As the awards campaign for feature documentaries reaches a fever pitch ahead of guild voting to take place in coming weeks, one dark horse candidate, “Mission Peace: The Staunch Moderates Documentary movie is doing all it can to cut through the clutter, including Bigfoot and Billboards.
The low-budget, gonzo documentary chronicles the formation and roll-out of the intellectual and philosophical movement Staunch Moderates throughout the highly stressful and polarizing 2020 presidential election and pandemic year. The sole mission of the Staunch Moderates movement’s movement is intuitively simple: to create a worldwide consciousness addressing the intellectual and political divisiveness in society today. Staunch Moderates aims to achieve this not only by practicing and promoting moderation, but also by striving for national and world peace.
The Mission Peace documentary premiered at the Culver City Film Festival last December and has since played at nearly twenty film festivals, garnering numerous awards in the months before its theatrical runs and #FYC screenings, and attended by Diane Ladd, Barry Goldwater, Patrick Kilpatrick Barbara Luna, Bo Svenson, Kate Linder, Pete Alman, Sybil Danning and Tom Hallick.
Moreover, in recent weeks, the company erected three billboards in Los Angeles and New York, hosting an unveiling and lighting event for the flagship Sunset Boulevard billboard with documentary subject Lou Ferrigno, as well as Ken Davidian, Natasha Blasick, Jeff Mullen, Maria Shapley, Deborah Presley Brando, and Ana Lawson.
But in addition to these more standard methods of publicity, the documentary’s director and Movement founder Greg T. Simmons has also utilized a series of Bigfoot sightings and marches. An eight-foot tall, boombox-toting DJ mascot of the movement dubbed “Staunch,” Bigfoot has made sightings in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Aspen and other cities over the last year.
And over this past weekend, Staunch startled visitors to Runyon Canyon Park, first appearing on the trail and crashing through the brush to the surprise and delight of hikers. Staunch then climbed two miles up Runyon Canyon from the bottom to the summit, engaging in photo opps with dozens of delighted hikers and culminating in an appearance with the Los Angeles Fire Department, politely declined Staunch’s offer to climb aboard the LAFD fire engine.
Do these outrageous tactics work? “We sure hope so,” says Simmons. “Our stunts get attention. Staunch was photographed with scores of hikers in Runyon Canyon. But what needs to be stressed about our film—since we’re not a major studio film, nor an A-list film fest attendee—is that Mission Peace has a unique and entertaining marketing campaign behind it.
It’s driven by our Bigfoot mascot Staunch, a full entertainment studio including a YouTube Channel; our band (who’s released three multi-genre hip hop albums that made the ballot at the Grammysâ ten times over the last three years); an eighteen episode, one-hour radio show; and a thorough social media footprint that includes nearly 150 million views and streams of Staunch Moderates content! This is all premised around an intellectual movement to address the divide and strive for national and world peace.”
Simmons continues, “What—if any—of these other documentary films we’re competing against or in the history of the Oscarsâ has had an infrastructure like this behind it, or has indeed been anything like it: an intellectual movement for peace during this divisive era we live? Think of the timeliness and the importance of that message.”
