In Independent America, husband and wife journalists Hanson Hosein and his wife, Heather Hughes, packed up their car (and their dog) and traveled the U.S. But their cross-country road trip doesn’t take place in chain motels and interstate highways. Instead, the couple searches for independent businesses — mom and pop stores, local restaurants, and family-owned inns — off of the country’s more scenic secondary highways. Along the way, they discover fiercely independent communities who are against chains and big-box retailers, an issue, it seems, that unites conservatives and liberals alike. Below, Hulu spoke to filmmaker Hosein about their journey. — Rebecca Harper (), Editor

Hulu: Can you give us a summary of the film?
Filmmaker Hanson Hosein: The big picture is that it’s about what I call the rising insurgency against corporate chains in American small towns and cities across the Heartland. The smaller story is of a road trip my wife and I took across the United States to document that, by taking only secondary highways to see what we thought was a more authentic view of America, before the corporate chains took over, and by only doing business with independent businesses along the way.

What were some of the more surprising things you discovered while you took this trip?
I think the most surprising thing is that this issue transcends politics and the standard conservative-liberal divide we keep hearing about in the United States, which is obviously quite true with many other issues. But we were in Midwestern towns in Nebraska or Wyoming, and these are conservative areas, but they also had the same concerns; they just call it something different. In Seattle, they call it sustainability; in these places they call it conservation. They’re just as concerned about these sort of concentrations of power by large corporations, which they don’t trust as much as they trust their neighbors in terms of how they do business.

One of the reviews about this documentary points out that you aren’t actually anti-Wal-Mart, that you actually provide equal time to their company. What’s your perspective on Wal-Mart?
It’s changed over the years. Because we come from a traditional journalism background — we both used to work at NBC — we take this fair and balanced thing very seriously. It was very important for us to actually get Wal-Mart in the film. They get 800 requests a week — that’s what they told us — for interviews. They looked at our website while we were doing our trip, and they said “Well, they obviously have a point of view that’s critical of us, but they’re giving us fair opportunity to talk.” So they decided they would give us some time. They gave us free access to their stores and their advertising, and there were no conditions whatsoever. So my thought on Wal-Mart as a company is, you know, I’m concerned still about the amount of power they have in the community and some of the things they’ve done in the past, overturning what communities have decided in terms of how they want to run their neighborhoods. On the other hand, I think the fact that Wal-Mart has been very open about some of the mistakes they’ve made along the way doesn’t necessarily endear me to them, but I believe in giving them a fair opportunity to state their case. It’s been said that a book can be written about Wal-Mart and all the bad things they’ve done, and a book can be written about all the good things they’ve done. Especially in this downturn, there’s a sense that that Wal-Mart is not necessarily the bad guy as much as they had been in the past.

You mentioned that you traveled the country with your wife, Heather. What was that like for the two of you?
[Laughs] It was tough, because we had both worked in television news traditionally. We both had real jobs. This was this crazy flight of fancy we had … We tried to get PBS and Discovery Channel and these other broadcasters to support us, and nobody did. We had this incredible pressure to do this story anyway, even though we didn’t have a major supporter. We had a partner, Tom Powers from Open Door in Toronto; he’d give us some funds to do this. But this was like driving into oblivion, not knowing whether we’d have something to show and whether anybody would care about what we were doing. Doing it was a little scary, but going out with your wife and your dog, there’s some moral support there — but it’s also like you’re facing every day, like “Gee, I hope I’m not leading my family into ruin on this creative urge that may not lead to anything.” It was tough, and you have the usual squabbles that happen between husband and wife: the husband never wants to check directions, and the wife always wants to stop and ask for directions — there’s a moment of pride there. But amazingly, we got along pretty well given all the stress of what the trip was about.

How did you determine your route? Did you have certain towns you wanted to hit, or was it all a “flight of fancy?”
I used to work at NBC covering breaking news around the world, so I’m really into covering things organically and letting the story tell itself. On the other hand, I knew that we couldn’t just take a chance and just close our eyes and point at a map. So we did some research before leaving — where we thought some of the hot spots might be, and we decided that we would visit some of those along the way. But what happened –this was a few years ago, before even YouTube had launched — we decided that as we were making our trip, we would share our video and share our thoughts on our blog with the world. As we kept going, more and more people kept following us, and we’d get covered by NPR stations and local newspapers. All of a sudden, people started sending us requests and recommendations of where we should go and said [they'd] put us up for the night. Fifty percent of the trip was very serendipitous based on that interaction with the audience. I’d say that the best half of the film was actually done through improvisation from these suggestions.

