True/False Film Festival: Seized does the Marion County Record (and small town papers everywhere) proud
Courtesy True/False Film Fest
True/False is an annual festival in Columbia, Missouri, MO, that celebrates the best of nonfiction (and nonfiction-adjacent) filmmaking. Our film editor, Abby Olcese, is covering the event’s 23rd year, and all her dispatches can be found here.
Even if Seized weren’t about the 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record, it would still be a compelling movie about small-town journalism. The fact that it’s also about a now-infamous First Amendment violation just makes it more vital.
In following the staff of the Record in the years after their dust-up with Marion’s corrupt police chief, director Sharon Liese and her team find funny, relatable details and a classic storytelling framework, resulting in a movie that’s part Parks and Recreation and part Spotlight.
The facts are these: In 2023, the offices of the Marion County Record and the home of editor-in-chief and co-owner Eric Meyer were raided by Marion, Kan., police under the orders of Chief Gideon Cody. Cody was acting in response to the Record staff’s possession of files indicating a local business owner, Kari Newell, had multiple citations for drunk driving, and was attempting to apply for a liquor license despite not having a valid driver’s license.
Cody and his officers, under a signed warrant, seized the Record’s computers and the personal phones of its staff. They also searched Meyer’s home, where he lived with his 98-year-old mother, Joan, co-owner of the Record. Joan Meyer died a few days following the raid, presumably in part because of the distress it caused her.
A year after the raid, the paper gets an intern, Finn, fresh out of journalism school in New York. Over the next year, Finn gets a crash course in small-town journalism from Eric Meyer and the rest of the paper’s long-tenured staff. He also witnesses the Record staff’s fraught relationship with Marion’s community and their ongoing legal battles against Cody, who’s decamped to his home state of Hawaii. Liese switches between this perspective and accounts of the raid and its immediate aftermath.
If you, like much of the region, followed the Marion County Record story much at all, you likely picked up on a uniquely small-town brand of poorly concealed corruption and a cynical populace who’d prefer to leave well enough alone. Liese’s film not only confirms this to be the case, but captures the vibe both lovingly and with the frustration of someone who’s all too familiar with it.
Townspeople repeatedly warn Liese that the story is more than it seems, then explain their bias against Meyer stems mostly from an opinion column in which he complained about the poor grammar in the paper’s community-submitted letters to Santa. Is Meyer a crank? Absolutely. He chugs cans of Diet Dr. Pepper and smokes so much that Liese includes a shot of his bucket of cigarette butts, full to the brim. But he’s also a newspaper man of the vintage that really only exists in places like Marion, one of a dying breed.
More than a story about a deeply stupid (and therefore frightening) threat to the First Amendment, Seized is a love letter to local newspapers, at a time when local newspapers (and let’s be real, national newspapers, too) are dying on the vine. It’s clear that, like the Marion County Record staffers and their loyal intern, Liese loves her subjects.
She loves rural Kansas in the way that you only can when you understand all of its flaws and hypocrisies. Who knows how much longer we’ll have Meyer and his crew around? But Seized makes you grateful to have them for as long as we’re able.
