“I wanted to try to make something to remind not only the audience, but to remind me of what we stand for. What are our values? What are our principles?’’ Tingle said over coffee at Café Algiers, in Harvard Square. “I can’t control the Congress, I can’t control who’s in the White House or what they do. I can’t control the media. I can do what I can do, using the skills I have, to make a contribution.’’
The hourlong documentary features Tingle cracking wise and asking his usual brand of barbed rhetorical questions. Everyone from Al Franken to Sean Hannity to Tingle’s mother, Frances, gives his or her two cents on the concepts of opportunity and freedom, how they’ve played out over our nation’s history, and how they collide with today’s realities. The roster of voices leans left with Howard Zinn, Robert Reich, and Barry Crimmins, but there are also representatives of Boston’s Muslim community and the homeless. Locations range from Washington, D.C., to Harvard Yard to Plymouth Rock.
Back in 2003, Waltham filmmaker Vincent Straggas directed a TV broadcast from Tingle’s Off Broadway Theater in Somerville. “After the shooting was done and we were breaking down the set, I said, you know, Jimmy, you kind of live the American dream here,’’ Straggas said recently by phone. “You grew up in Cambridge, you’re starting to achieve some national notoriety, and you came back to the Boston area where it all began for you and started your own theater, and you’re kind of doing your own thing.’’
They kept talking, and by 2004, they were making a movie. They grabbed some interviews during that year’s Democratic National Convention in Boston. They financed it themselves, too, to the tune of close to $60,000 over seven years, Tingle said. It has been a long haul, often taking a back seat to the other projects.
