From The Boston Globe, with a reviewer who strikes a tone we hadn’t see in the other reviews of the anti-Chevron movie, a world-weary cynicism. The inaccuracies are still the same, though.

From “An ecological disaster meets a media circus“:

In “Crude,’’ the anger onscreen spreads as slowly and inexorably as toxic sludge. The documentary follows a pending class-action lawsuit filed by 30,000 Amazon tribespeople against the US petro-giant Chevron for contaminating an area of land the size of Rhode Island.

But it’s not a class-action suit and it wasn’t filed by 30,000 Amazon tribespeople.

Even the Amazon Defense Coalition’s PR person, Karen Hinton, eventually admitted this basic fact — a basic fact that the Globe gets wrong.

Gee, if the reviewer starts off with a glaring error, wonder what else in wrong in the piece?

P.S. Today is the movie’s last day in Washington, D.C. It had a two-week run at the E Street Cinema, which the producers must regard as a success.

Reading the blog from the makers of the anti-Chevron film, “Crude,” we see this entry from Michael Bonfiglio, second unit director and producer, “CRUDE In Our Own Backyard?”

Many of us on the Crude filmmaking team are based in New York City, where the tap water is some of the cleanest in the country, and a debate is currently raging over drilling for natural gas that could threaten our drinking water.

Our friends at Riverkeeper oppose the drilling plan. Those who support the drilling maintain that with today’s technology, nothing bad could happen.  While the plaintiffs in Ecuador charge that Texaco used practices that were outdated even in the 1960s when drilling there began, are we really so arrogant to think that there will be no errors that could contaminate our reservoirs? And is a resource as vital as clean drinking water really something that we are willing to gamble on?

Bonfiglio is referring to hydrofracturing, the technology of injecting pressurized fluids into shale formations to fracture them and release natural gas. The natural gas producers group, Energy in Depth, has lots of information about this well-proven and safe technology, which is under attack from the usual activists who let the perfect be the enemy of good jobs. Start here.

Reading Bonfligio’s comments made us wonder when the next outrage-imbued “documentary” was going to come out, this time with natural gas companies as the evil corporate exploiters. There’s “Crude,” another one in the works about Eskimos and global warming, “The Kivalina Project.” You’ve got a cause, somebody has a movie and with cable television, a place to show it, so why not a flick accusing the natural gas industry of rampage and pollution? Maybe “Gas Attack.”

Well, of course there IS a movie. “Split Estate“ attacks natural gas drilling in western states, starting with the premise that mineral rights are somehow outrageous.

The Grand Junction (Colo.) Sentinel identifies the basic problem with “Split Estate” in an editorial, “Gas documentary offers anecdotes, not evidence“:

Many of the people featured in the documentary, “Split Estates,” have heart-breaking stories about health problems they have suffered.

What they don’t have, and what is absent from the documentary itself, is actual evidence that connects those health problems to the hydraulic fracturing of natural gas wells. Without this causal link between the fracturing substances and disease, the claim of wrongdoing — like the documentary itself — falls flat, at least with respect to hydraulic fracturing.

The same criticism applies to other environmental films we’ve seen. Of course human suffering elicits sympathy, but emotion does not equal “X is to blame.” In fact, when manipulated, emotion can lead one to think “X is to blame,” when in reality “Y is to blame.”

There’s probably a better movie to be made about energy, natural gas, hydrofracturing and the environment. Hope the directors talk to W. Neil Barto of Hughsville, Penn., where development of the Marcellus Shale is going great guns.

In July, four days before Barto’s 67th birthday, he received the first check from Chief Oil & Gas L.L.C., the Dallas company that last year drilled the wells on this hardscrabble farm, 21 miles east of Williamsport.

Barto’s monthly royalty checks now come in at about $7,000. It’s just the beginning. He and 14 neighbors get royalty checks from the sale of the gas, but the wells capture only a fraction of the gas trapped in the rock. Chief plans to drill many more wells on Barto’s land and surrounding properties.

