Josh Horowitz is a Philadelphia-born filmmaker, writer, and former professional cyclist whose path has moved between Hollywood storytelling and elite endurance sport. After graduating from NYU Film School, he worked in Los Angeles at New Line Cinema and United Talent Agency before stepping away to race professionally around the world.
Sovereign Quick Cuts was born during 18 months when a serious back injury left Horowitz sidelined and awaiting major spinal surgery. Immersed in online courtroom footage, he became fascinated by the strange theatre of sovereign citizen cases and set out to reshape hours of proceedings into fast, music-driven edits that let the story tell itself.
The result is a 10-episode series that blends documentary insight with high-energy pacing, spotlighting the personalities, language, and confrontations at the heart of the movement. Horowitz aims to make this hidden corner of internet culture accessible, addictive, and impossible to ignore. We caught up to discuss his fascinating journey and find out more about the YouTube series.
Josh, thanks for taking the time to speak with us. Growing up in Philadelphia, what early moments shaped the kind of life you wanted to pursue or made you feel that film was your language?
Two things shaped my life from an early age.
The first was viewing the Philadelphia Pro Championships, one of the biggest and most fabled one-day professional bike races (think bicycles, not motorcycles). It’s known throughout the world simply as “Philly”. We watched from the infamous Manayunk Wall, a narrow, incredibly steep climb twisting its way through the blue-collar neighborhood of Manayunk. Climbs in bike racing are ranked 1 through 4 based on difficulty. The wall is so incredibly steep that it is classified as Hors Catégorie. Uncategorized. So difficult it defies classification. The racers would conquer it ten times over the course of the 155-mile race.
Unlike most sports, in bike racing, there is very little to separate spectator from athlete. Watching the pain and determination on those riders’ faces from the sidewalk, mere inches away, you get a sense of the discipline and sacrifice it takes to accomplish what to a mere mortal seemed impossible. You could almost see the story of their journey in their eyes. I set a goal to do that race someday. So that someday some kid on the sidewalk could look into my eyes and see the journey I took to get there.
The day after I saw the Philly race, I grabbed a bike out of the garage and started training. I raced as a junior through middle and high school, always with Philly in the back of my mind. I was good but not great, and by the end of high school I was burnt out. Not quite ready to throw up my hands and surrender, but for the moment, I put the whole bike racing thing in my back pocket to focus on college.
The second event was seeing my first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, during its original theatrical run. At six years old, I fell in love with the idea that a movie could make me feel the way I did walking out of that theatre. I was simultaneously inspired by the art of the storytelling and the possibility of a life of adventure, danger, and excitement. I knew it was fiction, but the way it made me feel was very real. As a result of those two experiences, my chance of ever finding contentment sitting behind a desk was forever dashed. So the course of my life was set. I wanted to race Philly, I wanted to make movies, and I wanted to live a life of swashbuckling adventure. Seemingly oppositional goals, but as it turned out, not as disparate as one would think.
How did your time at NYU shape your path into the film industry? How do you value your experience and, looking back, was there a lesson that didn’t hold up in the real world?
I was only 17 when I started film school, and being on the autism spectrum with ADHD, I was effectively even younger than that. So I didn’t really understand what I was doing there. For a kid with unaddressed ADHD, sitting in a classroom is torture. I’d just suffered through 12 years of it, and college seemed like four more years of the same. I’d been told that in order to get a good job I had to get a college diploma, but I didn’t understand exactly why that was. I figured it must be something they told you when you got there. But they never did.
NYU prides itself on being an art school and not a trade school, so they taught nothing about the mechanics of how to succeed in the film industry. Literally nothing. If you don’t take advantage of the community and connect with other aspiring artists (which, due to the autism, was next to impossible for me), you really don’t get much out of it. However, there is one other valuable aspect of being a student at NYU. It’s a magic foot that gets in the door of any internship you want, and I took full advantage of that.
I worked at City Stage, one of the biggest sound stages in Manhattan, where I learned the name and function of just about every bit of studio equipment in existence at the time. I interned for independent filmmaking legend Hal Hartley on his movie Henry Fool, experiencing all the springs and gears of pre-production and production of a low-budget independent film.
I interned at a Manhattan law firm called LeBoeuf, Lamb, cataloguing discovery for a lawsuit brought by Troma Films against New Line Cinema, who had allegedly breached an agreement to make an updated version of Troma’s camp classic, The Toxic Avenger.
