America and its origin story are full of unexamined assumptions, one of the biggest being that voters actually cast their ballots for presidential candidates. Is democracy – which comes from the Greek words for people (demos) and rule (kratos) – the USA’s foundational “Big Lie”? Consider that, according to Ari Berman’s new book Minority Rule, only 1.8% of the population of the 13 original states voted in George Washington’s 1789 presidential election. In One Person, One Vote? director Maximina Juson goes behind the closed doors of 1787’s Constitutional Convention, when America’s anti-democratic original sin was enshrined in the new nation’s framed rules, and – like Howard Zinn’s People’s History and Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States – reveals hidden truths about “the land of the free.”
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Ed Rampell was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow because of his TV exposes of Senator Joe McCarthy. Rampell majored in Cinema at Manhattan’s Hunter College and is an L.A.-based film historian/critic who co-organized the 2017 70th anniversary Blacklist remembrance at the Writers Guild theater in Beverly Hills and was a moderator at 2019’s “Blacklist Exiles in Mexico” filmfest and conference at the San Francisco Art Institute. Rampell co-presented “The Hollywood Ten at 75” film series at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and co-author of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.
