DAY 10: July 10, 2010

For the duration of his first and only day on set, on location at the office of the alternative weekly The Stranger, Todd Stashwick makes us love to hate his character, Nick Ricochet. But it’s hard not to love him. Though Nick has just fired his character in multiple takes, Jason can’t resist leaping up from his chair the second a shot is cut, giving Todd a huge hug, and saying with friendly exuberance, “It’s going to be okay for both of us! I’m going to write a book! And it’ll get made into a movie! Starring Jason Biggs!”

The office is peppered with gems including an ink stamp made to brand any document “bullshit” in a split second, and a book on Karma Pooptra, the art of pooping. Clearly no funny business is allowed here. Still, books on topics including 20th Century German poetry and Ralph Ellison line the Stranger shelves, fostering a healthy balance between lighthearted and weighty material.

This dichotomy is reflected in an interchange between Mr. Biggs and Mr. Gyllenhaal. After one of Jason’s countless dirty jokes:

STEPHEN (joking): Here I try to bring some lyricism and poetry to the world, and look what happens!”

JASON: The world doesn’t want lyricism and poetry. The world wants fart jokes.

STEPHEN: Too true, too true – the tragedy of my life.

JASON: And the blessing of mine.

I get a chance to speak briefly with Phil Campbell, the author of the novel and the protagonist of the screenplay, who’s now living in Brooklyn. He just returned from what he calls “one strange week” back in Seattle, during which he visited the set.

When he wrote Zioncheck for President, he did not anticipate its transition onto the screen. “The period just after being fired from The Stranger was a sort of relief,” he says, “Because I really wanted to write books.”

He never set out to write a memoir. “Everything in the campaign just unfolded in a way that felt not just dramatically but thematically significant.” Telling the story of the campaign, Phil “realized how much emotion would have to be tapped with as few digressions and as little self-justification as possible.”

Writing Zioncheck for President, Phil was deeply connected with his own personal and emotional experience while staying focused on the story of the campaign and its external details, as his journalistic background had groomed him to be. By relaying as truthfully as possible his emotional journey in conjunction with his external struggle to get Grant into office, Phil unintentionally created the basis for this film.

Phil and Emily, his love interest in the movie, were engaged six weeks after Grant’s campaign ended and married in September of 2002. Their son, Mungo, will be three in October. Phil is now one or two revisions away from finishing his next novel, but has to balance writing with family life now; he had to get off the phone quickly because he and Mungo were at another toddler’s birthday party.

Phil’s time at The Stranger is years in the past, but the Grassroots crew has just finished chronicling it today.