The agent was trying to sell the services of a not overly talented performer to a Broadway producer who had slim patience for slim talent. The agent pressed on and on with over-long introductions to everything his client had ever done in show business.
Finally, the brusque and bored producer cut the agent off short and said, "Look. If you have to tell me who he is, he ain't!"
I'm now that agent. I fear if I don't huff and puff, this will go down as just another review of another documentary film. Quite the contrary, what follows is very big and very good news for America. Can you forgive a little "agent's build-up"?
Join me in Communist Romania just before Christmas 1989. Dictator Nicolae Ceausescu – just imagine a European Gadhafi – summoned the crowd to the square to explain why military repression was necessary in the northwest town of Timisoara, action that cost the lives of hundreds of ethnic Hungarians.
Something unheard of happened.
The crowd was not its usual worshipful self. There were jeers and catcalls. Ceausescu was cruel, not stupid. He knew that was the end of his power. A couple of days later, as all collapsed around him, he grabbed his wife, summoned his helicopter and tried to flee the country. The pilot landed at a military base to refuel. The angry soldiers grabbed the ruling couple, staged an absurdly short trial and executed them right there on Christmas Day.
In other words, sometimes everybody feels the opposite of the way everybody feels everybody feels!
Or, in the movie "The Sound of Music," when the Nazis inhaled Austria with one breath, the crowds seemed to love it. However, at a celebratory concert in Vienna, some in the audience began singing the forbidden national anthem, the song of free Austria. Like a flaming match on kerosene-soaked dry grass in a high wind, the crowd joined in. The German officers sat there looking as if their underwear was bunched up too tight.
Dennis Michael Lynch is a moneymaking and prize-winning entrepreneur. He has the politics of a dollar sign. He works. He earns. He doesn't vote. But he might now. Dennis was drawn to a man who day after day stood outside a 7/11 store with signs protesting illegal immigration, which he insisted was costing America jobs and a whole lot more. Those who appreciated his message honked their horns. Those who didn't threw stuff at him. Dennis called his friend John Roland, retired news anchor celebrity from Channel 5 in New York City, and said, "Can you teach me how to interview people?" Dennis felt a documentary coming on.
Dennis pulled out his checkbook and put the team together. They wound up with a feature-length documentary on illegal immigration entitled "They Come to America." The treatment is unbiased. "Unbiased" doesn't mean you wind up with an inconclusive mulch that leaves everybody still standing. If you see an unbiased documentary on Hitler, you're not likely to wind up liking Hitler. Ditto Stalin. And Dennis and John wound up with a work that elevates the argument high over the left-versus-right thing and leaves illegal immigration itself in the emergency room, for reasons disgusting and impossible to ignore.
Dennis naively supposed America's film world would welcome and honor an unbiased treatment of illegal immigration that rose above the reigning clichés. Wrong! Every film festival in America rejected it. So, Dennis booked a hall for a showing. America was about to be invited back to its senses regarding this scourge with millions of victims, none more pitiable than the illegal immigrants themselves! "They Come To America" is the un-perfumed reality, and the stench is epic.
Here's the great news. This audience was not in an American Legion hall in Gaffney, S.C. This was East Hampton, Long Island, N.Y. – probably the most liberal jellybean upon the continent of North America.
When the lights went on after "They Come to America," the crowd didn't merely applaud. They rose in standing ovation and stayed there for a good long time.
There's no space left to tell you about that man protesting daily outside 7/11 and what happened to his construction firm and employees. Or of John Roland being escorted by police out of a gubernatorial press conference in Florida for daring to ask a question about illegal immigration. There's no way here to tell you about American hospitals and schools closing because of illegal immigration. Or about the Islamic extremists crossing the Mexican border with 9/11 encores in their dreams. Also absent here is in-depth detail about how the drug cartels have taken over the illegal-immigrant traffic into America, extorting millions for "delivery," raping the women, beating the men for more money. I can't relate the story about Dennis and "Mauricio," the illegal from Ecuador, or the cartel "blockhouse" Dennis and his cameras got too close to.
At least, we pro-Americans can understand this first giant step in a great American comeback.
Dennis Michael Lynch's unbiased "rest-of-the-story" – about and against illegal immigration – still has them clapping.
And where is all that clapping?
In East Hampton, no less!