The current drought in California broaches multiple multiple perspectives on water rights. But these responses rest on a cultural and legal history that goes back to at least the 19th century. Water rights films like Chinatown (1974) illuminate this history for a popular audience. Chinatown serves as the quintessential water rights film: Murder, infidelity, and incest all become integrally connected with water as a commodity in 1930s Los Angeles, a context established by an FDR picture in the opening shot of the J.J (Jake) Gittes (Jack Nicholson) private investigator’s office. Jake is introduced to an infidelity case but discovers the perpetrator is Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling), the chief engineer of Los Angeles’s Water and Power.
According to Water and Power, Los Angeles is on the edge of the desert. Without water, the valley would turn to dust, and the Alto Valley Dam will save it, but Mulwray opposes the dam because it is shoddy and ineffective and because he discovers his former partner Noah Cross (John Huston) is dumping gallons of water from the Los Angeles reservoir into the ocean to prove the need for the dam. Ultimately Mulwray is murdered by the very water he serves. “Los Angeles is dying of thirst,” says a sticker near Jake’s car, but, as one police officer explains, “Can you believe it? We're in the middle of a drought, and the water commissioner drowns. Only in L.A.”
While investigating Mulwray’s murder, Jake discovers that the water department is not irrigating as they claimed. A clandestine group is poisoning the farmers’ wells and shooting out their water tanks, so they will sell their property to “ghost” buyers who are either dead or elderly relatives of wealthy LA socialites. In fact, Noah Cross killed Hollis when he hindered his plan to incorporate the valley into the city of Los Angeles by buying up farmland to grow even richer on its resources, declaring, “Either you bring the water to L.A. or you bring L.A. to the water,” underpinning the continuing connection between water rights and environmental history in Chinatown and other films centering on water.
Making documentary films accessible to a wider audience may also create other economic and financial problems. New York Times reporter Nancy Ramsey highlights the hidden costs of documentaries in her exploration of Jonathan Caouette’s distribution experience with Tarnation (2003). Although the film cost as little as $218 to make, once the film gained distribution, costs exceeded $500 thousand, with rights to the music included in the film accounting for $230 thousand of the total. The difficulty attaining distribution also limits low-budget documentaries’ accessibility. Peter Judson’s Nobody Wants Your Film (2005) provides a, sometimes, comic perspective on the problems director Alexandre Rockwell and writer Brandon Cole face when attempting to market their film, Thirteen Moons. Nobody Wants Your Film collects and augments footage shot on the set of Thirteen Moons, as well as a series of interviews with cast and crew members and e-mails between Rockwell and possible distributors to provide a semi-fictionalized story of difficulties gaining distribution, illustrating the problem many of the films explored here face when their films are only available through a small distributor’s website.
Of the twelve mountaintop removal mining films we watched, for example, only two gained a wide release: Coal Country, as a regional festival favorite, was broadcast on PBS in the fall of 2009, perhaps because it was directed by Mari-Lynn Evans and Phylis Geller, the filmmakers who brought The Appalachians to PBS in 2005. With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. at its center, Bill Haney’s The Last Mountain acquired a limited theatrical release after premiering at the Sundance and Seattle Film Festival. Another documentary examining mountaintop removal mining, On Coal River (2010) became a festival favorite like Coal Country and The Last Mountain, but it chose a different distribution route: iTunes. The film is available as a DVD for schools, libraries, and universities, but individual films are only available through the iTunes library. Even though only two of these films have found limited distribution success, however, all twelve draw on the experiences of the nearly the same anti-MTR activists, including Maria Gunnoe, Joe Lovett, and especially, (before her death), Julia/Judy Bonds. They also all highlight MTR incidents primarily in and near Boone County, West Virginia, even though other parts of Appalachia are suffer the results of MTR, including Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and other counties in West Virginia.
Which brings us back to the original question: Can the film industry and environmental movements mix? With cautious optimism, we can give only a qualified “yes” to the new attempts because of the enormous energy expenditures used to create film and the yet uncalculated waste levels associated with its distribution and exhibition. Hollywood film studios are making the move to “green,” partially because of economic issues, partly because of California’s environmental laws which regulate greenhouse gas emissions more stringently than the federal government, and partly because Hollywood film stars from George Clooney to Leonardo DiCaprio demand it. As the Warner Brothers website declares, “It takes creativity to entertain the world while conserving resources on our planet.” Although some succeed more than others, the films we explore in Film and Everyday Eco-Disasters, attempt to do both.
Eco changes made to the film industry also beg a final question: How green is the theatre experience (now that at least some folks are returning after Covid)? The changeover to total digital production in both the filmmaking process and in the delivery and projection of film may create a new manufacturing paradigm that is greener than the nineteenth century model being phased out. But the final third leg of the nineteenth century model still exists: the theatre, which is dependent on enormous energy expenditures to entertain and inform mass audiences in locations that usually average 300-1200 seats per screen, not to mention the enormous energy used to get people from home to theatre and back.
The need to light, heat, and cool these multiplexes (numbering approximately 35 thousand screens in the United States in 2012) is seen as an economically feasible expenditure. Spending billions of dollars alone to transition theatres worldwide to digital projection means the industry calculates the mass consumption of films will continue well into the future.
Digital filmmaking does make it possible to produce the low-budget independent films we explore in our book Film and Everyday Eco-disasters. The digital cinematography used in the powerful anti-mountaintop removal mining films of B.J. Gudmundsson and the humorous call to address climate change found in Jon Cooksey’s How to Boil a Frog lower their budgets, making them more financially feasible to produce and distribute. Even larger budget documentaries such as The Last Mountain and Blue Vinyl lower production costs using digital filmmaking processes. Technologies such as digital cameras, computer generated editing for both image and sound have made the whole process of filmmaking truly democratic.