My job was reading through and classifying thousands of interoffice memos between Troma and New Line execs such as president Bob Shay and president of production Mike DeLuca, gathering valuable insight into how a movie studio operated at the highest level.
New Line seemed like a pretty exciting place, so I applied for an internship, and the summer between junior and senior year I trucked out to LA. A world that for me had thus far existed in black and white on pieces of paper was now three-dimensional and in Technicolor. Like Dorothy stepping out of her house into Munchkinland.
It was an exciting time. New Line had just released Boogie Nights, and the place was humming. I met celebrities, went to wild company parties, and attended a red carpet premiere at the Mann Chinese.
Lots of cool stories to bring back with me to New York, but when all was said and done, the main thing I learned at NYU was that if you wanted to make a living in the film industry, you had to be in Los Angeles.
When you moved to Los Angeles after graduation, what did you think your career would look like—and what did it actually look like once you were inside UTA?
I moved out to LA with a broad goal of making movies, but I didn’t yet know what that would look like or how to get there.
So I took what is considered one of the best, most sought after entry level job in the industry. A position in the agent training program at UTA, one of the big three Hollywood talent agencies. I thought maybe it would help clarify for me what making movies actually meant. I found myself working in a mailroom surrounded by recent Ivy League business and law school grads, aspiring to jobs on the business side of the industry. The so-called “non-creatives”. I was the only film school graduate.
It was intense. All the things you know about talent agencies from shows like Entourage are deadly accurate. Massive egos, virtual hazing, high stakes, high intensity, high flying staplers. But I gave it a shot. I delivered mail, wrote script coverage, and covered desks for top agents such as Tracy Jacobs, Jim Berkus, J.J. Harris, and Jeremy Zimmer.
Agents make and receive hundreds of calls a day, and the assistant has to know the status of every single one. Who’s called the agent, who the agent has called, who the agent’s waiting for a call back from, and who’s waiting for the agent to call them back. And you have to know who all those people are. While all of that is going on, you also have to be on the calls, taking note of any promises made or action to be taken. If there was ever a place least suitable for a creative ADHD introverted mind who avoids human contact whenever possible and has a minor panic attack every time his own phone rings, this was it.
Working in UTA’s story department, what did you learn about how movies are really “made”? Did it make you more idealistic or more cynical about the business?
I was stressed to the point that it made me physically sick. I woke up every morning feeling like I had the flu. After about six months, I went to HR to quit, but they made me an offer. One of the responsibilities of agent trainees was to write script coverage. Synopses and analysis of the scripts that are sent to the agency for their clients to consider. Apparently, my script coverage had become one of the most sought-after in the agency. They offered me a job in the story department. Reading and analysing scripts all day long, far away from the intensity of the agency floor. A good job for an introvert. During that time, I covered scripts for actors such as Jim Carrey, Harrison Ford and Johnny Depp and for directors like John Singleton and Michael Mann. I was their first line of defence. Or at least I tried to be.
My main takeaway from that job was that working as a writer in Hollywood could not possibly be based on ability alone because most of the scripts I read were awful. Even the worst ones sometimes became big-budget movies (the one that still sticks out in my mind is Bedazzled starring Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley. Holy cow, that script was bad).
This scared the shit out of me because it meant that even if it turned out I had talent as a filmmaker, the same autistic antisocial disadvantages that kept me out of the loop at NYU could plague me again in the real world. And while reading scripts was a perfect job for an aspiring writer, learning from the good ones and learning even more from the bad ones, I still didn’t know I was an aspiring writer. I was still just a guy who wanted to make movies, whatever the hell that meant.
What I did know was that I went to work every day at the same place at the same time. I was sitting in an office behind a desk and wearing a suit and tie. I wasn’t making movies, and I wasn’t scouring the world for ancient artifacts.
You’ve referenced growing restless. Was that restlessness about the industry, your identity, your body needing motion—or something you couldn’t name yet at the time?
I had moved out to Los Angeles with a group of friends from high school. We all lived within a few blocks of each other in Venice, just steps from the beach. At the time, it was one of the most dangerous but least expensive (now the most expensive) places in the city to live.
Several of my friends were musicians. We’d go out and see their bands play at the Troubadour, the Roxy, the Viper Den, even at Lollapalooza. They’d take us to Hollywood parties, and we’d mingle with rock stars like Dave Navarro and Perry Ferrell.
Somehow we crewed up with Marc Collins-Rector and Chad Shackley, the founders of D.E.N. (the digital entertainment network), and Bryan Singer, who was hot off the success of The Usual Suspects. Through him, we became regulars at the now-infamous Encino mansion parties.
