David McElroy

Eight years ago, I made a short film and it had a successful run at 20 smaller film festivals. It even won a few awards. Since then, it’s been viewed more than 300,000 times on YouTube. It’s finally time to make another one.

I never dreamed I’d wait this long to get serious about making another film, but work has finally begun.

The working title is “John Crispin for President.” It’s a short parody of a political film for a presidential candidate of the “Demopublican Party.” Not only is Crispin willing to promise absolutely anything to anyone in order to pander for votes, but he also has a very serious and glaring physical flaw — which everyone completely ignores since he’s a powerful man.

The primary point is to satirize candidates who are willing to promise the moon to voters, but the secondary point is that a candidate can be completely flawed in obvious and serious ways, but few in the mainstream even seem to notice.

I’ll be launching a fundraising campaign on Indiegogo to raise some money to make it, so you’ll be hearing me talk about that when the sample footage is shot and we have a promotional video. Indiegogo is similar to Kickstarter, but I like the way the service works better.

I’m not going to spoil what Crispin’s major flaw is, but bringing it to the screen requires very specialized special effects makeup. Finding the person who can produce the look I need has been holding the project up for a couple of years, but I finally found a makeup artist recently who specializes in what the character requires. I think you’ll find the candidate’s look funny and outrageous at the same time. It’s something that might help in making the piece go viral online when it’s out. I have my fingers crossed.

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About six or seven years ago, I got a late-night phone call from a woman I know. She was really upset and on the verge of crying when I answered. I remember the feelings associated with the conversation far more than I do the details, but I’ll never forget the emotions because I’ve thought about it over and over since then.

The woman was a teacher who hadn’t been teaching long. I don’t recall whether it was her first or second year, but I know she loved her middle school students very much. She was a very good and caring teacher — with a brilliant mind and flair for communicating effectively — the prototype of the rare sort of teacher who anyone would gladly trust his own children with. But on this night, she was upset and confused.

She was on a school trip with her students to Washington, D.C. At some point along the trip, some sort of bullying or rivalry started among her girls. I don’t remember if there was just one victim or if it was a conflict between groups. But whatever it was, it was the sort of ugly, mean, nasty thing that only kids of that age can do to one another. For this kind and loving teacher, it was enough to break her heart — partly because of the pain it was causing for students she loved and partly because it was reminding her of her own miserable school years at that age.

As we talked that night, I sat in a parking lot and listened, but I didn’t have any useful advice to offer. For all these years, I’ve been wondering about it. What causes kids to act this way to each other? And what can we do about it?

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We’ve been told over and over that problems with health care in this country prove that the free market has failed. But what if the medical industry is already so regulated that its problems have nothing to do with the free market?

There hasn’t been a free market in health care for a long time, certainly not in my lifetime. Probably not since sometime in the 19th century. An item in the local news this week is a stark reminder of that to me.

In 2008, Trinity Medical Center in Birmingham proposed relocating from an older part of town to a fast-growing area along U.S. 280, very close to affluent southern suburbs. A major hospital company (HealthSouth) had built a state-of-the-art building already, but the company was hit hard in an accounting scandal involving the company’s founder and former CEO. The company unloaded various properties around the country just to survive, including this hospital which was about 90 percent complete. (That’s the new building above, framed by a nice sunset I shot last year.)

Trinity is currently in an older part of Birmingham near downtown that’s declining. The hospital was founded as Baptist Medical Center-Montclair many decades ago, but the Baptist system sold that hospital to a private company a decade or more ago. Before too long, the new management was looking to relocate to a newer facility closer to a suburban population that didn’t have a hospital close by.

In the current location, the hospital competes with various huge hospitals downtown. Although most people don’t realize it, Birmingham is a major center for medical research and health care. The medical industry — clinical and research combined — is the biggest in the area by far.

After an aborted plan to move to the suburb of Irondale, Trinity decided that moving to the unused HealthSouth building was more economical and would provide access to a better market. There was only one problem.

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