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 Entertainment | April 2007 
In a Filmdom Premiere, a Foe for Gore
 Jesse Mckinley - NYTimes
| | Steven F. Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute, a new movie star of sorts, with Thursday night’s audience in San Francisco. (Jim Wilson/NYTimes) |
San Francisco, California — The screening here on Thursday night had many elements of a classic film-world shindig. There were gift bags and television cameras, cold cocktails and hot popcorn. Ushers showed V.I.P.’s to their seats, and local politicos rubbed shoulders with the movie’s backers and flacks.
In fact, according to the movie’s star, Steven F. Hayward, there was only one thing missing from what could have otherwise been a typical Hollywood opening: liberals.
“I don’t know how much of the enemy we have here tonight,” said a smiling Mr. Hayward, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, based in Washington. “San Francisco is usually a target-rich environment.”
The occasion for the festivities was the world premiere of Mr. Hayward’s filmic debut, “An Inconvenient Truth...or Convenient Fiction?” It is a point-by-PowerPoint rebuttal of former Vice President Al Gore’s global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which played last summer in nearly 600 theaters, won two Academy Awards (including the one for best documentary) and grossed nearly $50 million worldwide.
Mr. Hayward’s movie is aiming somewhat lower, with a handful of free screenings planned over the next month, including one next week at the offices of the Heritage Foundation, another conservative Washington research group, where the film was shot. Mr. Hayward said the point of his 50-minute movie — basically a lecture like “Inconvenient Truth,” though half as long — was to dispute Mr. Gore’s depiction of potentially devastating consequences of global warming.
“I agree that we’re warming,” he told a reporter, “and I agree that we’re playing a role in it. What I disagree with is his overall pessimism.”
Mr. Hayward spends more than a little time in his film attacking Mr. Gore, whom he calls “an environmental extremist,” and poking fun at the style of “Inconvenient Truth,” including its hand-held camerawork, its arresting charts and its attention-grabbing props. At one point, for example, he mocks Mr. Gore’s dramatic use of a cherry picker to illustrate potentially soaring global temperatures.
“I’m going to save some energy,” Mr. Hayward says, “and use a ladder.”
That line was applauded by the 200 or so people who turned out on Thursday night. But global-warming bashing is not exactly a popular view in San Francisco, a green-is-gorgeous city that has banned Styrofoam, plastic bags and the like out of environmental concerns.
This is also solidly Gore country. The former vice president based his cable channel, Current TV, in San Francisco and keeps an apartment here. He took 75 percent of the city’s vote in the 2000 presidential election. Statewide, a recent Field poll showed, he would be supported by 25 percent of Democrats if he were running for president again (he insists he is not); only Hillary Rodham Clinton (31 percent) scored higher.
All of which is to say that it’s not easy being a global-warming skeptic — or an Al Gore skeptic — in San Francisco.
“It’s very much like being a Christian in the first century,” said Mike DeNunzio, former chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party and sacrificial lamb in the 2006 Congressional race against Representative Nancy Pelosi, who beat him with 80 percent of the vote. “But there’s two sides to every story, and certainly we’ve been hearing one side.”
Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, said Mr. Gore had not seen Mr. Hayward’s film but was accustomed to attacks on his positions.
“Obviously Mr. Gore stands by the film,” Ms. Kreider said of “Inconvenient Truth,” “and we found that the mainstream scientific community agrees with its fundamental conclusions.”
Sally C. Pipes, president of the Hayward film’s producer, the Pacific Research Institute, a “free-market think tank” based here, said she felt that Mr. Hayward “did a very good job of presenting the issue in a very balanced way.” Ms. Pipes also praised his “movie star potential,” just moments before Mr. Hayward — who is, well, big-boned — confessed to being a little nervous about being on the silver screen. “I’m a little frightened of seeing myself that large,” he said.
For the most part, the audience seemed to enjoy the show, “oohing” at comments about less-than-catastrophic ocean level increases and giggling at Mr. Hayward’s jabs. “I like to say the climate is too important to be left to environmentalists,” he said.
In a post-screening question-and-answer session, several people said they were relieved to see a differing viewpoint presented, while others questioned whether the idea of global warming might be “sociological hysteria” or “crying wolf.” One member of the audience wondered aloud whether God would have chosen Mr. Gore to save the planet, an observation that went unanswered by Mr. Hayward.
Not everyone, however, was thrilled by the movie. Judith Anderson, 46, a local artist and self-described “free-market fan” who had come to see the film because she was “interested in the rebuttal” to Mr. Gore’s movie, gave the flick the ultimate thumbs-down.
“It was terribly boring,” Ms. Anderson said. “I didn’t get his point.” |
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