The Encino mansion parties had a reputation for hosting underage male actors, and eventually allegations of rape and sexual assault from those wild nights would take down some of the biggest names in tech and filmmaking.
We had no idea what was actually going on, but there was definitely something ick about that scene. Soon that whole lifestyle just stopped being fun, and I was ready for a change.
My cycling plot line had fizzled out when I went to NYU, so perhaps in an effort to gain some control over my life, I had my bike shipped out and overnight went from a Hollywood party goer to an early-to-bed, early-to-rise, clean and sober living athlete.
I found a community of cyclists that seemed to be a better fit for me than the industry crowd, and I discovered that I was actually pretty good at it. Much better than when I was a kid.
It wasn’t long before I was training every day and competing in amateur races every weekend. Although I was doing fairly well, it still hadn’t occurred to me that it could be anything more than a very intensive hobby.
Leaving film to race professionally is a rare pivot. What prompted the change in careers?
That changed one day when I heard that Lance Armstrong, who had just won his second Tour de France*, would be signing autographs at Nike Town, which was right downstairs from the UTA offices. Although arguably the biggest sport in the world next to soccer, cycling had always been a niche sport in the United States. The only race ever televised was the Tour de France and then only for a few minutes on the weekends during Wide World of Sports.
But there was a line around the block, hundreds of people waiting just to get a glimpse of Lance, and I realized that these weren’t just cycling fans. Some weren’t even cyclists. Because of Lance, for the first time, bike racing was appealing to a mainstream American audience.
What that meant to me and pretty much everyone in the cycling industry was that there would now be real money behind the sport and, however unlikely, a small chance I could actually make a living at it.
It was simple. I was bored with my job (the office had become just another classroom), and I liked riding my bike. I turned my back on UTA and the film industry and began training full time. I worked my way through the amateur ranks and eventually made it to the pro/am level.
For the first time since I was a kid, the Philadelphia race was back on the radar.
I was good but not great. I eked out a living but mostly by coaching and writing training articles for websites and magazines (my first shot at writing professionally) as opposed to earning a salary or winning prize money.
In order to race Philly, you had to be signed by a pro team. There were only about 12 pro teams in the U.S. Each one had about 12 riders, and per UCI rules, a majority of them had to be under the age of 23, which for me had come and gone. So of the 124 spots up for grabs, no more than 61 were available to me, and they would each be hotly contested. I was maybe in the top 200 riders in the US, but I wasn’t yet good enough to earn one of those coveted spots.
So I became a journeyman racer. Always looking for opportunities to do the big international events, jumping on teams, traveling to races in Italy, Ireland, New Zealand, Cuba, Israel, Mexico. Then I’d come back to the US to travel to the domestic races with my Los Angeles-based elite team. Anything to develop my skills, improve my capacity to suffer, and bring me closer to Philadelphia.
I had started to make a name for myself, but it quickly became apparent that I was never going to be good enough to grab one of those coveted 61 positions. So I did what any obsessively driven person would do when opportunities were not forthcoming. I made my own opportunity.
I set forth to create my own professional team. It took a couple of years, but I found a cash sponsor (Wonderful Pistachios), landed equipment sponsors, hired riders, and handed myself a pro contract.
We had by far the lowest budget of any team in the country, but what mattered was that I finally had a piece of paper that said I was a pro rider on a pro team, and as an American pro team, we were guaranteed a spot in Philly.
When you look back, what do you remember most about the months of all-in preparation, the brutal conditions on the days, and the moment you had to choose between chasing your own finish and doing your job for the team—and how did that experience reshape what “success” means to you?
My training had always been disciplined and calculated, but for 9 months, I trained like never before. I spent hours in the Santa Monica Mountains becoming intimate with Tuna Canyon, Latigo, Topanga, Mulholland.
People driving down the PCH from Malibu towards LA on their way to work would see me riding north, and eight hours later on their way home would see me riding back. I virtually lived in my cycling gear. It was eat, train, eat, sleep, repeat. Every minute of the day was either riding or recovering. There was no in between.
June rolled around, and I was ready.
At the line were 180 racers, representing every team in the US as well as teams from around the world.
It was already in the high 80s, and the forecast was 97 degrees with 96% humidity. Just about the worst conditions you could imagine for a six-hour bike race. But I never felt the heat that day. Not even a little. I was focused on finishing the race. Everything else melted away.I had the best day I’ve ever had on the bike. The Wall was actually easy. Mostly because of the training but also because of the energy from the massive crowd.
