Scary stuff, right?

However, what we learn here is that something Fox chose not to reveal was that there are reports of people being able to light their tap water on fire decades before any kind of fracking occurred in the same geographical area. You’ll get the full context in the video:

—–

“Gasland” is an extremely well-made documentary, so well done, in fact, that about an hour in Fox had me convinced that fracking for natural gas really was a problem. The film is produced in a low-key kind of way using a tone that’s practically hypnotic and when you watch people light their freakin’ tap water on fire it blows your mind. My wife and I — and she’s even more skeptical of these enviro-Marxists than I am — just looked at each other in horror. After the credit’s rolled, our skepticism returned, and soon after, Ann McElhinney (McAleer’s wife and filmmaking partner) pretty much confirmed our skepticism.

But McAleer’s success in getting Fox to admit he knew about these decades-old reports is like (and not just because of the courtroom setting) the closing scene in a “Perry Mason” episode.  

Why would Fox not include the relevant fact that there were reports of high enough methane levels to light tap water on fire decades  prior to any kind of industrial fracking being done? But that’s not the real question, is it? Because the answer is obvious: Fox has an agenda and he very well knew that such a pertinent fact would completely undermine that agenda. The real question, though, is why would an Academy Award-nominated documentary that currently sits at a nearly unprecedented 100% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes get away with this for so long? Even if you Google “Gasland debunked” most of the links appear to be about debunking the debunkers.  Same with “Gasland lies.”

With a few very simple, straight-forward questions (always the best kind), McAleer not only allows Josh Fox to bury himself but we also — unless I missed something – get a lesson in just how pathetic the elite media is when it comes to puncturing narratives they’re sympathetic towards.

McAleer’s report is here.

Today, over at the hard-left film site Movieline (a site that eagerly participated in the grossly dishonest character assassination and attempted blacklisting of conservative musician Jonathan Kahn), famed screenwriting teacher Robert McKee responds to Big Hollywood’s Ann McElhinney. For those of you who might have missed her terrific piece, I personally read it as a warning to anyone not a wild-eyed, narcissistic, America-bashing, religious bigot, that for the price (you pay) of $745, Mr. McKee believes he’s earned the right to prove he is one throughout a very expensive screenwriting course.

Anyway, brought to you by one of left-wing Hollywood’s chief Palace Guards and water carriers, S.T. VanAirsdale, here’s the unsurprising response from McKee, someone with a seemingly bottomless well of ego (we’re groupies?) and insecurities (really, we’re groupies?) who insults his students with unadvertised (at least until now) political sucker punches and then literally tells them to “fuck off” if they don’t like it:

Movieline:

Earlier this week, a contributor to the right-wing film and culture Web site Big Hollywood offered up the delightfully titled tale, “For $745 You Too Can Be Insulted By Famed Hollywood Screenwriting Teacher Robert McKee.” Author Ann McElhinney proceeded to recount her time in McKee’s celebrated (and, indeed, expensive) story seminar last October, time reportedly spent chafing under the instructor’s prodigious use of profanity, social criticism, “Bush bashing” and other liberal bloviation. A torrent of conservative bile followed in the site’s comments. Of course, anyone who’s seen Adaptation, featuring Brian Cox as the legendary — and legendarily irascible — writing mentor, could have warned McElhinney of at least some pedagogical turbulence ahead. So Movieline asked McKee on Wednesday: What, if anything, went wrong here?

In a nutshell: Nothing.

“These kinds of people always make me nervous, because they’re right on the edge of being a groupie,” McKee said. “Their fascination with me, my personality, my life, my feelings, my ambitions and whatnot really is misplaced. What they really should be there for is to take notes on their own writing. And instead they do some sort of biographical study of me, and I’m wondering, ‘Why were they there?’ If I’m the most fascinating thing they encountered, and not the ideas in the lecture, then maybe their heart’s not in the right place to begin with.”