You created a follow-up film where you go to New Orleans. Can you tell us about that, and why a film about New Orleans was important?
We were actually supposed to go to New Orleans on the first trip. This was in 2005, and we got a call from Wal-Mart saying “We will talk to you,” so we had to rush to get to Arkansas, where Wal-Mart has their headquarters. We were thinking, “Oh, we’ll get there sometime.” Six weeks later, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. We’d always been told that New Orleans was the classic independent American city, where they had a really strong local economy and local culture, and they didn’t like big-box stores in the city. We knew that was going to change after Katrina. The second film was kind of like a lost chapter of Independent America. It’s my attempt to capture what the city was like before, and how it was actually small businesses that came back immediately after Katrina. I mean, I heard stories of people opening up the day after the floods to help their neighborhoods, and how vital that is to a community after a disaster like that. So that’s the story of that second film. There are some concerns about how city officials have been favoring big-box stores like Home Depot with tax incentives while not giving the same incentives to small businesses. It’s very much the same themes as the first film, but it’s really focused on one community right after a major disaster.

And what are you working on these days?
Right now I’m a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. And funnily enough, all the stuff that I did for that first film — creating your own content, telling your own stories, using engaged community members to help spread the word about what you’re doing — is pretty much what I teach now. It’s like the future of digital media and communication and social media. I’m also working on a book on storytelling in the 21st century. Independent America is going to be the main theme to it, which is essentially that if you ever want to cut through all the noise — everybody can communicate these days — you have to tell a really good story and you have to find a way to connect with your community using these different platforms to have them engage with you, kind of like we did in having them tell us what the second half of the story should be. That’s basically a book on the future of storytelling.

Thanks so much for your time — good luck with these projects!

How do you make a story about marathon runners? You really get into the human stories, says Spirit of the Marathon director Jon Dunham. The documentary tells the stories of six runners who are preparing for one of the fastest marathons in the world: the Chicago Marathon. “I cast it just like it was a feature film,” Dunham says. “I knew I was looking for first-time marathon runners, Boston qualifiers, and a world-class athlete or two. We sent profiles out all over the country, in running magazines, on websites, and the responses came streaming in. Then it was just the process of narrowing it all down. We looked for amateurs, individuals in and around the Chicago area, and the stories evolved from there.”

Of all the famous marathons — New York, Boston — why did the Los Angeles filmmaker choose to focus on Chicago? “All roads were pointing to Chicago,” says Dunham. Because he was looking for someone training to qualify for the Boston Marathon, Chicago made sense. “Chicago sends the most runners to Boston,” he says, because it’s such a flat, fast course. But Chicago was also on the agenda for 2004 Olympic Bronze Medalist Deena Kastor, who suffers a foot injury early in her training for the Chicago race. But, for Dunham, it was also about the location. “It’s one of the bigger races, and it has a skyline rife with opportunities for filming. It’s a beautiful city,” he says.

As we learn more about Spirit ’s subjects, we learn more about marathons: the training involved, the deep inner strength required to keep your feet going one step after another for 26.2 miles, and the sheer spectacle of the event: tens of thousands of people streaming through the urban city streets.

With this year’s Chicago Marathon taking place on Sunday, Hulu caught up with some of the runners we met in Spirit of the Marathon to see where they are now. (Professional runners Daniel Njenga and Deena Kastor were not available for interview.) — Rebecca Harper (), Editor

Ryan Bradley — Boston Hopeful
Though Ryan Bradley’s race didn’t turn out quite like he planned, he was back to his routine about six months later. “I’ve been doing about one marathon a year since then,” he said. Like the other amateurs we meet in Spirit, he’s not running the Chicago Marathon again this year — but that’s because he’s planning to run 26.2 miles in Des Moines next weekend, instead. His wife will be doing Chicago this year, though, so while she’s running the race Ryan’s on kid duty. “I’ve got to somehow manage to get three kids under the age of five down there to watch their mom run,” he said. “It will be fun — it will be a challenge, but it will be fun.” He and his wife had the opportunity to run the Boston marathon together, and now Ryan’s hoping to requalify within the next couple of years so he can return when he’s 40. So what’s it like living in a household with two marathon runners and three young kids? “We’ve broken our treadmill quite a few times,” he laughs. They take the kids with them on some of the shorter runs — the kids love it, he says — and the whole family recently ran their first 5K together (with strollers, of course).