75 miles in, the heat and the climb had taken out more than half the field. At 125 miles, there were only about 35 riders left, and I was still feeling great. But cycling is an unpredictable sport, and it’s a team sport.
There was another rider on my team who we had designated as the team leader. It was just him and I left in the pack, and my job was to support him. Drift back to the team car to get water and snacks, protected him from the wind, chased down dangerous breakaways, and stopped to help him back to the pack if he got a flat tire.
Which is what happened. With only 20 miles to go, he flatted, and I stopped with him. Our team car was in the back of the motorcade, so by the time it got to us with a new wheel, the pack was long gone. The only way back was for the driver to hold a water bottle out the window (as if giving a feed) and for my teammate to grab onto it and get towed back to the group (not technically legal but a commonly accepted practice). He grabbed the bottle, the car gunned it, and just like that, my day was over.
Not the result I wanted, but the takeaway was that I showed up to the start line in the best shape of my life and I sacrificed my dream for a teammate. There is no question in my mind I would have finished that race, and that would have to suffice.
I had accomplished my goal. Everything I ever wanted to do in the sport of bike racing.
Did that experience open the door to a new kind of challenge you wanted to chase?
Not exactly. I made the mistake a lot of athletes make. I did one more.
By the end of the season, my team was struggling, and it looked unlikely that we’d retain our sponsorship for the next year. The last chance to make a mark was at Track Nationals. Velodrome racing. Short, extremely fast races on a steeply banked (45 degrees in the turns) 250-meter track. So fast in fact that the bikes don’t even have brakes.
I got myself in track shape (fast for 5 minutes as opposed to 5 hrs) and entered the California State Championship as a precursor to Nationals. My event, the points race, started with a neutral lap, a slow roll to jockey for position before the gun.
I maneuvered into a perfect spot towards the back, but just before we crossed the start line, the rider in front of me broke his pedal and went down. As I mentioned, there are no brakes on track bikes, and with riders on either side of me, there was no room to maneuver.
In a high-speed crash, you skid across the pavement, shredding layer upon layer of skin. It’s horribly painful, but you usually avoid what would be classified in cycling as an “injury”. In a slow-speed crash, you go straight down. You don’t shred skin; you break bones.
I remember thinking to myself, this is going to be bad.
I hit the downed rider, went end over end, and smacked the cement hard.
At first it seemed I had just gotten the wind knocked out of me, so I figured I’d catch my breath and get back on my bike for the restart.
But when I tried to sit up, my shoulder stayed on the ground. I’d broken my collarbone before (bike racers like to say it’s not a question of if you’re going to break your collarbone but when and how often), so I knew that’s what had happened. But I still couldn’t catch my breath, and my back and stomach muscles had spasmed so hard I could hardly move. Eventually I was scraped off the cement, loaded into an ambulance, and taken to the hospital.
On the way out, strapped to a gurney, I waved goodbye to my three-year-old daughter, my four-week-old son, and their mom. I was taken to the hospital, where an MRI revealed the broken collarbone plus four broken ribs and a punctured lung.
I spent three nights in the hospital and another six weeks recuperating, leaving my wife to almost single-handedly care for our newborn.
That was it. Cycling is very dangerous. It’s a calculated risk for a calculated reward. The balance had shifted. No matter how I looked at it, the risk was no longer worth the reward. I hung up my cleats. I was done.
Racing in places like Italy, Cuba, New Zealand, Ireland, and Israel—what did constant travel teach you about human behavior under pressure, and how has that shaped the way you read people on camera now?
When I finally had a chance to settle down and think about what was next, I realized something profound. All those years, I hadn’t just been racing. I’d been collecting. Collecting experiences, collecting insights. I’d been collecting stories.
I started telling those stories in a webcast called The Broken Bones Garage, and I recognized that I had a knack for piecing them together. A beginning, a middle, an end, tension, humor, excitement, drama. Stories about nearly hitting a 1400 pound steer that wandered into the road in the Italian Alps, our police escorts shooting stray dogs in Sonora Mexico and spending the night in Guantanamo Bay during the Vuelta a Cuba. For the first time, the idea of what I wanted to do in the film industry began to take shape. My nonspecific dream of making movies transformed into the slightly more precise idea of telling stories. And a good way to tell a story is to write it down.
But there was something else on my mind.
Right around this time, a close friend and teammate died of brain cancer. He left behind a wife and a young son. Our birthdays were less than a month apart.
It occurred to me for the first time in my life that tomorrow isn’t a given.
