In December 2012 Matt Damon new flick “Promised Land” which is a drama about hydraulic fracturing will hit the cinemas in America but already the movie has come under attack from the oil lobby. The movie sees Matt Damon playing a gas-company salesman trying to get citizens living in rural Pennsylvania to lease their lands to allow the fracking of shale deposits to release natural gas.
Promised Land is directed by the acclaimed director Gus Van Sant who has been twice Oscar nominated for Best Director (Good Will Hunting and Milk) and has a script written by John Krasinski and Matt Damon (who wrote, stared and wrote an Oscar for Goodwill Hunting).
And this might be the reason why Big Oil is ticked off.
This is not the first movie to have environmental degradation as a theme in recent years. There was the award-winning smash hit documentary An inconvenient Truth by Al Gore which highlighted the effects of climate change and we also have smaller but critical acclaimed documentaries like Age of Stupid and Gasland. Gasland in particular focused on the effects of fracking on local communities while Age of Stupid gave screen time to the oil pollution experienced in the Nigerian Niger-Delta region.
Theatrical poster with British legend Pete Postlethwaite (Spanner Films)
The Oil Industry as expected launched a series of attacks disproving the validity of the claims made by each movie with the Independent Petroleum Association of America establishing the Energy in Depth (EiD) campaign which aims to promote the benefits of fracking and has released Truthland to debunk the claims made by the Josh Fox who directed Gasland while the human contribution to climate change which featured in both An Inconvenient Truth and Age of Stupid have attacked by climate sceptics as being a myth.
In the case of Promised Land, the Independent Petroleum Association Of America and other energy companies have declared that they will launch a PR campaign that will be “provid(ing) film reviewers with scientific studies, distribute leaflets to moviegoers and launching a “truth squad” initiative on Twitter and Facebook.”
The question one could ask is why is the Oil Lobby so scared of the arrival of Promised Land?
The answer is twofold: money and star power.
Like I mentioned earlier there have been several movies with environmental themes but their budgets have been relatively small. Promised Land has a budget of $15 million which is small by Hollywood standards but An Inconvenient Truth had a budget of $1 million while Age of Stupid producers turned to crowdfunding to finance their movie.
Now it’s a fact that the larger the budget, the more resources that will be spent in advertising. This will lead to more people seeing the movie and forming their opinions on what they have seen which will most likely be that fracking is bad.
The second reason why Big Oil is scared is because of the movie cast. Matt Damon is seen as a good guy in Hollywood who supports a variety of environmental and human right issues. He is also a very talented actor and scriptwriter so it will not be a shock to expect Promised Land to be nominated for an Oscar in 2013 and this will be the worst kind of publicity that fracking proponents will need.
Greentech Radar 