Leah Caille — First-Timer
A knee injury slowed Leah Caille down in her first marathon, but that didn’t stop her from wanting to do it again. “I got to the first finish line, and the only thing I wanted to do other than sleep for three days was go out there and do it again,” she says. This year, though, she’s unable to participate in the Chicago Marathon due to spinal issues. “When you’re a runner, if you’re sidelined for even a few weeks, that kind of sets you back for a bit,” she says. “Well, I’ve been sidelined for a good long time more than that,” thanks to back surgery last year and then two herniated discs in her neck in March. “When God was passing out healthy spines, I might have been at the bar or something — actually, I was probably out for a run,” she laughs. She’s back to shorter, three- or four-mile runs now and hopes to get back to doing both the triathlon and a marathon this year. In the meantime, she’s started a run team at her daughter’s school — they’ve done several 5Ks together — and she’s coaching her volleyball team, as well. “Things are going really well,” she tells us. “My career has moved forward. I’m in the ‘business’ — I sell sponsorships for major races throughout the country, and I love it. Being a runner helps me to speak with not only knowledge, but also a deep passion for the sport.”

Gerald “Jerry” Meyers — Veteran Marathoner
In Spirit, we meet Jerry Meyers as he’s training his daughter for the Chicago Marathon. And though he’d love to be running this weekend, he won’t be able to make it. “I’m on the injured-reserved list,” he says. “I threw a blood clot in my leg in January and it’s still there.” Though he hasn’t been able to run since the beginning of the year — the longest he’s been off in 30 years — he’s still walking every day. After the film, Jerry ran the 2006 Chicago Marathon but had to pull out at mile 16, when an exposed nerve on the ball of his foot kept him from going any farther. “My family told me that if I didn’t quit, they were going to come after me with a baseball bat,” he says. “I was going to hobble in, but they said, ‘No way, you can’t hobble in on two broken legs, ‘cuz that’s what we’re gonna give ya.’ That’s the first time I was not able to complete a run.” Despite the blood clot, Jerry says he feels great today. “If I didn’t know better, I’d go out and run,” he confesses.

Lori O’Connor — First-Timer
Lori got the marathon bug during her first Chicago Marathon and had every intention of doing it again the following year. “During the first one, my training went really, really well,” she said. “I stuck to the schedule. I missed maybe one run that entire training session. I finished, I had a smile on my face, and I felt great at the end. I thought, like some runners do when they finish a race, ‘I can do it a little bit faster!’ There’s always this push to be better.” She prepared for her second marathon the next year, only to find out that she was pregnant after running the 20-mile training run. “My doctor gave me the option [to do the marathon] and I said ‘Hmm, I think I’m going to stay on the sidelines for this one.’ I know it would have been perfectly safe, but I just didn’t want to do it. I wanted to go for speed, and I knew I wouldn’t be going fast.” This year, Lori’s out of the race because she and her husband are both wrapping up their dissertations. (Lori is getting her PhD in Sociology.) “It’s very time-consuming to train for a marathon, and so this year I said I’m basically just sticking to half marathons,” she said. “I did a few halves in the spring and I’m doing another at the end of October. I’m holding off until the degree is in hand — that’s my reward, so I’ll probably train for one again next summer.”

Filmmaker Brett Gaylor makes a compelling case for an update of U.S. copyright law in his documentary RiP! A Remix Manifesto, which is now available on Hulu. In the film, he uses examples of artists such as Girltalk to show how, historically, artists have drawn on others’ creative works to produce new music, art and media. Today, he argues, that creativity energy is threatened by corporations leveraging copyright law to their advantage — even though many of those same corporations were once “disruptive technologies” themselves. Drawing on the cultural policies of Brazil, the talking points of law professor (and Creative Commons founder) Lawrence Lessig, and a small work called The Cannibalist Manifesto, he creates his own decree for the digital age. The result: RiP! A Remix Manifesto. Hulu recently spoke to Gaylor about his exposé on this war of ideas; an excerpt of our discussion follows. — Rebecca Harper (), Editor

Hulu: Tell us about your film, RiP!, and why you decided to tackle the recording industry and copyright law?
Brett Gaylor: Well, I didn’t set out so much to challenge the recording industry. What I really wanted to do was celebrate creativity, specifically individual creativity. Digital technology has always been where I’ve expressed myself from a young age. I was using the Internet in the early days, when it was all about modems and mainframes and things like that. For anybody that was involved in digital culture from the beginning, it was always very apparent that there was a disconnect between the existing industrial models of commerce and production and digital thinking, which is about the free flow of information and connectedness. There’s always been that tension there. And so I wanted to explore that, and when it really became apparent was when the first peer-to-peer file sharing programs came out, like Napster. It sort of crossed over into pop culture, and music became the thing that really grabbed people’s attention and made this tension really apparent. When I first began making the film, it focused on the music industry, but as I did my research and I discovered the history of copyright law, it became a much bigger story. It took several years to make. The record industry is really a moving target, but the kind of basis that this was built upon is an older and a bigger story. It wasn’t so much tackling “What is the future of the music industry?” What I was a lot more concerned with was “What are the other underlying issues here?”