The movie “Crude” was again used to promote the anti-Chevron cause last week when a Congressman and the U.S. trial lawyer appeared at a Washington, D.C. showing alongside the film’s director, Joe Berlinger.  Their comments in the Q&A demonstrated again that the litigation against Chevron for its predecessor Texaco’s operations in Ecuador is a matter of politics and public relations — not law –  designed to force the company into a settlement.

Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) levied several serious charges against Chevron, accusations commonly made by the anti-corporate activists but still startling when delivered by an elected member of Congress. In his five minutes of remarks (audio here), McGovern urged the crowd “to ramp up the pressure.”

And one final thing, and that is, here in Washington, we need to raise this issue more in Congress. We’re trying. I chair a human rights commission. We had a hearing on this, and trying to raise the issue of environmental contamination as a human rights issue. These people, their human rights are being abused by being forced to live in that area. And we can do something about this. We need to make this a priority.

Shortly after…when I came back — this was in December — I sent then President-elect Obama a letter [here] explaining my trip and asking him to raise this issue, and to coordinate with all the relevant departments and with the Ecuadorian government a way to help these people. We can’t continue to fight this thing out. This is not about lawyers, this is about these people that you see in this film. It’s about my friend Luis and all the people he’s been fighting for.

Donziger, the New York City trial lawyer who has masterminded the case, made it clear what he considers Chevron’s real target — its reputation:

At the end of the day, though, I don’t think it’s just a money question for them, I think it’s a reputational question. There’s opportunity costs when you have this hanging over your head and you search for new sources of supply around the world. So, you know, we’ll see how this all shakes out. They could try to drag this out as long as they possibly can. But we have a plan legally to go get their money, assuming we win the case and get a judgment, to go get that judgment in force as quickly as possible. (Audio clip)

As the old saying goes, when the law is against you, argue the facts. When the facts are against you, argue the law. And when both are against you, pound the table.

And get a movie made about your cause.

And hire a lobbyist while you’re at it. Only someone who believes the issue is going to be resolved politically, not legally, hires lobbyists as have Donziger, the Amazon Defense Coalition, and Kohn, Swift and Graf, the Philadelphia law firm paying the bills.

For the audio of the entire Q&A, click here. It’s about 28 minutes. Also speaking are Mitch Anderson, Amazon Watch; Luis Yanza, an Ecuadorian activist; Joe Berlinger, director of “Crude.” Berlinger said Washington’s E Street Cinema was the only venue showing the film and he urged the crowd to support the film, saying, “If it does not do well this week, it will be gone.”
 

In catching up on the reviews, previews and interviews on the anti-Chevron movie, “Crude,” we see this interview with the director, Joe Berlinger, from Express, the free commuter tabloid from The Washington Post, “‘Crude’ Art: Documentarian Joe Berlinger Discusses His Latest Film“:

FILMMAKER JOE BERLINGER’S latest film, “Crude,” is about the case filed against U.S. oil company Chevron by 30,000 rain forest dwellers in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador.

No. That’s wrong. Thirty-thousand people did not file a suit against Chevron.

Here’s an English translation of the lawsuit. You see that the plaintiffs are about 48 Ecuadorians and the proceeds of a successful suit would go the Amazon Defense Coalition.

Yet the claim of there being 30,000 plaintiffs is everywhere. Here’s Grist referring to “a lawsuit brought by 30,000 rural Ecuadorians,” and Politico, “Since 1993, some 30,000 of those people have taken on Chevron in a landmark lawsuit seeking damages.” Even Washington Post energy writer Steven Mufson, who strives for balance in his Thursday Style piece, “Big oil stains the Amazon in the documentary film ‘Crude’” writes, “On one side of the lawsuit are tens of thousands of indigenous people, represented by an appealing Ecuadoran, Pablo Fajardo, and the American Steven Donziger, who says he has moral as well as financial interests in the case.”

But there aren’t tens of thousands of indigenous people involved in the lawsuit, except as props to be used for public relations purposes.

This isn’t some minor side issue or interpretation. It matters who files a suit, just as it matters who gets the cash.

