Byron Myrick

Through the eyes of a British "documentary", this film takes a satirically humorous, and sometimes frightening, look at the history of an America where the South won the Civil War.

In 1939, a group of African American intellectuals come up with an ingenious and unlikely response to Jim Crow America -- leave the planet and populate Mars. Using technology created by George Washington Carver, a three-person crew (plus one rambunctious robot) lift-off in Earth's first working spaceship on a mission that will take them to a world not unlike present-day America. Their spacey adventure illuminates some hard truths about American culture, and threatens to undermine the time-line of history along the way.

The inhabitants of a deteriorating section of 1968 Junction City, Kansas known as "Junk City" bemoan their existence and revel at the history of their neighborhood during its 1940's heydays when legendary jazz musicians regularly played its clubs. In 1968, the area has diminished to strip clubs and juke joints inhabited by Vietnam War draftees that pass through from nearby Fort Riley. Heads of the group include a wino who lost a leg in WWII, a taxi dispatcher, a saloon owner, and a crazed bag lady. The younger generation is represented by a young prostitute who is trying to get off the streets, but is forced to continue to work by a no-good boy friend and the need to feed her baby. Martin Sheen also appears as a white minister who prefers the people in the area over his own congregation.

A group of unlikely allies modernized college sports and changed a small Midwestern town, serving as a parallel to the Civil Rights movement that would transform the entire American society.