McElhinney did find plenty to note in McKee’s lecture, cataloging a succession of claims like “1/3 of all women will suffer sexual abuse in their lives” (“Yeah, that’s research,” McKee told me. “That’s a fact.”), “Everybody hates everybody in the US” (“Yeah. They do”), and “Columbus killed 5 million Indians, it was genocide, chopped up Indians to feed to their dogs, we killed them because we were Christians and they were heathen.” (“I didn’t pull that out of the air,” he elaborated. “When I say it’s a fact, it’s something that I’ve read in my research of other projects. I came across the Haitian genocide by Columbus and his crew.”) McKee cited, then laughed off, his attributed “Conservatives have famously thin skins” claim from memory.

You’ll recall that Cameron hectored to the world, “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads,” and then just last week through a proxy, invited Breitbart & Co. to battle him before an audience of committed global warming believers in Aspen.

I have just learned that an earlier challenge to Humphries made by this same proxy, environmental activist Richard Greene, followed the same nonsensical pattern that involves Cameron inviting you, encouraging you to incur costs, and then finding an absurd reason to cancel at the last minute. Humphries tells his story:

“What they wanted me to do was pay to fly across the country, pay for a hotel, pay my own way to the event, and then, after an opening showing of the Avatar DVD, I would get the privilege of debating James Cameron on climate change in front of 5,000 of his rabid fans. Oh, by the way, I was also asked: ‘can you bring along Glenn Beck (whom Cameron calls a “fucking asshole”) and Sean Hannity?’ I don’t know them and could’t get them, but I was going to do it because, eh, what the hell, I’ll get to meet James Cameron. But just before the event, I was told the thing was off because there was a bio or eco emergency or something like that in Brazil.”

Once in the Amazon, Cameron painted his face and tried to figure how to work Nanny McPhee’s magic walking stick to solve the crisis.

“I’m less interested in making money for the movie and more interested in saving the world,” King of the Jungle says.

But was a sudden trip to a far away place the real reason Cameron’s contrived political theater event was canceled? Absolutely not. What we have here is a wanker joke twice pulled-off  by one of the wealthiest directors of all time for the benefit his own cowardly ego.  I’ll save the discussion about whether debates prove anything beyond who is the better debater for another time, but if there is any evidence that Cameron would actually engage a knowledgeable opponent in verbal combat on level ground before an impartial audience where he is at risk of losing face or repelling people with his profane arrogance, I’ve yet to see it.

On the other hand, his chicken tracks are plain:

• Cameron invites prominent conservatives to a high-profile debate on a very important issue.
• They agree to pay their own way for the opportunity of being on stage with him.
• Then he starts demanding ridiculous changes to prior agreements.
• He then either uses the exotic coolness schtik of being too needed in other parts of the globe to cancel the debate or….
• Tells those he’s invited to debate with him that they’re suddenly not good enough to share the stage with, and…
• Sticks would-be participants with any expenses they’ve incurred for stupidly assuming he was negotiating in good faith. I know for a fact McElhinney ate more than $1,000 in camera crew expenditures.

Cameron clearly sees no need to honor his commitment with those he regards as lesser mortals. Get the joke?

“Morano is not at Cameron’s level to debate, and that’s why it didn’t happen,” sneered Cameron’s proxy procurer Greene. “Cameron should be debating someone who is similar to his stature in our society.” Hmmm, then maybe Greene credibly can explain why he was even allowed to negotiate with Morano for more than a week.

Greene’s calls to God have gone unanswered.

Enjoy the 8 minutes of awesome and then do yourself and America a favor and check out “Not Evil, Just Wrong.”

Irish directors Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney have brought Gore’s controversial picture back under critical focus in their new documentary, “Not Evil Just Wrong,” which addresses the science and language of Al Gore and other environmentalists who see global warming as a major problem. Nearly 10,000 people in 22 countries simultaneously watched the film as it was streamed online via USTREAM (28,000 tuned in at different times), as well as almost 8,000 screenings across the U.S., all of which started at 8 p.m. EST. yesterday, October 18. 

This isn’t the first time “An Inconvenient Truth” has been critically studied. When the British government planned to send the DVD to 3,500 secondary schools in 2007, volunteer school governor Stewart Dimmock challenged the decision, believing it is inaccurate and biased. Just over two years ago (Oct. 11), British High Court Judge Michael Burton found nine significant errors in the film, and ruled that it could be shown in schools only if accompanied by guidance to counter its one-sided views. Without this guidance, showing the film would have been breaking the law. While Gore himself claimed he won the case, Judge Burton disagreed, saying, “I conclude that the claimant substantially won this case by virtue of my finding that, but for the new guidance note, the film would have been distributed in breach of … the 1996 Education Act.” 

