without eating, independent motels can be disappointing, as they aren’t usually equipped with mini bars, he said.

“But who needs lunch when you’ve got scotch?” Hughes said in the film, swigging from a bottle of Glenfiddich at a motel in Nashville. “And that … is good stuff.”

Roadside restaurants were also a challenge — “Mom and Pop” don’t always speak English.

In a ghost town in Texas, the only independently owned restaurant is one where the waiters only speak Spanish. Surrounding the seedy cantina are boarded-up shops and stores with “For Sale” signs collaged on windows.

“Before, we were like, ‘Are these places really worth it?’ — McDonalds was down the street,” he said. “And you could tell that this Mexican restaurant wasn’t for people that spoke English. No one spoke English. The menus weren’t in English. But it was the best meal I’ve ever had.”

Even “Mom and Pop” filmmakers get stressed out, Hosein said. But there weren’t any great marriage war stories from the trip.

“This was the first thing we had done by ourselves,” he said. “We had $30,000 and we were unemployed. We had to make it work.”

The couple wasn’t alien to the workings of large corporations. Hughes had worked as an anchor for a prominent Toronto news station. Hosein had done reporting for NBC in New York, working alongside Tom Brokaw. While working in Tel Aviv, Israel and Baghdad as a war correspondent, Hosein noticed the cities’ healthy climate of independent business — something he saw rapidly disappearing from the filmmakers’ former home outside Vancouver.

“We saw the Big Box companies moving in and small businesses dying,” he said. “It made us wonder if it was going on everywhere, especially in the USA. The idea partly came out of being in Iraq, because — just like there — there’s dissidence in America, this low-level insurgency. We don’t trust Washington [D.C.]. We don’t trust corporate boards. We are friends with our butcher, baker and local cheese maker. We trust our neighbors. We wanted to go out and see how ‘Mom and Pop’ were doing. We wanted to see if we were doing business with our neighbors sufficiently, so that if we needed them we could call them.”

An idea about talking to neighbors turned into a film with regular circulation on the Sundance Channel, along with more money for another documentary. Independent America: Rising From Ruins will feature Hosein and two UW graduate students detailing how local business helps communities prosper, and in the case of Hurricane Katrina-torn New Orleans, survive hard times.

“We always wanted to go [to New Orleans] in the first place,” he said. “Then Hurricane Katrina happened two weeks after we got back from the trip. We want to see what it’s like now — like a before and after.”

For Hosein, however, just making the first film was a surprise. It was originally planned to be a research trip.

“We were going to sell it to Discovery Channel as an 11-part series,” Hosein said. “Then in Austin, two things happened. The first was that we got an interview with Wal-Mart. Hundreds of people ask them for interviews. It was huge. My friend, Chris De Witt, who I knew from being at NBC in Israel, lived in Austin. She was like our guardian angel. She got us an interview with [National Public Radio] there. Then people started suggesting to us where to go. We had a following. At our lowest moment we got this boost out of nowhere. Then we headed off to meet Wal-Mart.”

Wal-Mart sent Mona Williams, the company’s vice president of corporate communications, to meet them. She smiled through the entire interview. She answered questions with the calmness of someone sipping tea and eating crumpets. To Hosein, she was more than ready for them.

“When I told her that her company had been accused of ripping off taxpayers, she didn’t bristle," he said. "When I asked about the Wal-Mart ad that compared book-burning Nazis to independent companies, she basically admitted it was a boneheaded thing to do.”

Two hours after the interview, the company called Hosein again.

“Aaron Brown from CNN — the guy who Anderson Cooper replaced — was doing a story about another documentary that’s anti-Big Box,” Hosein said. “Wal-Mart wanted to use our footage because they thought it made them look good. I thought, ‘Wal-Mart likes us? Oh no. … I didn’t interview them hard enough.’

“It was the ultimate catch-22. We could reach as many people as possible with our stuff on CNN. But at the same time it felt like doing a deal with the devil. It was promotion through a Big Box company.”

CNN eventually decided not to air the segment, but Hosein said he probably would have sent them the footage because the opportunity would have been too good to pass up.

But even without the exposure, the film now had a direction — finding a solution that could reacquaint America with “Mom and Pop” — something, Hosein said, people seemed thirsty for in both red and blue states.

“America is not as polarized as Fox News makes it out to be,” he said. “The country is really just one big shade of purple. There’s a deep-seated fear of losing our national identity. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican. It unites the country.”

[Reach reporter Clark J. Fredricksen at features@thedaily.washington.edu.]