And I wondered if this whole bike racing romp had been an epic adventure or a cowardly retreat. A 10-year block of procrastination. An epic case of writer’s block.
Had I been running away from the overwhelming intensity of the film industry?
(In retrospect, what really scared me off wasn’t the intensity but the lesson I learned reading all those awful scripts. That success on the creative side of the film industry wasn’t necessarily determined by ability or hard work but by something obscure that an introverted autistic person like me might never understand. The idea that even if it turned out I did have talent, it might not be enough.)
Well, that was all it took. It was time to get going.
With my mortality in mind, I began to write. Feature-length screenplays.
I jumped in with a noble first effort called Infidolls, which let’s just say is exactly what it sounds like.
I started (predictably) with a feature screenplay called “Bicycle Racer”, loosely based on my journey to Philly, set in the perilous, down and dirty, doping-plagued world of third-tier international pro racing. A fictionalized account but without a moment or a character that wasn’t real.
Then came “Punk Rock Girl”, about my high school infatuation with a real-life manic pixie girl, her fearlessness inspiring me to discover my own individuality just as bands like Nirvana and Alice in Chains were inspiring a seismic shift in culture from the soulless conformity of the 80s into the gritty realism of the 90s.
At the time of my back injury, I’d been close to finishing an abduction tale called Fucked featuring a billionaire in-cell antagonist who makes Jigsaw look like Mary Poppins and a story that makes Hostel look like, well, Mary Poppins. The kind of script that would make the reader turn to the cover after page 3 wondering to themselves, who the fuck wrote this? A script that comes with a warning from the Surgeon General.
Fucked was almost done when I came across the idea for Sovereign Citizen Quick Cuts. Once I’m into one project, it’s hard for me to shift focus, but the idea invaded my soul. It was all I could think about. It had never been done before.
I dropped what I was doing and refocused all my energy. I was so excited about the new project that I remember thinking to myself, please just let me finish it before I die.
It had never once occurred to me to become a documentary filmmaker, but I was excited about this project and the possibility that it could help pave my way back into the film industry.
When your back gave out, and you went from living through your body to barely being able to walk, what happened to your sense of self—and what did you have to grieve before you could create again?
I’ve dealt with many injuries over the course of my racing career. Broken bones, a concussion, miles of road rash, but this was different.
When you crash in a race, time slows down. As you fall, you have time to think of how you want to land, whether you’re going to take out the riders behind you, and of course how bad it’s going to hurt.
After you crash, only one thought goes through your mind.
How long before I can get back on the bike?
Sometimes you get right up and back into the race, bloody and bruised. If it’s too bad a crash or your bike is broken, you go back to the hotel, bandage yourself up and race again the next day. When there’s a torn ligament or a broken bone, the doctor might tell you to stay off the bike for four to six weeks so you wait two.
The way you get through it is by making a plan. I’ll start training again on this date, and race x will be my first one back.
What made this injury so hard to handle was that nobody knew what it was and therefore, how long it would be before I was back on my feet.
The pain was in my hip flexor, but it was too intense to be just a regular strain or tear. And it would come and go, even move around. It was going to take some exploration, which can be a real pain in the ass in the American health care system.
Two weeks to get an appointment with my doctor. Two weeks to get a referral to a specialist. Another two weeks to get that appointment. Then two more weeks to get authorization for an MRI, two weeks to get the MRI, and another two weeks to get the results.
The MRI showed nothing. No tear, not even a strain. Despite the blinding pain, there was nothing physically wrong with my hip.
3 months in and I still no idea what was wrong. I was drowning.
Someone suggested the pain was stemming from my back and the cycle began all over again.
When my doctor finally called me with the results of the new MRI, she sounded upset. My spine was a mess. Pinched nerves, edema, desiccation, herniated disks, slipped disks, bulging disks, stenosis. Spondylosis, herniation, retrolisthesis. Bad news, but better than we still don’t know what’s wrong with you. I was finally able to put a name(s) to my injury, and what could be named could be treated. Surgery turned out to be the only real option, and after seeing a few surgeons who could best be described as quacks, I found a unicorn in Dr Daniel Nagasawa.
He gave me the best news possible. He could fix my spine by installing the brand new TOPS system. A series of flexible shock-absorbing inserts with hinges and rods and screws that would fix all my problems. Much better than the old option of fusion, which would have left my spine as rigid as a steel pole. It was relatively low risk and almost guaranteed to work. Sounded too good to be true, but as it turned out, it wasn’t.