“Not Evil Just Wrong” picks up where the High Court left off, picking apart both Gore’s film and the environmental movement through case studies and in-depth interviews. It addresses the economic and societal impacts of environmental regulations, as well as the scientific truth behind today’s environmental hype. Key components included a study of DDT, a chemical that kills mosquitoes. It helped end malaria epidemics in many countries, and was once widely used in the United States until environmentalists convinced governments around the world that it caused cancer and was harmful to wildlife. Because of this DDT was banned. Without DDT, malaria-carrying mosquitoes have thrived in third-world countries, especially in Africa, and have killed millions. But in 2006 the World Health Organization removed its ban on DDT after beliefs about its negative affects were disproven. 

The film also revealed that the “hockey stick” global warming graph, which was cited in “An Inconvenient Truth” as evidence of global warming, was in fact incorrect since its compiler Michael Mann used flawed mathematics to reach his end result. Its underlying mathematics was flawed. The film cites a warm period during the Middle Ages and the 1930s as exceptionally hot periods. 

Gore himself declined to be interviewed for the film, but McAleer was able to pose a question to Gore at the Society of Environmental Journalism’s 2009 conference in Madison, Wisconsin, giving his film a burst of publicity just before its release. They briefly sparred after McAleer asked Gore whether he accepted the British High Court’s ruling that there were nine significant errors in the film and what he’d done to correct the errors. Gore evaded the question and the two locked horns over one issue: the number of polar bears alive today. This is probably the worst of the nine errors to fight over, since neither side can say with certainty how many polar bears there are. Terence P. Jeffrey, an editor at large for Human Events, wrote in May of last year that there is really no evidence to base numbers on other than estimation. 

On the whole, the film excellently uncovered the facts about Gore’s campaign, though when the lights came up, I for one would have liked to know more. In that vein Andrew Breitbart plans to help the filmmakers launch “Big Environmentalism” as a platform for environmental truth. McElhinney announced the decision at the panel discussion after the Washington, D.C. film premiere.

Online video chat by Ustream

**If you are having problems watching the film, watch it here.***

Big Hollywood is proud to be a part of the “Not Evil Just Wrong” premiere.

The film Al Gore and Hollywood doesn’t want you to see premieres right here, online at Big Hollywood, RIGHT NOW, Sunday October 18th, 8pm ET/5pm PST.

For more information, please visit the “Not Evil Just Wrong” website.

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]]> http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/bighollywood/2009/10/18/right-now-not-evil-just-wrong-premiere-big-hollywood-live-stream/feed/ 99 http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jdboreing/2009/10/17/not-evil-just-wrong-the-human-cost-of-environmentalism/ http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/jdboreing/2009/10/17/not-evil-just-wrong-the-human-cost-of-environmentalism/#comments Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:01:25 +0000 Jeremy D. Boreing http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/?p=246374 Last Friday, America was introduced to documentary filmmaker Phelim McAleer when he asked an inconvenient question of former vice-president and multi-millionaire climate-change spokesperson Al Gore.  The terse exchange has become a hit on YouTube, and has afforded Phelim several appearances this week on cable news shows.  In it, Phelim asks Mr. Gore to weigh in on a British judge’s ruling that nine facts cited in the vice-president’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth”, were in fact not true.  After struggling to remember the exact details of the case (it was so long ago…), Mr. Gore and Mr. McAleer wrangle briefly over whether or not polar bears are actually endangered.  Mr. Gore remarks that if they are not, “the polar bears didn’t get the message.”  Cute.

Of course, this answer is really at the very heart of the current debate over global climate change (formerly global warming, formerly global cooling), because whatever the polar bears might think about their own species’ global population, it is obviously far more than most every human environmentalists seem to care about theirs.

“Their is an anti-human element to many environmentalists.”  That was what Phelim told me the day I first met him and his lovely wife Ann McElhinney early last year.  The two had just spoken, quite passionately I might add (everything the two of them do is quite passionate), at a private gathering of conservatives in Sherman Oaks, California. 

