Over the past few years, I’ve worked in the background (as is the case with many of my projects and collaborations) on a mystery Alaska documentary. It’s still not greenlit for full length — it may never cross that line. But there’s enough money behind it now that I can share some photos and talk about it a bit.

In early 2017, I met Paul Brown — brilliant theater producer behind the Alaska Repertory Theater, the Alaska Center for the Performing Arts, and a PBS documentary on Governor Wally Hickel (the Secretary for the Interior under Nixon). Paul also helped produce The Ticket, a play by Dick Reichman. He’s a preeminent mover and shaker, when it comes to various projects. He’s a dear friend and aging rather fast — he’s passed the baton to me on this mystery Alaska documentary.

In fall of 2016, the New Haven Review (Yale’s Institute library) bought a story of mine that — in the long run — ended up becoming an excerpt from my novel Bell Hammers. They set to publish it in their winter run, February 2017. They set a launch day in New Haven.

Brian Slatterly, editor and novelist, was set to play some jazz and classical (or maybe folk?) with a string quartet. There were to be hors d’oeuvres — what my father used to pronounce “horse devours.” Other writers would come. Plus The Institute Library is one of the oldest subscription libraries in the country. Few people who have only ever lived in sprawly wide states like Kansas and Missouri realize we can drive from NYC to Maine in 6 hours on a clean day. Much less do they realize it’s just a 1 hour train ride north on the New Haven line to get to Yale — to Connecticut. 

So Tara and I had planned on staying up there overnight, signing some copies of the New Haven Review, meeting some regional authors and artists and musicians, heading home.

I told Paul this.

He booked an AirBnb and offered to drive us there. 

I, frankly, thought this was nuts. I’d known this man a week. My first thought was “This man will shank me in my sleep.” 

My second thought was, “Tara and I have done crazier things and trusted crazier people overseas.”

My third thought was, “If he tries to murder me by plunging a brutally hand carved prison shiv into my sternum in my sleep, he’s 72. I think I can take him.”

My fourth thought was, “Lance: you’re convicted of nonviolence as a pacifist. Live it out, you old sinner.”

I tend to be as good of a sinner as I am an idealist. But I do try to live out my convictions promptly, without doubt or delay. We went to New Haven for the launch of their issue.

We had a wonderful time with Paul.

Soon after that, Paul asked me if I had written any film scripts. I told him I had. He asked me if I had sold any. I told him I had. I showed him some pieces from my portfolio. 

He wanted me to go to Alaska with him to explore this mystery Alaska documentary. As we talked about it, it started to take shape. It would focus on the resources we all have in common — the atmosphere, the ocean, etc. This was five years ago. 

Paul got us a room at a friend’s house. He borrowed their car and we tromped around Anchorage and the surrounding area. I read books like Crisis in the Commons and Who Owns America and The Divide in prep for the trip. We interviewed a ton of folks. 

I wrote an outline for a script while I was in Anchorage. It incorporated everything I’d learned from the interviews and books. That was 2017.

Well we came back to our mutual neighborhood here in Brooklyn, I did more research, Paul did more hobnobbing and politicking and asking around up in Alaska, feeling out for a film.

Around this time, a few months later, an opportunity came up to become attending members of the Alaska Dialogs in Girdwood alongside former lieutenant governors, Alaska native chiefs, former senators, state representatives, mayors of Anchorage, executives of oil and gold and fishing companies, economists from the London school of economics, the list went on and on. We’re just a couple of filmmakers, writers, etc.

Just 40 people, but the room packed a punch, locally.

Paul asked me to go.

One of our patrons said I couldn’t go by myself the second time. I couldn’t go without taking Tara. So Paul bought my second plane ticket and his. And that supporter bought Tara’s plane ticket. 

So the second time, we both went.

In Alaska, the second time, I emphasized to Paul how much of GK Chesterton I’d read — this included his bits on distributism. This seemed irrelevant at the time, but I also pointed to Pope Leo’s encyclical on labor. Both of these books seem to have influenced Elinor Ostrom in some way, who seemed an irrelevant intellectual at the time. But now, knowing what I know, she not only had an influence on the Catholic Governor Wally Hickel (Secretary of Interior under Nixon). She literally helped Governor Hickel write the Alaska constitution. 

That’s one of the things we uncovered while interviewing one of the authors of the constitution.

Yes, an author of the Alaska constitution is still alive.

The more I thought about it, the more that Acts 2 response to shared resources made sense:

And all who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.

Acts 2:44-45

And also:

There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold 35 and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

Acts 4:34

They pooled their resources together in order to create a baseline from out of what’s already shared. This thinking helped inform the “owner state” model, which is neither Capitalism nor Communism.

In the Alaska constitution, the text literally reads — to this day — that every citizen of Alaska owns an equal share of the state. When resources are developed from out of the state, the royalties from licensing the rights to develop those resources go into a sovereign wealth fund. 

That fund earns interest on the world economy.

From out of that interest, the shareholders — that is to say the citizens of Alaska who own the state land in common, who co-own its ocean, who co-own its air — get a dividend of somewhere between $1,000 and $2,000 per person, per year.

That’s not Capitalism. And it’s not Communism.

It’s distributism: private property (a la the 10 commandments’s bit on do not covet), spread as wide as humanly possible. Either no one owns the ocean or everyone does, but it amounts to the same thing:

We own it in common. You shouldn’t develop one resource at the expense of another.

AND!

We — all shareholders — should all receive the maximum benefit from its development or conservation.

You know.

Like a community garden in everyone’s backyard. And then realizing how everything is nested within that community garden.

That’s the Alaska model.

That next year?

Late 2019. 

We had planned in early 2020 on going back up there. 

Well you know what happened in 2020.

And, since we’re New Yorkers, you know how that extended into 2021. 

By that point, Paul was 76. He had gone back and forth on the project, depending on its status at various points. But in the end, he has bowed out due to his health and stage of life. I — still — feel unspeakably sad about that.

But I’m still here.

Why?

If this model represented by this mystery Alaska documentary is right, and if it’s exported to the rest of the small communities all over the world, we will have no legitimate need for poverty.

The good news? Surely you expected some good news, right?

You know that about me by now, surely. Surely you know I’m an incurable, mythopoetic, comedy-and-fairy-tale-of-Scripture optimist. 

The pictures and video I’m about to show you? They almost entirely came from a third trip funded by two of our supporters. We got a filmmaker from Seattle — a long time friend from Joplin (not OCC connected) — to meet us in Anchorage and shoot for three days.

He gave us the footage for free.

Which we used as leverage with the center and the foundations in Anchorage.

They realized it was serious. It took time, to apply for the grant. But as all of this has happened with Paul, I got a late night email.

The Atwood Foundation gave a small grant for me to do the first 10% of a film as a short film. If all goes to plan, I take Derek Hammeke up to shoot it with me in the spring. We’ll see whom we hire for the edit. 

But Paul’s dream — which is now my dream — will be, in part, a reality by helping the center for the commons.

And if all goes well, perhaps it’s the first segment of a longer mystery Alaska documentary that’s no longer a mystery to me:

Paul’s dream of a film on the resources we all have in common.

And the authors of the Alaska constitution’s dream that we develop or conserve all resources for the maximum benefit of all stakeholders.

Click here to see all of the pictures and video.