The Man Who Loved Seattle Too Much | Seattle Met Magazine

Grant Cogswell found hope in Seattle’s possibilities. He tried to give the city a monorail and a civic vision, but he discovered that happy endings are only in movies.

SCENE 1: THE WRAP PARTY
It was a night of tears, cheers, and bear hugs. After two months of careering around town, Grassroots, the new film about an improbable Seattle City Council campaign in 2001, had finished shooting. It was time for that fraught but inevitable movieland ritual—the wrap party.

The love and praises flowed, celebrating a rare event: a nationally produced film set in Seattle that was actually filmed in Seattle. But one figure stood apart, as distinct as a polar bear on Puget Sound. Amid the T-shirts and cocktail dresses, he wore a black watch cap and Michelin-man jacket. His face was red and his expression a rush of flickering emotions. He clutched a glass of brandy like a buoy in a storm.

This was Grant Cogswell, the poet-turned-activist-turned-politician-turned-filmmaker whose 10-year struggle to make Seattle a more urbane, communitarian, and transit-friendly city in the 1990s and early 2000s rocked local politics, nearly wrecked his own life, and inspired the book that inspired Grassroots. He’d traveled 2,800 miles from his current home in Mexico to attend and try to capitalize on the film’s making. He’d dropped in on shooting, been filmed himself for a companion documentary, enlisted Mayor Mike McGinn for one scene, even played a city councilman (not himself) in another… Read the full article by Eric Scigliano at Seattle Met