Al Gore Hits the Big Screen

[WilliamPitt]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/25/AR2006012502230.html

Al Gore, Sundance's Leading Man
'An Inconvenient Truth' Documents His Efforts To Raise Alarm on Effects of Global Warming

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 26, 2006; Page A01

PARK CITY, Utah -- Has ever a little indie film faced a greater hurdle? Imagine this sales pitch: Babe, it's a movie about global warming. Starring Al Gore. Doing a slide show.

With charts.

Improbable? Perhaps. So it's all the more amazing that "An Inconvenient Truth" had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday night before an enthusiastic audience that gave the former vice president and his movie a big standing O.

Among the film's lessons: Earth's glaciers are melting, the polar bears are screwed, each year sets new heat records. Al Gore sometimes flies coach. He also schleps his own bags.

The morning after his debut as leading man, Gore pronounces this whole Sundance thing "a most excellent time." He is wearing earth tones again. He seems jolly . He brought Tipper and the kids. He is attending parties and posing for pictures with his fans and enjoying macaroni and cheese at the Discovery Channel soiree. He's palling around with Larry David of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," who says, "Al is a funny guy." But he is also a very serious guy who believes humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan.

The core of the film is a one-man, ever-evolving multimedia slide show that Gore assembled himself. A little-known fact: Since his defeat by George W. Bush in 2000, Gore has traveled the globe with his bar graphs, staging event after event for small, invited audiences. Free of charge. And he's presented one version or another of this slide show, by his own estimation, a thousand times.

The official Sundance Film Festival guide calls the documentary a "gripping story" with "a visually mesmerizing presentation" that is "activist cinema at its very best."

...more...

[KSLeftyMom]

1. I so miss President Gore...

:-( He would have been all over the Katrina disaster... and it might not have been quite so bad. Sigh.

[stellanoir]

5. I don't have a link for this story

but remember reading that he chartered two jets out of his own pocket to transfer hospital patients out of hurricane ravaged NO to Tennessee whilst "heck of a job" Brownie was doing his photo ops and arranging his private dinners.

[AlGore-08.com]

10. The best coverage was from Greg Simon over at TPM Cafe

It's an amazing story.... it began on Sept. 1st, with Denise Kline, the daughter of the doctor who saved Gore's son's life in the 1980s, Dr. David Kline. Dr. Kline was one of the doctors stranded in charity hospital in New Orleans, and his daughter called one of Gore's former staffers, Greg Simon, trying to reach Gore to see if he could help her father.

On Sept. 2, Simon and Gore began organizing a rescue of patients from Charity Hospital in New Orleans. They ended up renting two planes, which Gore promised to pay for out of his own pocket. (Later the founder of California Pizza Kitchen paid for one of the two planes.) Their biggest roadblock was FEMA and other government agencies, who refused to allow them to help, no matter how bad things became in New Orleans.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/9/7/164747/4155

THE FASTERCURES AIRLIFT FROM NEW ORLEANS

Greg Simon
President
FasterCures

(snip)

(The Deputy Director from NDMS) was unmovable. We were not military and that was that. She tried to sound grateful for our intentions but she was not going to have outsiders help. I even offered to GIVE her the planes and the crews and the hospitals and let her run it through her NDMS system but she would have none of it. She asked me at least to delay until noon the next day and I said I would try.

I called Steve and told him to delay the planes. I called Al. It was 2 a.m. in Nashville. He was planning to leave for Dallas at 4 a.m. to meet the plane. I told Tipper what was going on. She said, “Greg, you can’t delay it now. It’s too late, the doctors are flying in here to fly with Al to Dallas.” Al got on the phone and said we could not delay. I tried to scare him. What if something went wrong with a patient on the plane? What if the military did not cooperate on the ground and no patients got on the plane? He refused to budge. Col. LaFon (Gore's cousin, a retired Air Force Col., one of two doctors Gore got to participate on the flight) could handle the patients and Al would trust that when they landed they would break through the resistance and succeed.