Like so many documentary film-makers, they needed a ride.  (Unlike so many documentary film-makers, the ride was to a fairly nice hotel in Santa Monica…)  In exchange, they offered to screen an early cut of their film, “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” for me and a few friends.  It was a bargain I was happy to take.  “Only an environmentalist could look at thirty million dead from malaria and think that the biggest threat to the world is the pesticide that would stop it,” Ann told me on the ride over the hill.  “You really should watch our movie.”

In a world where so much of the debate (if you could argue that there is any real debate…) over climate change is focused on the science, it is the human story that most interests and appalls Phelim and Ann.  More aptly, it is an anti-human story, and they have seen it first hand.

In 2005, the couple traveled to Romania with a mission.  It was being reported in the European press that a greedy western mining corporation was invading the quaint, idyllic Romanian village of Rosia Montana to extract the regions’ gold deposits and exploit its people.  For Phelim and Ann, both experienced documentarians, this seemed like a story worth telling.  The problem, as they soon learned, was that the story was a lie.  Far from quaint and idyllic, Rosia Montana was a badly impoverished village that modernity had largely passed by. “These people weren’t making a lifestyle choice.  They were in deep, deep poverty.  They couldn’t wait for the mine to open and inject fresh money and jobs into the local economy. But stopping that were activists from Switzerland and Belgium. These rich western environmentalists didn’t care.  They were content to watch people live in misery and view it as a “culture” that needed to be preserved, but if you talked to the local people they viewed poverty as a curse that was killing their children early and needed to be eradicated as soon as possible.”

What Phelim and Ann discovered was a far bigger story – one that would give their film, and their lives, a whole new shape.  It was the largely untold tale of western activists advancing Marxist ideology under the guise of environmental protection. “This romantic notion that starving people are ‘poor but happy’ has to stop.  Someone needs to tell these environmentalists that humans are actually part of the environment.”

In 2006, Phelim and Ann did just that, releasing their film, “Mine Your Own Business,” as a stern rebuke of what they see as a criminally disingenuous movement to destroy the west and the progress that modernity has brought.  The film is a brutally honest look at how much damage is done to actual humans by those claiming to save the world.  “Rosia Montana never got their mine, but the Romanian villagers facing another winter of extreme poverty can shiver to sleep secure in the knowledge that the greedy capitalists were defeated.”  Environmentalists called the movie “Nazi propaganda…”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” picks up on the same theme, and carries it much farther.  If free-markets, trade, and employment are the only tools ever used to effectively end poverty, then what would it mean to take those tools off of the table, as the modern environmental movement seems bent on doing?  Who will suffer and who will gain?  According to Phelim and Ann, who will suffer is everyone, especially the poor.  Who will gain is Al Gore and the rest of the multi-billion dollar Big Environmental Businesses.  And of course, America loses the most.  Says Ann, “China produces more genuine pollution than any other nation on Earth, but none of the international regulations on the table do anything to curb them.China’s cities are badly polluted with dirty fumes. If Greenpeace wanted to stop global pollution they should move all their offices to China. And I’m talking about genuine pollution – not CO2 which is essential for life and one of the elements that keep our crops growing and our children healthy. But Greenpeace is not in China because there is a strong anti-business, anti-capitalist and above all anti-American element to the environmental movement.  If the world is really ending, why wouldn’t they want to stop everyone polluting and not just single out the American economy for destruction?.”  Or, as Phelim puts it, “They say America should lead by example, but what example is that?  Suicide?”

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is the anti-”Inconvenient Truth,” not only because it exposes and rebukes the foundational premises of that film, but because it advocates humanity first, and nothing serves humanity better than morally checked, free-market capitalism.  As it turns out, that’s another topic Phelim and Ann know rather well.

“We’re trying to do something innovative,” Phelim told me on a recent call.  “We figure that lots of really interesting and intelligent ideas have come out of the American home and almost nothing interesting or intelligent comes out of the current American cinema.”  Phelim and Ann’s innovative answer?  They are going to launch their films in the former, not the latter.  The idea is as profound as it is simple.  In a world of flat-screen televisions, high-speed Internet, streaming media, and cell-phone movie rentals, “Not Evil, Just Wrong” is leading the way in direct-to-consumer marketing.

