MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON (2025) Jefferson Jackson Smith is a small-town Illinois prosecutor and volunteer firefighter whose life changes in one brutal instant. During a historic 1000-year flood he rescues three children and their mother from a collapsing bridge nearly drowning in the process. Overnight he becomes a state hero.At the ceremony meant to honor him the governor blindsides everyone by appointing Jeff to fill the U.S. Senate seat left vacant by the sudden death of Senator John Drebin. Jeff never asked for this never trained for it and definitely never planned for it. His wife Debbie is wary. His son Rickie thinks it’s the coolest thing that’s ever happened. Jeff can barely tie his tie.Once in Washington Jeff is swept into the machinery of power before he can catch his breath. The President courts him. The Party showers him with gifts. A luxury apartment materializes out of thin air. His Senate office is mysteriously staffed furnished and surveilled before he even steps inside. Everyone insists they’re “helping.” No one explains why.Jeff soon learns what they actually want: his vote on HR 66 a radical bill that would let a president remove and replace a Supreme Court justice every term bypassing the Senate. Drebin had been blocking it. Now he’s gone and Jeff is the easiest vote to flip.Senator Sara Shimón one of the only genuinely decent people he meets warns him that nothing about this push makes sense. The bill is dangerous. The alliances behind it are unnatural. And Jeff’s sudden rise may not be an accident.Before she can tell him more her SUV is hit by a semi-truck in what looks less like an accident and more like a message.Jeff finds himself caught between a White House that expects obedience a party machine that already owns pieces of his life and the last fragments of his own conscience. He came to Washington by mistake. Now he has to decide what kind of senator he is going to be — and whether he’s willing to take on a system that has no intention of letting him think for himself.The story becomes a political thriller about an ordinary man dropped into extraordinary power surrounded by people who will test whether his better nature can survive the pressure the manipulation and the cost of choosing what’s right.

I was born in 1977 to a Guatemalan immigrant mother and a blue-collar Texan father who were both divorced and met at a singles party in Twin Peaks, San Francisco. I grew up in the rural hills near Napa, California, leaving at the age of 18 to earn a bachelor’s degree from Claremont McKenna College, and then a law degree from Harvard and a master’s degree in real estate from NYU. After taking the typical route of joining big law for a decade, I hung up my shingle and worked out of my own ship for another 12 years.

I was quite secure that would be the end of this bio until one very late night philosophical debate, some heavy IOS Notes scribbling and an introduction to Final Draft later, GOOD was born, and my 22-year legal career seems to have abruptly, universally and unexpectedly (my hand’s up too) come to an end.

I could not be happier.

We would also like to tell you that Monte’s family produces delicious olive oil, he is a husband and father of two beautiful boys and summers in the Hamptons.