Lights, camera, action at the polls

Many filmmakers made movies they hoped would sway the 2004 presidential election. Now a producer is putting together a documentary about the voting itself.

Jim Stern, whose movie credits include the basketball documentary “The Year of the Yao” and upcoming dramas “Proof” and “Hotel Rwanda,” has dispatched six different camera crews to precincts across Ohio. The goal of his film, tentatively titled “Ohio: An American Vote,” is to detail how the state’s nearly 8 million voters cast their ballots.

“I think this movie is going to offer a view of whether the ends justify the means, if the means get out of hand,” Stern said. “You are seeing the most polarized and pressure-laden tinderbox I have ever seen.”

Stern, a supporter of Democratic challenger Sen. John F. Kerry, said he didn’t plan on making and financing the film until a week ago. It was then he read about Republican efforts to challenge the legitimacy of Ohio voters by placing thousands of monitors inside polling places.

“I called [producing partner] Adam [Del Deo] and said, ‘Do you want to make a movie in the next two days?’ ” Stern said. Within a week, Stern’s production company, Endgame Entertainment, had hired half a dozen filmmaking teams.

By Friday afternoon, Del Deo was in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, interviewing a husband-and-wife couple who will split votes between President Bush and Kerry. Other “An American Vote” teams were filming stories about students at Ohio State University who support Bush, the chatter at a Columbus lunch counter, an Ohio Bush rally featuring California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a registered voter who received a letter saying he was ineligible to vote. They will shoot footage until a president is named.

“We will be locking onto certain compelling stories,” said Del Deo, who also describes himself as a Kerry supporter.

It’s easy to see why Ohio has the potential to make a great movie. The two candidates and the media have spent more time and money there than in any other state besides Florida.

On top of that, Ohio, with its 20 electoral college votes, has been the site of numerous voting disputes. No Republican has been elected president without winning the state, and polling shows a dead heat between Bush and Kerry.

Republicans have charged that tens of thousands of voter registrations are fraudulent, carrying wrong addresses and fictitious names, and have asked county election boards to disqualify them. A federal judge blocked some hearings on the matter before election day, allowing many of the disputed registered voters to cast ballots.

In a separate ruling, provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct will not be counted.

Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell has issued a ruling in a separate dispute regarding poll watchers that could create hordes of people challenging whether registered voters can be given ballots.

There could be as many as 3,600 Republican challengers at polling places, and Democrats complain the Republicans are targeting largely African American precincts, which could vote heavily for Kerry. The U.S. Department of Justice said this week it will send monitors to ensure voters’ civil rights are not violated.

Independent candidate Ralph Nader also has been excluded from Ohio ballots.

Most movies made about the candidates, such as Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” have criticized Bush. There have been a handful of films that are critical of Kerry, including “Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die.”

“We don’t want to narrowly define the documentary yet,” said Stern, who hopes he can show the film in theaters in the next several months. “But the crucible of democracy is one man, one vote. We want to be there and see what happens.”