After an 8-hour surgery and a 5-night stay in the hospital, I was back home recovering. It’s been 8 weeks now since the surgery, and my life is pretty much back to normal.
You’ve stated that YouTube “started pushing” sovereign citizen clips into your feed. What do you think it was about your mental state in that season—pain, boredom, anger, hunger for story—that made you susceptible to being captivated?
The internet has the uncanny ability to make us feel bad about ourselves. You see only the parts of people’s lives they want you to see. Pics taken from their best angle with perfect lighting. A spotless living room. Shiny polished cars. Perfectly behaved kids.
But the reverse is true as well. Often on police bodycam footage, you see the worst in people on the worst day of their lives, and there’s something undeniably compelling about watching someone throw away their entire life in a matter of minutes.
It gives you perspective on your own life.
Maybe I don’t make as much money as I’d like, or my kids are having trouble at school or my sink is full of dirty dishes, but shit, at least I’m not on the internet flailing my way through a field sobriety test, hopping around on one leg and pissing my pants.
So I guess that’s what I needed at the time. A reminder that while I was struggling, I had a healthy and happy family, a house to go home to, and a dog.
A reminder that things could be worse. A whole lot worse.
I could be a sovereign citizen.
Please define the sovereign citizen movement. For someone who’s only heard the term as a punchline, what is the sovereign citizen movement at its core?
The movement is a disorganized mess of bizarre, deeply flawed legal theories, but if I had to, I could sum it up in two sentences
America operates under the principle that states have the right to make a law unless the Constitution specifically says they can’t.
Sovereign Citizens operate under the principle that states don’t have the right to make a law unless the Constitution specifically says they can.
And since the Constitution and it’s amendments are less than 8,000 words long, there’s a whole lot of legal territory it doesn’t cover. Meaning the Sovereign Citizens think they can do pretty much whatever the fuck they want, conveniently overlooking that all-important Tenth Amendment giving states the right to govern themselves.
Because once you set that aside, it’s party time.
Since there is no mention in the Constitution of a state-run police force, a state-run court system, or state-run legislation, they believe they don’t have to follow state laws and codes, that the police are illegitimate, and that the courts have no jurisdiction over them.
At the core of the movement is their “right to travel” argument. Their belief is that since the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to travel freely, any impediment to that right is unconstitutional. Meaning they think they shouldn’t have to carry driver’s licenses, buy insurance, register their cars or even follow the rules of the road.
Now the idea that states can’t put any restrictions on travel is, at best, impractical. Does a 7-year-old have the right to drive drunk on the sidewalk through a school zone? Can a person board an airplane without buying a ticket? Is a law forcing me to stop and pick up my dog’s poop unconstitutional because it prevents me from just keep on walking?
And there is one other problem with their main tenet, and it’s a pretty significant problem. As it turns out, the constitutional right to travel that this entire movement is built on isn’t actually written into the Constitution or any of its amendments.
So there’s that.
You describe chipping away like Michelangelo—rebuilding trials from thousands of micro-pieces, even syllables, without voiceover. Where do you personally draw the ethical line between clarifying reality and reshaping it—and how do you keep yourself honest in the edit?
I should clarify that I don’t see myself as one of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance. I’ve just always liked the idea that art doesn’t necessarily have to be created. It can also be unearthed.
As a kid, I wanted to be an artist, which at that age meant drawing or painting, but my autism (as it often does), came with the added bonus of dyspraxia, poor motor skills that made expressing myself through those mediums nearly impossible. Whatever I drew on a piece of paper looked nothing like the image I had in my mind.
It’s tough enough for someone on the spectrum to express themselves through words, but it’s a double whammy to be unable to express yourself through art.
So in order to create art, I had to find it in the things around me. And that’s the true intention of this show. Not to create a whole new story but to flesh out a story that already existed and to isolate and package all its weirdness and eccentricity.
In terms of the line, first and foremost, this is entertainment, and I think by the feel of the show, the rock music, the animation, the humor, that is very clear. But if anyone were to go back and look at the raw trial footage, they would find that the final edits capture fairly accurately the reality of the proceeding. There was simply no need to change it. The truth was stranger than any fiction I could create. It really was just a question of extracting the meat and potatoes and skimming away the rest.
Do you worry that you might be exploiting these people?
Oh, for sure I am. There’s no way around that. One could argue that they deserve to be exploited, but it’s still not a nice thing to do. The principle I adhered to in the editing process was to at the very least, preserve what was left of their dignity. To try not to make them appear any worse than they already did.
