More than just a screenplay and photobook, An All American Boy is tell-all of growing up in the 1950s, when Sam Edwards joined the Army only to get into the kind of trouble at Fort Bragg that nearly cost him years in a military prison. What else could you expect from, as they used to say, the product of bad blood? Sam's great, great, great grandfather, before his election as the ninth president of the United States, vowed to annihilate the great Iroquois Chief, Tecumseh, and his democratic confederation of tribes, "even into babes in arms." He kept his promise. Sam's uncle, as security chief of the CIA, was engaged in domestic spying decades before it was fashionable. To top things off, he administered the CIA sponsored attempt by the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro with poisoned cigars. Sam himself has several times tested the constitutional integrity of the republic by his consistent lack of foresight. While in the army, his arrest for grand larceny-not grand ideas-called up the heroic actions of the military lawyers who had previously defended the Korean War turncoats to challenge the uniform code of military justice when in conflict with the constitutional right to a fair and speedy trial. An All American Boy is the precursor to Sam's previous book, The Last Days of The Empire.
About the Author: Sam Edwards disappeared from New York after editing and publishing Second Coming magazine-the first of the slick-paper cultural and political magazines that published the works of I.B. Singer, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank, Robert Rauschenburg, Susan Sontag and many others-edited Arts magazine and published and edited the New York Free Press. His play about capital investment in capital punishment, "The Great American Light War," was published in the Drama Review, and produced in regional theaters around the country and off-Broadway in New York. Sam had columns in the underground press as "Our Man on the Spot"-which caused the West Side News to lose all its advertising in one week-and "Our Man in the Big Apple," under his by-line D. Melmoth, caused an attack on the office of the New York Review of Sex and Politics (also published by Sam) by anti-Castro Cubans. Sam kept his night hours occupied by tending bar uptown, downtown, eastside and westside before fleeing the Big Apple in 1973 to homestead in Northern California. After learning a bit of common sense from homesteading, Sam had the sense to begin looking again for news that doesn't fit "at a prime time of your convenience," and he started Eureka Video Magazine with consumer cameras. He made his first award-winning documentary about Reagan's proxy wars, "Dinner in Managua." Eureka Productions has won awards for grass-roots productions (the digital revolution) on sustainable logging ("Why You Can't Harvest Trees Like Carrots or Potatoes"), the Himalayas ("On the Pilgrimage Trail"), post-Taliban Afghanistan ("nam-e-shab"), gold medals for documentaries on micro-farming ("Invitation to Garden"), health, healing and knife-fighting ("The Best of Masters on the Mountain Healing"), modern India ("In the Footsteps of Gandhi") and "hopefully more to come from collaborative efforts" (he said that).