So, the Amazon Defense Coalition, who’s that? At a website in Ecuador, the Frente de Defense de la Amazonia claims to be a “corporación de derecho privado sin fines de lucro” incorporated in Ecuador in 1994. But in a September 2, 2009, lobbyist disclosure form from the Sharp & Barnes lobbying shop in D.C., Frente is listed as the client and Frente’s address is 245 West 104th Street, Suite 7D, NYC. That’s the office address of Steven Donziger, the trial lawyer who has directed the litigation against Chevron.

And why is an NGO using the Ecuadorian courts to sue a U.S.-based company lobbying Congress in the first place? Just to get Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) to attend tonight’s showing and write angry letters to the President?

Curious. We find it curious. Haven’t really seen any mainstream journalist address the issues, though.

But…well…30,000!

The publicity machine has geared up for the umpteenth premiere of the anti-Chevron movie, “Crude,” this time at the E Street Cinema Friday just a few blocks down from NAM-HQ. Joe Berlinger, the director, will be at the premiere, perhaps proclaiming his objective distance as he did in this San Francisco Chronicle interview:

I have maintained throughout the entire production period and release an arms-length relationship with everybody involved, so that the film is treated as a piece of objective journalism—because it is.

Berlinger will be appearing at the DC showing with Luis Yanza, an Ecuadorian activist, and Steven Donziger, the American trial lawyer who is directing the lawsuit.

Now that’s objective distance!

To be fair to Berlinger and the movie, you learn a lot about the trial lawyer/activist/media combine that drives the litigation. He shows Donziger in full trial-lawyer mode, coaching Ecuadorian Indians to be more emotional when speaking to company stockholders, successfully selling Vanity Fair on doing a piece he can use to market the lawsuit (”Jungle Law“), and begging for more money from the Philadelphia law firm that’s subsidizing the litigation in the hopes of a big payout.

And there’s a scene in the movie where Donziger berates an old, shaky judge in Quito and then verbally attacks an attorney out in the hallway for the sake of the cameras. (See our earlier Shopfloor.org post.) It’s ugly bullying from Donziger, but you don’t really learn how cynical the abuse is until you read Peter Maass’ description of the encounter.

Maass is author of “Crude World,” a global maligning of the oil industry, with a chapter devoted to Donziger and the litigation. (Maass is also a sympathetic promoter of the movie.) In the book, Maass reports:

Donziger had known for months that Chevron had built a villa at the [army] base and agreed to give it to the military once the case ended. Donziger hadn’t opposed the deal because Chevron was not popular in Lago Agrio; he’d realized that the company’s lawyers would be safer with military protections. But with more than a dozen news-hungry journalists recording the moment, Donziger suspected that the time was right to accuse the military of being on the payroll of gringo oilmen. He was correct. The accusation made national headlines, and a little more than a month later the Ecuadorian military canceled all military contracts with oil firms and ordered Chevron off the base.

In other words, Donziger originally didn’t make an issue of legitimate security precautions because the opposing legal team faced potential harm. But when it served his purposes — when the cameras were there to record the mock outrage — he’d gladly renege on any understanding and put those lawyers in danger.

A truth-teller. Sure.

More …

• Yet another over-the-top release from The Amazon Defense Coalition about “Crude’s” D.C. showing.
• An article by Peter Maass on the litigation, “Slick” from Outside Magazine, which includes another telling of Donziger browbeating the judge in Quito.
• In Spanish, the kind of headlines that Donziger’s cynical stunt produced in Ecuador, “Amazónicos denuncian que Chevron Texaco usa base militar para sabotear juicio.”

The activist/trial lawyer combine driving the $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron loves to wield the personal attack, demonizing the company, its employees and anybody else who argues that the litigation is baseless. At first blush the attacks look like an attempt to cow critics, but by now everybody has read Saul Alinsky — pick a target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it — and once recognized as tactics, the attacks lose their power to intimidate.

So as the litigation and PR squad now levy personal charges against yours truly (again), we’re left to puzzle over their thinking. “The Chevron Pit” — billed as the blog maintained by the team suing Chevron — mentions my name seven times in its Tuesday post, “Chevron: Don’t believe your eyes…believe our lies!” and adds the usual insults. But if they cannot successfully intimidate, what’s the point? Therapeutic release for the blogging activists?