On Sunday, October 18th, the largest, simultaneous film-premiere in history will take place. “Not Evil, Just Wrong” will be screened in well over 4000 private locations in America, and more than a thousand more worldwide.  People from all walks of life are hosting screenings in their homes and churches, they are renting small theaters and community centers and school auditoriums.  It is a grassroots movie premiere.

You can visit their website for a map of screening locations. It is impressive.  Better yet, you can tune in to Big Hollywood and be a part of this historic premiere event yourself tomorrow night at  5PM PST, just like thousands of other venues around the nation and world.  It is a very human model for getting a very human movie out into the culture, and as Phelim and Ann are always quick to remind, humans are what this story is really about.  As Phelim told me recently in Texas, “The vast majority of human history has been spent in darkness and hunger and tyranny.  That’s what these environmentalists, by their actions, seem to want to bring back, only not for themselves, of course.  They just want everyone else living in huts and starving to death but with a “quaint” centrally approved lifestyle while the environmental elite run the show.  America’s existence and success is the only thing stopping them, and it’s the proof that they’re wrong, which is why they have to destroy it.”

Or, put more simply, “These people don’t give a damn about polar bears.”

“It’s a liberal, socialist film. It’s about poor people in Africa and America,” McAleer says. “We’re not interested in insulting anyone or winning political points,” McAleer continues. “I don’t care about your politics and I’m not going to demonize you.”

But what McAleer and McElhinney won’t stand for is watching people suffer while serious, glaring misinformation guides public policy.

That happened during the misinformation campaign surrounding the use of DDT years ago to stop the spread of malaria, they say, and it could happen soon if the U.S. adopts cap and trade legislation which will hamper industry – and curtail American prosperity.

The film sprung in part from their last film, “Mine Your Own Business.“ The documentary slammed environmentalists for holding back progress in impoverished communities.

McAleer recalls working as a liberal journalist assigned to cover “an evil capitalist mining company” for the Financial Times.

When he arrived on the scene, “I discovered everything the environmentalists were saying was exaggerated or untrue,” he says, adding the locals wanted the new mines to improve their standard of living.

“Mining gives jobs to some of the most impoverished people in the world,” he adds.

While touring to promote “Mine Your Own Business,” the filmmakers were implored to investigate DDT, the insecticide which could have prevented millions of Africans from getting Malaria had it not been unfairly assaulted by environmentalists the world over.

That lead to their interest in the fractious global warming debate.

“Co2 is the new DDT. They‘re demonizing it the same way,” McAleer says.

“Not Evil Just Wrong” doesn’t just feature experts who agree with the filmmakers’ views. Some sequences include those who fear the earth is warming at an alarming rate.

–

“Climate people always believe journalists are on their side … they assume the journalist will not ask difficult questions,” McAleer says.

McElhinney says when they challenged some of the environmentalists featured in the film, “…they take it very badly. It’s unfamiliar territory to them.”

“Not Evil Just Wrong” is set to debut Oct. 18, a date they hope will become the largest ever simultaneous film premiere. Consumers can buy DVDs of the film beforehand in the hopes they’ll wait to hit the play button until 8 p.m. EST Oct. 18 to take part in the historical attempt.

The DVD screenings will be accompanied by theatrical screenings across the U.S., and those who see the film can Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or Skype questions to a panel gathered at a D.C. screening of the film after it debuts.

The filmmakers have shown their movie to a limited number of audiences already. McElhinney says audiences are shocked by the information in the film, particularly the British court case which ruled much of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was either misleading or outright wrong. The court debunked key information in the film, like the claim that sea waters would rise 20 feet in the near future.

Major media outlets couldn’t be bothered to report on that truth, McElhinney says.

“That’s a story worth reporting, and it‘s worth asking Al Gore about,” she says.

McElhinney compares global warming activists to undergraduates = well intentioned souls trafficking in dangerous material.

“They’re hopped up on testosterone and good intentions with little knowledge to back it up,” she says.