I also tried to keep in mind that a fringe movement like this attracts people who, for a variety of reasons, might not be as in control of their faculties and therefore not as responsible for their actions as others. They might have grown up in abject poverty, they may be the product of drug addicted parents, they may have experienced childhood trauma, and they may have undiagnosed mental illnesses.
So the focus on every edit was solely to make the cases more interesting, more entertaining, and never to humiliate the subject.
In fact, because the edits often make the sov cits look a bit more coherent than they actually are, there was some concern that it made them look too good. That I may actually attract people to their cause.
Just to be clear, that is also not my intention.
What’s the hardest part of the process emotionally—sitting with hundreds of hours of banality, living inside delusion and conflict, or deciding what to throw away—and what’s the most unexpectedly rewarding part when an episode finally “sings”?
I loved every step of the editing process. It was like a treasure hunt. Digging and digging and then experiencing the thrill of coming up with that unexpected gem. (Why does that sound familiar?)
Ironically, I could never have done this if not for the ADHD. One side effect of the disorder is the ability to hyperfocus on certain very specific things, and fortunately editing is one of my things.
I can’t sit in a classroom for more than 60 seconds without getting agitated, but I can edit for 10 hours straight without breaking a sweat.
(In fact, during the treasure hunting phase of this project, I burned just about every meal I made! My kitchen timer would go off, and I’d think, give me 10 more seconds. Next thing I know, 20 minutes have passed, and the smoke alarm is blaring.)
For the first six months, all I did was catalog. Every available moment of the day. Chipping and chipping and filing the pieces away for future use. When that was done, I began the process of piecing together segments and montages, but I still hadn’t hit play on any of it.
I was too afraid. Terrified that it would turn out nothing like the way I’d been seeing it in my mind.
That it would be the drawing frustrations of my childhood all over again.
So I remember this very vividly, half a year in, watching a rough cut of the very first segment. The cold open from episode one.
I actually cried. It came out exactly as I’d envisioned.
There it was. Redemption for all my life’s artistic failures.
Viewing episodes, you’ve carefully considered the music and soundtrack. What does the music do that the footage alone can’t—and how do you choose a track without telling the audience what to think?
The music was by far the most complex part of the process.
I had originally edited the segments without music, pacing and cutting the dialogue so it had a rhythm and flow of its own. Only after they were complete did I start to locate and integrate the music, matching it through weeks of trial and error with the pacing and feel of each segment.
Since there is no dead air between segments, each song also had to mesh seamlessly with the next one. I might find a song that went perfectly with one segment and one that fit perfectly with the next segment, only to find that the two songs didn’t fit together.
To add to the challenge, I had 3 and a half hours of show to score but only 2 hrs of music to do it with. So I needed to space it out, trying not to repeat any song in back-to-back episodes. I might find a song that worked perfectly with one segment and mixed in perfectly with the next segment, only to find out I had used one of those songs earlier in the episode or in the episode before or the episode after.
Then I would replace one of the songs only to find out I had used that song in an adjacent episode. One seemingly simple change would send a domino effect throughout the entire series.
It was almost a mathematical problem. I had pages and pages of spreadsheets, designed to give me a visual reference of when and where I had used each song. If I ever printed them out and taped them to the wall, it would look like John Nash’s shed in A Perfect Mind.
Once again, hyperfocus to the rescue.
What’s the hidden emotional engine? Under the legal jargon and confrontation, what emotion do you think is driving most of these defendants in the room: humiliation, defiance, desperation, addiction to conflict, or a need to feel special?
The simple and easy answer is that they’re just trying to scam their way out of a ticket, and that seems to be the consensus from the other sov cit channels.
The problem with that theory is the sov cit argument doesn’t actually work. It’s never worked. Not for any violation, not for any crime. Not in any court nor in any state. It’s never taken a dollar off a fine or an hour off a jail sentence. Not ever.
I think the reason the hosts of other channels write them off as scammers is that the sov cit’s ideas are so incredibly flawed, it’s hard for a normal person to accept that anyone actually believes these things.
But that reasoning, dismissing beliefs because they are blatantly wrong, has gotten us in a lot of trouble these last few years. Birthers, anti-vaxers, election deniers, climate change sceptics, deep staters. The facts against these schools of thought are unequivocal, yet despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, many otherwise rational people buy in, hook, line and sinker.
(In fact, raise your hand if you read through that list thinking, can you believe people actually… Hold on a second, Josh, that one is actually true.)
