The other environmental documentary: "Who Killed the Electric Car"

[DeepModem Mom]

Entertainment Weekly: Electric Blues
The summer's ''other'' environmental doc. ''Who Killed the Electric Car?'' doesn't have Al Gore's media wattage, but ire over gas prices may spark box-office interest yet
by Adam B. Vary


CURRENT EVENTS Begley, as seen in ''Electric Car,'' eulogizing GM's EV1

When Al Gore took his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth to the 2006 Sundance film festival, he told reporters there was one movie in particular he wanted to see while traipsing through snowy Park City, Utah: Who Killed the Electric Car?, an investigation into the life and death of an automobile that released none of the toxic CO2 Gore has spent much of his life railing against. In fact, as Gore put it to WKTEC? director Chris Paine at the An Inconvenient Truth Los Angeles premiere May 16, ''We should be the double-bill for the summer!''

At first Paine, a former dot com entrepreneur, meant his documentary to be a light-hearted look into why the electric car, particularly the speedy and silent GM EV1, became an object of utter devotion for its California owners. Paine himself is so dedicated to the car that in 2003, after GM had halted the EV1 program and requested all the owners give up their cars at the end of their leases, he organized a mock funeral for the car at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery featuring impassioned eulogies by the likes of Ed Begley, Jr. (Naturally.)

But then a tip from a fellow EV1 activist led Paine to rent a helicopter and head to the GM proving grounds in Arizona, where he discovered a phalanx of the beloved cars crushed and piled into a dusty heap. ''The film became darker ,'' says Paine somberly, ''and more of a murder mystery.'' Here was a hip, fast, and fun-to-drive automobile that liberated its owners from ever going to the pump again — here was the future quietly charging its batteries in garages across California and Arizona — and then, suddenly, they were, in a word, killed.

Paine wanted to know why, and the reasons GM was giving — demand for the car, the company argued, never came close to justifying its research, development and production costs — did not seem to add up. If demand was so low, why was it so difficult, even for celebrities like Mel Gibson (more on him in a second), to buy one? And if GM had sunk so much money into the car, why did the EV1 marketing campaign — blurry photographs of the car seen from across a desert; actress Linda Hunt's voice ominously ruminating ''what makes it go?'' — come off as pretty much the opposite of the hard sell?...

http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1215414_1_0_,00.html

[ClassWarrior]

1. Opens here this weekend.

NGU.