For Mr. Smith…

Hi Kevin,

It’s Dan Duffy.  We’ve never met, but we’ve talked, and you’ve talked about us.  I’m a VFS alum, live in St. Louis, and interviewed you for the Steve and DC Radio Show.  You told me that I was the only show outside of Vancouver that talked about the school with you.

A few weeks after you started Plus One Per Diem, you and your lovely did a commercial for the Half Fund, our philanthropic mission dedicated to spreading cancer education through the arts, such as films and docs and books and music.  After bullet point 4 we sent you, Jen burst out with, “That’s fucking amazing.”  I felt all tingly…like Mewes’ phallus “…on the way down.”

We’re the guys who brought you the St. Louis Blues Jersey to the Chicago tour stop of Red State, and were also the guys that bent Jon Gordon’s ear for 20 minutes in the lobby.  I’m so glad I had no idea what he had done, career-wise, before meeting him.  I knew it was a big deal, however, when after about 5 minutes of talking, a ring of people had started to surround us.  And they weren’t thinking, “Who are these jamokes talking to Gordon?”  They were thinking, “Who are these jamokes to whom Gordon is giving a ridiculous amount of time?  And why the hell are they talking about each others kids?”

Yes, by the end of the conversation, we were telling each other about our children.  Amazing man, that Mr. Gordon is.

I was also in the audience last Saturday night when you and Jason presented the Super Groovy Cartoon Movie at the Pageant.  I have to say that seeing Jason in that light made me completely re-imagine who he is.  I had read your posts of “Me and My Shadow,” but seeing him in person gave me an entirely new level of respect for both of you…his coming from being a wonderfully thoughtful person…and you for never giving up on your love for him.  We should all be so lucky to have a friend like that.

So why am I writing to you?  Well, it’s simple.  I have an idea…a plan…a mission to change the world in a variety of ways, and I want to ask you to become a part of it.

The Half Fund was started to shed light on a cancer diagnosis.  I contracted and subsequently beat ball cancer back in 2002, but at the end of it, all I could ask was “What the hell happened?!”  I wanted to help others not sink into the same quicksand that I did, so I wrote a script.  (No, it wasn’t 50/50…ours was started 4 years prior.)

The script sucked ball, but it had just enough of a nugget for others to say, “Keep writing.”  So I did, and after only 9 years (and the 50/50 boys beating me to the screen), we have something amazing.  I’ve sent it to a few people.  We have a casting director in Hollywood lined up, saying, “Get some dough to shoot this, and I’ll get you actors you won’t believe.”  The main camera guy on “Once Upon A Time” is one of my former instructors, and has agreed to shoot this lower than I could get a fresh film grad to shoot it.  He loved the script, and he read the extra-crappy Version 5.  We’re up to Version 14, by the way.

So now I need the money.  And here’s how we’re getting it.  In 2012, I was blessed enough to get to go to Haiti to shoot a video for Soles4Souls, the organization that has put shoes on over 20 million of the worlds most impoverished people.  I filmed their founder, Wayne Elsey, who took a real interest in how the Half Fund works.  He couldn’t quite get how simple it was at first.  But then it finally clicked:

“The Half Fund funds commercially viable artistic ventures that educate about cancer.  All artists who receive funds have to split net profits in half: half to any legitimate cancer charity of the artists choice, and half comes back to us where we give it away to other artists who will split their profits.  And the cycle continues forever.”

So Wayne came up with a way for dot-org’s like ours to make a ton of cash in a short amount of time.  We are collecting shoes…city wide.  Our goal: 1 million pairs.  Wayne’s venture, Funds2Orgs, pays us $0.40 per pound.  When we collect a million pairs of shoes, not only are we keeping 40 tractor trailer loads out of landfills, not only are we providing shoes to people in places like Haiti, where they will use them as safety, currency, and tuition (yes, school tuition in Haiti is one pair of black shoes), but we will receive $400,000 for the Half Fund…enough to make our film.  And it’s all done by asking people to donate what they don’t want or need anymore…their old shoes.

So we’ll make our film, and after all of this…here is where you come in.

We would like to broach the possibility of partnering with you, as well as Mark Cuban, for the premiers.  Once we make our film, the American Cancer Society is going to help us market it.  Four years ago, before the Half Fund even came into existence, I sent an e-mail to our local ACS office, saying we wanted to make a film and share our profits with the ACS.  That was at 2pm.  By 4:30pm, we got a call back, saying this: “Hi Dan, it’s April from the ACS.  I read your e-mail and thought it had huge promise, so I sent it to division (regional).  They liked it so much that they sent it to national.  And now Angela Hayes from national wants to talk to you.”

We cleared the entire bureaucracy of the American Cancer Society in two-and-a-half hours.

So they have agreed to let us use their name and logo, as well as helping us to promote the film by helping to stage a series of premiers…a road show if you will, not unlike Red State and SGCM…but it would be way smaller, like maybe six cities.  And we’re going to approach Mark Cuban to hold them exclusively in Landmark Theaters, which are all over the country in the markets we want to hit: St. Louis (of course), New York, LA, Seattle, Miami, etc.

They could be so hugely over-the-top successful, it’s staggering.  They would give an entirely new spin to the American Cancer Society, of which the ACS National Office is very excited.  It would share in the philanthropy with Smodco, as well as Landmark and Mr. Cuban.  It’s going to be an amazing movie, and we’re going to impact so many lives.

And that’s really why we are here, anyway…to make the world a better place for everyone we can.  We can help millions of people to not freak out when they hear the words, “You have cancer,” or sometimes even harder from a friend or loved one, “I have cancer.”

So I think that’s it.  I’m just going to share this with you in hopes that you get to read it and see that what we’re trying to do is as noble as we can be.  I’ve had an interesting life at only 40 years old.  I was thrown from a 60 MPH Jeep (sober, while flipping) at 24 years old, and I survived cancer at 29.  I don’t know how many more lives I’ll have, so we’re doing something epitomizes what I heard you say last night on TV: “The world is full of why’s.  We need to live a life of why not’s.”

Take care, sir.  Love and thanks to your wife for such an amazing testimonial on Plus One Per Diem, and I hope to talk with you some day soon.

Dan

PS: Special thanks to Jason for the balls he’s showed last Saturday night in St. Louis.  He won us all over with his heart, not just his humor.