Why Global Warming Matters

By Blair Golson, Truthdig. Posted June 9, 2006.

Editor's Note: The following is an edited conversation between Truthdig managing editor Blair Golson and Lawrence Bender, the producer of the Al Gore global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which opened in Los Angeles and New York on Wednesday, May 24.

Several years ago, the idea of making a wide-release movie out of Al Gore delivering an hour-and-a-half lecture might have struck some people as slightly batty. After all, the nickname he earned during the 2000 presidential campaign was "The Robot"--hardly a selling point for a guy whose rhetoric would have to carry an entire movie.

Nonetheless, there he was recently at the Cannes Film Festival, posing for pictures on the red carpet in support of "An Inconvenient Truth"--a film cut almost entirely from the footage of Gore's lecture on the dangers of global warming.

The presentation is one that the former vice president has given around 1,000 times since the late 1980s, but it wasn't until early 2005 that it caught the attention of a Hollywood producer who glimpsed the cinematic potential of Gore's traveling show.

That producer, Lawrence Bender, had exploded onto the Hollywood scene in 1992 as the producer of Quentin Tarantino's first film, "Reservoir Dogs," and produced every Tarantino film since--including "Pulp Fiction" and the two "Kill Bill" movies. And although gory violence is indeed one of his hallmarks, he has also made a career of tackling projects with more social conscience: "Good Will Hunting," "White Man's Burden" and "Voces Innocentes" ("Innocent Voices").

More recently, he was one of the driving forces behind "The Detroit Project" TV ads, which drew attention to the foreign policy ramifications of driving gas-guzzling SUVs.

With "An Inconvenient Truth," Bender tackles an issue of, well, earth-shattering importance: global warming. And whereas the makers of "The Day After Tomorrow" pumped a reported $175 million into that depiction of catastrophic climate change, Bender's version is somewhat more stripped down.

The majority of the movie exhibits Gore delivering his lecture to an audience at a relatively small theater in Los Angeles. But the message is no less startling than that of the fictional movie--it's more, because it derives from essentially uncontested scientific fact.

With the aid of a 70-foot digital screen that Bender commissioned specifically for the movie, Gore displays a dizzying array of graphs, facts, figures and slideshows that leave little doubt of the calamity facing our planet due to the stratospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

But lest Bender allow the entire film to rest upon Gore's delivery, the producer also sprinkles the film with narrative dramas from the former presidential candidate's life--such as the death of his sister Nancy to lung cancer, which Gore ties into the film's message by highlighting the disingenuous marketing strategies of industries like tobacco and coal.

Bender and his production team have orchestrated a grass-roots marketing campaign that relies heavily on small informal screenings for influential groups and individuals. The movie's almost uniformly positive buzz and advance press have stoked enormous amounts of "will he or won't he" speculation about a possible 2008 White House run by Gore. But the man who says during the film that he "used to be the next president of the United States," has repeatedly said he isn't running.

Blair Golson spoke to Lawrence Bender in Los Angeles on the eve of his trip to Cannes. Bender discussed how he became convinced that Gore would make a compelling documentary subject; the reasons why Gore didn't capitalize on this issue when he was in office; and the sad fact that despite all of Gore's efforts, pollsters still finds that global warming barely registers on most voters' minds.

Blair Golson: How did this project come about?

Lawrence Bender: Basically what happened is that [environmental activist] Laurie David brought Gore here to do his presentation in L.A. I hadn't seen it, and when you see him do it, it's so definitive on global warming that it makes you want to take action. Everyone comes out saying, "What can I do?" I'm a filmmaker, obviously, and I immediately felt that this presentation could be made into a movie. And I think a light bulb went off in my head. I thought it could be made much more visual--instead of thousands of people seeing this, millions of people could see this; and we could create a tipping point if we created a movie out of this.

Blair Golson is the managing editor of Truthdig.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »