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The first time I saw AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH I was bowled over. I was impressed at how well it communicated the manifold threats that global warming entails. And I was impressed that Davis Guggenheim, the director (the unmentioned truth is that it's his film, not Al Gore's) was able to impart emotion to what critics dismissed as a Power Point presentation. But what astounded me - and everyone in the documentary community - was that the general public embraced the film. Michael Moore had long before shown that documentary could be commercially successful as well as politically transformative. But what AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH specifically revealed was a huge hunger for serious treatments of environmental issues -- and that triggered a big reaction in my trade. Suddenly broadcasters and other investors were all over anything "green".
After three nearly fruitless years of trying to fund WATERLIFE, our new film about the Great Lakes, the money suddenly fell into place. In the end, the film became a co-production between our company, Primitive Entertainment, and the National Film Board of Canada, with supporters that included Mark Achbar's Big Picture Media Corporation, the Sundance Channel (which will broadcast the film in the US in August), History Television in Canada, Telefilm Canada (a government investing agency), NHK (the national broadcaster in Japan) and a fund set up by broadcaster Canwest and the Hot Docs film festival. Finally, the dreary challenge of filmmaking was behind us, and the fun challenge began: deciding what, exactly, the film should say -- and how.
All the years of looking for money had given us - myself and my partners in Primitive Entertainment -- plenty of time to research the plethora of issues on the Great Lakes. Plus, I (and my partner, and brother, Michael) had grown up on the lakes. We had cottaged as kids on Lake Erie until the stinking mats of algae made the beach useless. As a young journalist in Niagara, I had covered the Love Canal disaster and the ensuing controversies on the Niagara River. Our first major documentary - THE FALLS - looked at the toxic nightmares beneath the Honeymoon City. I have taken my kids camping every summer on Lake Huron and seen the proceeds of beachcombing gradually reduced to the monoculture of zebra mussel shells.
Yet, as I interviewed people in preparation for filming, the official line - from some scientists, some of the more booster-ish organizations and everyone I spoke to in government - was that, "compared to 20 years ago", the health of the Great Lakes was improving. It wasn't like the bad old days when industries just wantonly poured poison out their tail pipes. Officials pointed to various initiatives and rhymed off all sorts of acronyms that spoke of government, industry and citizen efforts that were "turning things around".
Yet my experience, and most of my reading, told me that the glass was actually half empty. A striking example was the statement in 2005 signed by eminent Great Lakes scientist Henry Regier and 60 of his colleagues which argued that the Great Lakes' ecosystem - its ability to generate fish and clean its water - is enduring so many stresses that it may be nearing "irreversible collapse". They said that this collapse will probably come in a non-linear way; not a continued slow decline but a sudden crash. What struck me when I read that, and still amazes me now, is that such a statement could be made about a water body that so intimately effects so many people and go virtually unreported in the mainstream media. Another important voice was the Town Hall's own Dave Dempsey, whose 2004 book ON THE BRINK put the waves of interest and apathy over the last 150 years into perspective and made me realize that -- for all the political blather and the plethora of commissions, reports, meetings and now glossy websites -- most of the governments around the Great Lakes have, in recent decades, "buried their heads in the sand".
Clearly, there were two, opposed perspectives on the lakes' reality. I didn't want to be alarmist or disrespect all the committed people who have been working on behalf of the lakes. But I did want to make a film that would provide a clear view of the horizon. This struggle may surprise people who don't work in the media, because reporters like to claim objectivity - telling both "sides" of the story in the "he said/she said" of modern journalism that tends to nullify both (while subtly validating the one more likely to profit, or flatter, the reporter). Me, I aim for honest and fair. And the reality is that in setting out to do something as big and complicated as a documentary, most makers have a pretty good idea of where they are going before they depart. It seemed to me that there was a genuine crisis beneath the lovely waves of the lakes and that it was only honest, and fair, to report that.
But what a hydra-headed crisis it is! How would we ever stuff all of its nasty parts - toxics (old and new), invasives, sewage overflows, overdevelopment, global warming, political apathy - into one film, much less even hint at their interrelationships? And how could we do all that while conveying the meaning the Great Lakes' water has in our lives: from the work it does in our cells, to the way it courses through our sewers, to its historical, cultural and emotional importance? Oh, yeah, and how, also, were we going to simplify it all into something approaching a "story"?
I'd had response to these questions that were satisfactory enough for the breezy chat of a funding pitch, but now that I was about to actually make the film, the search for hard, practical answers consumed many long nights. Book writers have an easier time with this sort of thing than filmmakers. They have room to meander. Our medium is relentlessly time-based, starting at A and proceeding to Z. It is not well-suited to dealing with complexity, which explains a lot about both Hollywood and the TV news. Making documentaries about environmental issues, which are almost always complex, means constantly pushing the form - as Davis Guggenheim so notably did.
For weeks I pondered how we, with our particular story, would do that. I considered all sorts of design paradigms, and rejected each in turn, before settling on a conceit that had, I suppose, always been in the back of mind; had been there, in fact, since childhood.
Tomorrow: "Road trips and fairy tales"
Reposted from Great Lakes Town Hall's The Daily Post.