It’s certainly not truth-telling. The blog goes after our Saturday post, “What Photo Do You Use to Illustrate Misleading Journalism?,” which challenged The New York Times’ use of a photo of a current oil pit in Ecuador to illustrate a story about the lawsuit. Texaco, bought by Chevron in 2001, left Ecuador in 1992. Any photo of a still-liquid oil pit depicts pollution caused by the government-run oil company, PetroEcuador.

How does The Chevron Pit rebut our point? By trotting out more misrepresentation!

Below we noted the lawsuit the Kivalina Alaskan native village has brought against oil, coal and power companies, suing them for contributing to global warming that has supposedly eroded the village’s shoreline. Now some filmmakers are out to depict this calamity, using the litigation as the narrative device.

From Public Nuisance Wire, “Film company shoots Kivalina documentary before trial ends“:

TORONTO - A Canadian-based film company has begun filming a documentary aimed at exposing the controversial case of Kivalina v Exxon Mobil.

Filming began last month in the tiny Alaskan village of Kivalina, a 3.9 square-mile town with a population of around 399 people. The village is in the middle of a lawsuit with Exxon Mobil over allegations the big oil company’s excess gas emissions have caused erosion and damages to the town.

In a press release, Phoebe Greenberg, one of the film’s producers, said she was intrigued by the subject matter and that the dramatic consequences of global warming affect not only the small Alaskan community, but the world as well. 

The production company labels Exxon one the world’s “worst polluters,” claiming the oil giant should pay for the consequences of global warming.

Too bad they have their minds made up already. We were hoping for an objective documentary by an objective filmmaker telling both sides of the story objectively. You know, like the anti-Chevron movie, “Crude.”

Ms. Greenberg better not hope for boffo box-office. “Crude” pulled in $4,219 in weekend gross last weekend, Oct. 2-4, That’s right. Four thousand bucks in four theaters, off 72 percent from the previous weekend.

Total domestic sales as of October 4? $81,257. That’s not quite the “huge hit” that Amazon Watch proclaimed. Tendentious documentaries that pretend to be something else just don’t sell.

The documentary-style film about the litigation against Chevron for past oil operations in Ecuador, “Crude,” has been rolled out around the country in recent weeks, accompanied by much touting by the anti-corporate activists and uncritical reviewers. The Los Angeles Times, for example, profiled the film’s director, Joe Berlinger, and the film under the headline, “‘Crude’ tactics in Ecuador.”

“Crude” ostensibly relates the story around a lawsuit filed by U.S. trial lawyers against Chevron for pollution caused during the operations in Ecuador by Texaco decades ago. (Chevron bought Texaco in 2001.) And “Crude” is a well-made, even compelling movie. Too bad it’s only loosely related to the truth.

Berlinger’s product is a classic anti-business hit job, biased and selective in its telling of facts and spreader of myths and half-truths. But in the media coverage and reviews, the public rarely learns that much of what the movie portrays is bunk — or at least vigorously disputed by Chevron. The Times’ reviewer, Gary Goldstein, doesn’t bother to solicit a response from Chevron.

Berlinger claims to be an objective filmmaker, just bringing a good story to light. In remarks after the June premiere of “Crude” at the SilverDocs film festival in Silver Spring, Md., (Berlinger said):

I think one of the strengths of the film is that it is a fairly objective film, it shows kind of the warts and all of both sides.

Yet moments later he says:

For me the lawsuit is obviously the structural glue of the film. I made this film because of how we as white people have treated indigenous people over the years in both North and South America, and around the world. I think what multinational corporations have done in our name is just the late 20th Century and early 21st Century continuation of this terrible treatment of indigenous people. That’s really why I’m in.

It’s an objective film about the destruction of peaceful people by evil Western exploiters, he said, objectively.  (The photo above is from the SilverDocs’ presentation with Berlinger, right, and Steven Donziger, the trial lawyer who is leading the litigation against Chevron, financed by the Philadelphia law firm of Kohn, Swift & Graft.)