Let’s talk about this disconnect you mentioned. Of course it was felt in the era of Napster, and I think may seem more mainstream than ever now with online video — or at least we feel it every day here at Hulu, where we know what our users want, but we also honor our content partners’ business objectives. How is this relevant today, in the post-Napster world?
Yeah, it’s good stuff. It’s getting bigger and bigger, this conflict. That was the concern that we had while making the film — will people get tired of talking about this? But it just gets more and more relevant as an increasing amount of our communication takes place over the Internet. You know, in 10 years, we won’t even call it the Internet, it will just be communication. When copyright law was originally designed, it was to govern the printing press, which very few people had access to. But now everything, from a post on Facebook to YouTube to Hulu, from the very small people, to the major TV studios that are putting stuff on Hulu, everyone’s covered under the same law, which starts the disconnect.

Copyright law covering is an extremely broad level of discourse, whereas before it was for one specific problem that concerned very few people because very few people were publishers. You know, that’s not quite right, either, because there was this folk creation that people took part in. It used to be that when people listened to music, it was music that created by themselves and by their peers in their living rooms, playing the piano. But over the 20th century, we kind of shifted to more of a consumer-based culture, and fewer and fewer people were making culture, whereas now, anyone can be a publisher, anybody can be an author and reach millions and millions of people, so that’s at the heart of this dilemma.

Were you ever concerned that lawyers would come after you for doing this film?
Well, you know, part of my inspiration for this film has been culture jammers such as Negativland or Dan O’Neill, who are in the film, who basically practiced this, in some sense, as some form of civil disobedience. Mark Hosler from Negativland always told me to “live your life under the rules that you wish existed.” I definitely took that to heart, but the project was always meant to push the boundaries of fair use and of fair dealing, and to really make those issues apparent in the design and the form of the film. We actually felt quite comfortable about the uses that are in the film because we’re using them for the reasons that fair use and fair dealing exist, which is to critique, to comment, and to criticize. We actually had a lot of lawyers look at the film for the interpretation of every clip I had to use, and we’d sort of debate whether that was a fair use or not. Interestingly, nine times out of 10, if a lawyer said “Well, that’s not a very good example of fair use,” it was usually in an artistically uninteresting part of the film, so it almost a part of my creative toolkit, to say, you know, if I’m going to stand behind fair use, I have to be sure my uses are fair.

How much did you know about copyright law going into this? Did anything take you by surprise?
That’s a good question. I was like most people in that I had a vague sort of understanding of it, but as I made the film, I had to amass a lot of knowledge about copyright law. Maybe not what surprised me, but certainly what inspired me was the history of appropriation in Brazil, and how going back to the very beginning of Brazilian culture, there was this history of fair use and appropriation. And you know, we have that in North American culture, as well, with things like the Blues and obviously hip-hop. But what really struck me about Brazilian culture was how recognized it was, and how there was this culture that seemed to be built on taking influences of Europe, of North America, of their native cultures, and sort of putting them in this big pot and making a stew. That was really inspiring, and I read the works of a Brazilian poet and modernist called Oswald de Andrade. He wrote this thing called The Cannibalist Manifesto, which was basically saying that Brazilian culture needed to eat and ingest the cultures of the world to regurgitate and create something new. I just thought that was a really great metaphor for the digital age and postmodernism. That’s why I decided to go to Brazil and spend a good amount of time there.

And this manifesto, of course, was the basis for your “Remix Manifesto.” Can you tell us about that?
It was funny, because the manifesto was actually the last part of the film to come together. I probably would have saved myself several months in the editing suite if I’d come at it first, but it came kind of late in the editing stages of the film. I decided to take a couple of weeks off to think about the film and part of that was the title. And I thought, “Oh, what about a remixer’s manifesto?” And someone asked, “Well, what’s the manifesto?” I realized that a lot of it kind of closely followed a really early speech by Lawrence Lessig, who is also in the film. He was speaking at a convention; I think it was around 2002. I kind of remixed his manifesto and condensed it a little bit, and it was suddenly enough. There wasn’t heck of a lot more editing to do because it really fit with a lot of the progression of the film.