The truth is, a lot of people do sincerely believe our government is overstepping it’s bounds. People who’ve had negative encounters with the police, had homes foreclosed on due to what they consider unfair tax assessments, and people who’ve witnessed systemic racism in the court system. There are plenty of reasons to mistrust the government.
So they’re looking for a bogeyman, something tangible to grasp onto. And they’re looking for people to legitimize their experiences, to make them feel like they are not alone. Lucky for them, the internet has a knack for putting together people who share similar beliefs and then affirming the hell out of those beliefs no matter how bizarre they are.
They learn of and get curious about the sov cit movement. Curiosity becomes participation, participation becomes indoctrination, and indoctrination turns to fanaticism. When they get to fanaticism and take up the position that any source of authority disputing their position is illegitimate and the only information to be trusted is that which reinforces their beliefs, then all bets are off.
Beyond “bringing the circus mainstream,” what do you hope happens after someone watches—do you want them to laugh, feel disturbed, feel informed, feel compassion, or recognize something about our culture?
Although that’s not the intention, the show is going to cause some anger, and there are legitimate reasons for that.
One could argue that the people the sov cits harm the most are themselves. Unless they’re poked, they usually keep to themselves. They don’t pester you to sign a petition in the parking lot of a grocery store, and they don’t come to your door preaching the gospel. I personally have never encountered one in the wild.
But they are not harmless. They pose a legitimate danger to society, especially out on the road. During a traffic stop that would normally take one cop 15 minutes, they occupy four or five officers for hours at a time, leaving the rest of us unprotected and vulnerable.
In the courtroom, they suck up ridiculous amounts of time from an already backed-up system, keeping law-abiding and non-law-abiding citizens from exercising their Sixth Amendment right to a speedy trial.
And it’s a snowball effect. A sov cit goes to jail for a minor offense. While in jail, they lose their job and go on welfare and food stamps. Without a job, they can’t pay their rent and are evicted from their homes. Without a roof over their heads, their kids are taken away and put into state-funded child care. Precious resources taken from people who legitimately need government assistance.
We are all involuntarily funding the movement.
But anger is not a terribly productive emotion, and it tends to drive people even deeper into their oppositional beliefs. I think the best way to deal with this group and really all other dangerous conspiracy theorists out there, is to try to understand them. Find out what drives them, what’s lacking in their lives, why they’ve strayed from the path of rational thought. Instead of pushing against them, take a step back and let them fall on their face.
If an audience comes in expecting pure comedy or pure outrage, what do you want to surprise them with instead—and where can they find the series (or learn more) when they’re ready to go deeper than the clips?
I originally thought of this as a YouTube project. Just something interesting to post. Moderate, maybe monetize it at some point. But the series became more complex. Shorts became videos, videos became episodes. There was music, animation, themes, monologues, cold opens, even bloopers and behind-the-scenes. It turned into a docu-series. 10, 20-minute-long episodes..
Perhaps I’ll upload the episodes to YouTube, but I’d love to get wider distribution of some kind, possibly with a streaming network like A&E. I see it as a counterculture answer to their more traditional Court Cam program. Sort of like Saturday Night Live was to The Carol Burnett Show.
For now I’ve posted a few trailers on our channel that capture the essence of the show. I actually spent as much time on the trailers as I did on any of the segments. I wanted them to be mini movies that could stand on their own.
One highlights the “cast”, another highlights the judges. There’s one that has fun with the crazy sov cit “legal” vocabulary and another that shows how the traffic stops go that land most of these people in court.
I’ve also posted a few shorts, and there will be more of those to come. Hopefully in the near future, some network will step up, and the full 10-episode series will be made available to the public.
Facing surgery, what drove you to finish the project no matter what—and what do you hope happens now that it’s finally out in the world?
I started this project just a few weeks after the injury. I expected it to take three months. It ended up taking 16 months, working seven days a week all day, every day. 485 days in a row.
I was starting to get a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel when the date of the surgery approached. The goal became to finish it before I went under the knife. Just in case something happened.
And I did. The day before.
When you have a family, and you’re looking at an eight-hour surgery on your spine, you make certain legal and financial arrangements. But another thing that weighed heavily on my mind was the thought of this project lingering in the cloud for eternity, never seeing the light of day. So I left directions for my family on where to find the episode files with a final request to watch it and to share it with as many people as possible.
And that’s still my goal. To share it with as many people as possible.
For further information, please visit the following links:
- Website: https://sovereigncitizenquickcuts.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sovcitquikcuts
- TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@joshhorowitz0?
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@sovereigncitizenquickcuts
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