Falsehoods upon falsehoods are at the core of the legal shakedown against Chevron by U.S. trial lawyers, environmental activists and the Ecuadorian government, aided by an uncritical media. We see another round of unquestioningly repeated falsehoods in the recent coverage of “Crude,” the anti-Chevron movie now being released around the country.

Here, from today’s The Los Angeles Times, the review by Kenneth Turan, who simply accepts the movie’s claims as true.

The outrage in question is the subject of a class-action suit filed by 30,000 citizens of Ecuador against Chevron, the world’s fifth-largest corporation, alleging that 18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped into the Amazon between 1972 and 1990, fatally poisoning the land and water and sickening inhabitants

That’s a lot of propaganda packed into a single paragraph, starting with the word “outrage.” And …

Class-action suit? No. That’s wrong. There are no class-action suits in Ecuador. Class action litigation is, alas, an American legal malady.

Filed by 30,000 citizens of Ecuador? No. That’s wrong. The suit was filed on behalf of 48 plaintiffs and all the damages would go to the Amazon Defense Coalition, with U.S. contingency trial lawyers getting their cut. (Although the Ecuadorian government now claims it would get 90 percent.)

18 billion gallons of toxic wastewater were dumped? Only in the most tendentious interpretation of the term “toxic wastewater.” In fact, it was “production water,” i.e., the water produced in the drilling of wells, everywhere in the world. It was handled according to the prevailing environmental standards at the time — and Texaco (Chevron’s predecessor) — was released from environmental claims by the Ecuadorian government after completing its remediation work on well sites. Meanwhile, Ecuadorian law still allows the discharge of produced water.

Think about it: 18 billion gallons of toxic waste? It’s a preposterous claim on its face, yet it’s a familiar charge in the attacks against Chevron, one that is simply repeated as true by documentarians and reporters alike.

More…

• We review “Crude” here.
• And for Chevron’s perspective — and a useful supply of facts — see this summary.
• As we’ve noted repeatedly, Chevron paid our way for a quick trip to Ecuador in June to see first-hand the oil region and to discuss the claims against it.

The movie “Crude” uses documentary film techniques to launch a one-sided, fact-challenged but well-crafted attack against Chevron for environmental damage supposedly caused by the operations of Texaco in Ecuador. (Chevron bought Texaco in 2001.) The directors have been showing the movie to friendly audiences around the film-festival circuit, including last week at the American Film Institute’s “SilverDocs“* festival in Silver Spring, Md.

Perhaps despite themselves, the moviemakers reveal an awful lot about the nature of the litigation scheme.

The photo shows U.S. trial lawyer Steven Donziger, the moving force behind the lawsuit filed on behalf of the Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia (AKA Amazon Defense Coalition), being introduced to Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador. As the post immediately below describes, Correa is a radical, anti-American politician in the mode of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bolivia’s Evo Morales.

In the movie Donziger and his Ecuadorian colleague, Pablo Fajardo, fly to Philadelphia to solicit more financial support for their litigation from Joe Kohn, a partner in Kohn, Swift and Graf. Kohn cheerfully explains to the camera that the lawsuit is, indeed, intended to be a money-making venture. (Photo below: Kohn, left, chats with Donziger in the Philadelphia law offices.)

And here’s the House lobbyist registration form from 2008, in which über-lobbyist Ben Barnes signs his firm up to lobby for Kohn, Swift and Graft on issues related to Ecuador and the environment. Which would be…

The campaign against Chevron rests on a foundation of falsehoods, misrepresentation and emotional appeals.

But when you have the Ecuadorian government, self-styled documentarians, big-time lobbyists, not to mention Sting’s wife Trudie, all on your side, who needs the facts?

More on the film and the alliance against a U.S.-based energy company soon.

* The SilverDocs prizes were announced today. “Crude” did not win any awards.

Disclosure: I recently traveled to Ecuador on Chevron’s dime to get a first-hand view of the territory over which the lawsuit makes numerous claims. Chevron is a member of the NAM. But I’ve been posting on this lawsuit since September 2008.