How the Kitchen got to produce Larry Lessig’s presidential campaign video

In 1967, Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy entered the primary here in New Hampshire to challenge his own party’s sitting president, because he feared the most important moral issue of the time — the Vietnam War, was going to be invisible in that election. In four months, McCarthy went from almost nothing in the polls to almost beating Lyndon Johnson in the primary. And the one issue that no one wanted to talk about became the one issue that no one could ignore.

That’s the opening bit to Harvard professor, open source warrior and Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig’s presidential campaign video. The video was shot and produced in New Hampshire and D.C. by Wilmington-based production company the Kitchen. Founder Zach Phillips’ grandmother actually ran Senator McCarthy’s Syracuse, N.Y., campaign headquarters.
But Phillips’ tie to Lessig goes much deeper than that.

“What he’s basically doing, the way he describes it is, we’re using a Constitutional hack — we’re hacking a referendum into the Constitution by using the presidential race as a referendum race,” said Phillips. “The idea is he gets elected on this referendum to achieve citizen equality. As soon as he were elected, he would pass this reform and then resign.”
The referendum — Lessig’s Citizen Equality Act — would systemically reform the election process by taking money out of politics, essentially giving citizens full representation in the election process.
“It’s a very wonky issue,” said Phillips, who has been actively advocating for the same issue for the past few years. “It itself doesn’t solve anything. There are tons of very important issues. The problem is that this is the issue that must be addressed before any other issue can be addressed.”
Phillips took the issue to the Delaware House of Representatives last year in an effort to get the state involved in an Article V convention.
“We were dead in the water,” said Phillips. “Everybody was against us. It was going to be 5-0 against.”
Then, Lessig himself came to the rescue. He wrote about the experience, which he described as the “most extraordinary political event I have ever seen,” in his blog. Lessig listened to Phillips give a speech on the floor.
“Everything about the speech was brilliant — the emotion, the tempo, and most importantly, the substance,” Lessig wrote. “The room seemed to hum with him as he spoke.”
Phillips said once Lessig got involved, they got three votes “just through argument.” The speech — more so the delivery of the message — stuck with Lessig.
“Last week I got a call [from Lessig] asking if I can write a proposal for a thing that I can’t tell anyone about,” Phillips said. “We found out we have this job, and the very next day we’re driving to D.C. We shoot in D.C. and immediately upon finishing shooting we drive 10 hours to New Hampshire. We slept three hours a night trying to get this together.”
Phillips said he and the Kitchen will be continuing their work with the campaign.
“The big thing for me is that this is one of my heroes,” said Phillips. “To be able to be working on a core part of this effort is kind of surreal.”