I was born and raised in the Midwest. As a filmmaker, the demands of my profession have forced me to split my adult life across California and my home in Missouri. Consequently, I’ve gained a unique dual perspective which has allowed me to communicate rural life to City Dwellers, and to help Midwesterners see themselves from the uncommon viewpoint of a loving outsider. Popular media often depicts Midwestern settings in simplistic and frustrating ways. Drug dealers, gun-runners, and bumbling hillbilly idiots are classic stereotypes of Midwesterners on-screen. These flat caricatures are nothing like the Midwest I know, which is full of incredibly loving, ingenuitive, community-oriented individuals, who draw a grounded sense of identity from their environment, and the complex histories contained therein.
The Coastal / Midwestern divide is now more obvious than ever, and nothing excites me more than a film that creates conversation across self-created bubbles. Over the past 7 years, I’ve prepared a film that will lift up the daily drama’s of America’s Modern Heartland to the scale of the silver screen, because I believe that “Flyover Country” is well worth that quality of attention.
I made this site to serve as a portal for you and anyone else who is interested in tracking our progress over the course of a year of filming in rural Missouri. In addition, this site also serves as our main crowd-sourced fundraising platform. If you’re a Local here in Marion County, you will have access to behind-the-scenes materials, including updates from me, video blogs, on-set photography, and more. For everyone else, we’re offering Membership opportunities that will open you up to similar perks. We’re welcoming Accredited Investors interested in investment opportunities to request a meeting with us to discuss joining our team. Lastly, FLYOVER is fiscally sponsored by Creative Visions, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that supports creative activists, those that use the arts and media to ignite social change. This sponsorship opens a door for individuals and businesses to make tax-deductible donations to our project.
If you believe in representing the Modern Midwest in an authentic and cinematic way, please consider contributing to the project. Whoever you are, wherever you are, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to learn about our film.
