NEW DOCUMENTARY: WILL WE STOP MAKING CENTS?

In 2017, wife-and-husband documentary filmmakers Jamie Kovach and Zach Edick embarked on an epic eight-week road trip across North America. Their quarry? The most worthless thing you can find in a cash register or a coin purse: the penny.

The result is "Heads-Up: Will We Stop Making Cents?" Their 68-minute documentary is by turns thoughtful and goofy, featuring interviews with everyone from former directors of the U.S. Mint to the tetchy head of a Virginia mail-order vinyl company who was so irritated by local government that he paid the tax on two new vehicles entirely in pennies — five wheelbarrows full.

When the couple saw a magazine article about seigniorage — the difference between the cost to produce a coin and what it's worth — they thought the back-and-forth over whether to abolish the penny might make a good subject.

"It's not particularly controversial, but it would literally affect every American in every walk of life," said Jamie, 34. "It's a fun way to do a portrait of America as a whole through the lens of a really simple issue."

They did some research, decided whom to interview, set up meetings, then set off. At the end of every interview, they would ask if there was anyone else they should speak with, a trick Jamie learned when she was at Blair's Silver Chips newspaper.

"There's a wonderful community of people that work within the field of coinage," said Jamie, who lives with Zach and their daughter, Lucy, in Austin.

They wound up talking to such diverse figures as the chief executive of Coinstar and a New York City ornithologist who says that spotting birds is good practice for finding coins on the sidewalk. And the couple stopped in Canada, which got rid of its penny in 2012 and suffered no apparent ill effects.

Also in the film is Julian Leidman, a numismatist who runs Bonanza Coins in Silver Spring.

"I remember going in there as a kid," said Jamie. "Montgomery Donuts was nearby. We'd get a doughnut and look at coins at the coin store. I'd buy a wheat penny."

Their movie debuted in September at the Columbus Film Festival. It went up on Amazon Prime two weeks ago.

To read the complete article, see:
A new documentary flips over the lowly penny (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/a-new-documentary-flips-over-the-lowly-penny/2020/08/19/b61ad328-e22d-11ea-b69b-64f7b0477ed4_story.html)

To watch, see:
Heads-Up: Will We Stop Making Cents? (https://www.amazon.com/Heads-Up-Will-Stop-Making-Cents/dp/B08D617XKS/ref=sr_1_1)

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