March 19, 2006
3/20 - "Flock of Dodos": what, when and why a movie?
I just finished watching the "60 Minutes" segment on James Hansen and the White House control of global warming science. This is a big and very real problem. You can read about it last week in The New Yorker -- Michael Specter has an article titled, "Political Science: The White House vs. the Laboratory", and of course you could have read about it in 2004 in Chris Mooney's book, "The Republican War on Science". Societies have always engaged in "revisionist history," now there seems to be a new trend of "revisionist science."
Over the past year I've written and directed a documentary feature, "Flock of Dodos: the evolution-intelligent design circus," that is a small slice of this story. I focused on the specific case of the attack on evolution and the proposed alternative of intelligent design. But my "essay" (which is pretty much what the film is) arises from 30 years of thinking, observing, and gathering thoughts. A year ago right now, as a result of my three years of working with ocean conservation, I had accumulated a number of frustrations with the environmental world's lack of understanding of mass communication, and their lack of interest in innovation. When I took a close look at the intelligent design issue (after reading David Orr's excellent article, "Unintelligent Design," in the New Yorker last May) I felt the communications defeats being experienced by the evolutionists were in part a manifestation of this same lack of appreciation of mass communication.
The film is lots of fun as I take a fairly light hearted look at the evolution/I.D. issue, but at its core, its also part of the very serious issue of the attack on mainstream science, and the slowness with which the science establishment seems to be responding. We are now fortunate -- the film's been selected for the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival which will be rocking good time for us, but I hope a little bit of the serious message will filter out as well.
And an interesting tidbit that I have now noticed about the film. I just returned from my 9th advance screening (KC, Harvard, Stony Brook, Cornell, Yale, Rice, LSU, FSU, KSU) over the past six weeks. All of the screenings have been perfect and I've gotten to the point where I know when to expect every single audience laugh in the film and how large each one will be. But there's one laugh that wasn't intended. Towards the end of the film I ask, as narrator, "Who will be the voice of evolution in the future?" and I answer it with two questions, "Will it be academic scientists who are handicapped by their blind obsession with the truth? Or will it be public relations firms who know the importance of telling simple, clean stories, not constrained by the truth?"
I wrote that text in seriousness, but every audience laughs at the line, "handicapped by their blind obsession with the truth" and I don't blame them. It's a bit surreal what's going on. It's a real problem we're facing and it's a byproduct of the information era. If you find the subject interesting, you should read Alexander Stille's "The Future of the Past," which is on our Top Ten Books List from a couple years ago.
And come to the premiere on April 30. Details for buying tickets are on the Tribeca website. It sounds pretty tough to get tickets (they only give me 5 per screening), but I think if you have an American Express card you stand a better chance. Also, you can keep an eye on our dodos website for updates.
Hope to see you there!