(snip)

Over the next three hours (from 2a.m. to 5 a.m.) I was called by an array of Majors and Lieutenant Commanders telling me to stop. (“I don’t mean to be rude, sir, but you must not do this. You must stop this now.”) Major Webb from GPMRC (don’t ask), Grant Meade from ESF. Major Lindquist from TRANSCOM (at last!) all telling me they would not cooperate and they did not know how we had gotten permission to land. I never mentioned Gore’s name because no one ever asked me who was paying for the flights or how we had come so far.

Finally at 5 a.m. Major Lindquist said if we landed he would not put any patients on the plane and we should expect no cooperation and there was no place to store the plane so we would have to leave.

(snip... after airlifting the first plane full of critical patients from NOLA to Tennessee on Sept. 3rd, and having to refight the bureaucracy to return with the second flight that had been okayed earlier)

On Sunday morning (Sept. 4th) Gore and the team landed in New Orleans to a much improved scene. Many more patients had been airlifted out after our flight and there were only ten ambulatory patients for our plane so we took 120 evacuees with us to Chattanooga. The welcoming reception in Chattanooga was so large that Gore said it looked like there was an ambulance for everybody on the plane.

We decided not to return to New Orleans because the medical patients we could take had been helped. (We could not take bedridden patients on stretchers on this plane.) Gore said that on the second trip to New Orleans, the doctors at the airport told him that the evacuation of the first 90 ambulatory patients had been the tipping point in their ability to adequately care for the other bedridden patients. They also noted that the military evacuations did not really pick up steam until after we “motivated” them with our private effort.

(more... )




(Gore helping to unload the first plane in Tennessee)

[Flying Dream Blues]

2. Wow. K&R. I want to see the film, and I hope this gets more coverage!

[Squatch]

4. I think it has very limited release.

I checked for it on Netflix, but nada

[NYCGirl]

9. No, it doesn't have a distributor yet. NT

[stellanoir]

3. "Hooray

for Holly(weird)"

At least the non corporate creative community still has a modicum of influence.

It would appear that Al's on a roll.

[Dogmudgeon]

6. Al Gore: An Inconvenient Leader

He started out as a "New (Conservative) Democrat". His rise to national prominence came when his wife, Tipper, appeared to promote censorship of rock music (which wasn't quite the case, but it was close). He didn't seem to do much when he was the vice-president. And his presidential run was made when he was emerging as a newly-converted Populist, but he still kept himself, his ideas, and his passion under wraps. Or, as a generation of the friends of Mary Jane used to say, "wrapped too tight".

He was an environmentalist in an era in which environmentalism was not just passé, but ridiculed. He was (as we all were) swindled out of the presidency by a cabal of rich petrocrats, a lapdog media, a Press addicted to the phrase "the Democrats are just as bad", and a Supreme Court that explicitly ruled that the cheaters had an unalienable right to occupy the civil throne of America.

And, in an era when the climate has begun its epochal collapse to a new atmospheric state, when we have used as much oil as we can without paying an exorbitant Gravity Tax, and after we have abused and ruined the good will it took America generations to build, he may be the only leader we have who understands what is happening and what must be done.

He knows all too well that the Presidency is promised to no one, so he has inconveniently NOT kept his mouth shut.

As a citizen, he is still considered to be a major political figure; by his behavior, he is one of the major statesman of our era.

Truly, Al Gore IS the Inconvenient Leader of our time.

In office or out, in complete agreement or with frequent argument, I support Al Gore.

Impertinent, Imperfect, and Inconvenient, I support Al Gore.

In continued support of other leaders and other voices, it still must be said --

I support Al Gore.

--p!

[givemebackmycountry]

7. On CNN, that cow Soledad O' Brien and her cronies...

Were rolling their eyes and saying little cutesy things like "Al Gore in Sundance?"
No sign of deference or recognition that this was the former VP and winner of the 2000 election.
These networks, if you have a "D" after your name, you are automatically discounted as irrelevant and no longer important.

"It looks like it's an interesting documentary" quips Soledad.

What a tool she is.

8. I wish we could see it - get some motivation n/t