What America Needs: From Sea to Shining Sea is a journey from New York City to Los Angeles by train produced, recorded and directed by Mark Wojahn, a journalist from Minnesota. He takes the long route to get a simple answer from 500 people: "What do you think America needs?" As you can imagine the answers vary but the top five were: A new president, love, peace, God and to help other people. Wojahn didn't just go to the cities though he got true litmus of the people by stopping in stopping in little towns in Iowa, Wisconsin, Virginia and Colorado among other stops. This film was recorded on a handheld Sony TRV-17 mini-DV camera with a Seninheiser microphone and was edited on a Mac OSX using iMovie 2 and Final Cut Pro 3. The film was shot from October 10th through November 4th 2002, a little more than a year after the 9-11-01 bombings so it was still fresh on the minds of the people.

The people despite mainly being down on the world at its current state remained opportunistic that things could change and gave some poignant answers beside the top five mentioned before. Here are my favorites: truth, better education, good friends, supporting the arts, get off the rest of the world's back, a constitutional convention, the congress should wear US Flags as suits so they will remember what they are there for and relearn techniques of the 60s.

This movie was good because rarely does any media try to get a full picture of any situation or story. The media can get kind of lazy when dealing with superiors who want a story NOW or their own agendas. Wojahn is being unbiased when he asks this question and the truth can set us all free.

Please direct any questions or comments to Clayton Ruley at clayton@geoclan.com