SeekerBlog

(…snip…) It took four years for Stone to make the film. He got initial funding from technology types in Silicon Valley. Ray Rothrock {pictured left}, a venture capitalist at Venrock (who majored in nuclear engineering in college), told me he got a call from Jim Swartz, founder of venture firm Accel Partners, and serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch (founder of Infoseek) asking him to support the documentary. Rothrock met with director Stone to get a sense of his goals, and Rothrock, Swartz and Kirsch seed funded the film two and a half years ago with enough money to make a trailer. Then they hosted a fundraiser in Silicon Valley and raised funds that allowed Stone to complete the film. The budget for the project, according to Stone, was “over $1 million.”

One of the people who watched the screening of Pandora’s Promise at Sundance this year was Bonnie Benjamin-Phariss, director of Paul Allen’s Vulcan Films division. She thought it was so well done that she showed it to Paul Allen, who, after several months of “vetting every detail in the film,” according to Stone, decided to finance a big chunk of the cost of distribution. Allen’s sister, Jody Allen, who is president and CEO of Vulcan Inc., the investment firm she and her brother cofounded, is backing the film as well. UK billionaire Sir Richard Branson also came in as an executive producer after the film was complete. Branson’s representative did not respond to a request for a comment.

A common aim for Stone, Allen and Rothrock is to spark a dialogue. “The goal of this movie is to start a conversation that we are not having as a nation,” explained Rothrock, adding that there has been a ton of innovation in nuclear power technology. (…snip…)

This is an excerpt from a Forbes article by Kerry A. Dolan. I found Dolan's article because I follow Venrock partner Ray Rothrock on Twitter. From the article, here's the summary of the heavy hitters who backed Pandora's Promise – who have I failed to include?

• Paul Allen
• Jody Allen
• Richard Branson
• Steve Kirsch
• Ray Rothrock
• Jim Schwartz

Greenpeace, FOE, Sierra Club, UCS et al will do everything they can to prevent this conversation from starting, so please do what you can to stimulate discussion in your real/virtual community.

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Brookings scholar Paul Blustein reviews Pandora’s Promise from Kamakura, Japan:

Chances are pretty high, based on prevailing public opinion, that you will think my wife and I are a tad crazy, maybe even guilty of child abuse. During the March 2011 accident at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant, which is a couple hundred miles from where we live, we stayed put while thousands of others fled the Tokyo area and many foreigners left Japan for good. Not only that, we buy as much of our fruits and vegetables as possible from Fukushima Prefecture, the Connecticut-size jurisdiction where the plant is located (we even specially order boxes of Fukushima produce) while millions of others in Japan take extreme care to consume only food from the far west and south of the country. And yes, our whole family, including our 12- and 10-year-old sons, eats Fukushima food. We’re convinced it’s perfectly safe, and we like helping people whose products suffer from an unjust taint.

Are you recoiling in horror, perhaps even wishing the Japanese child welfare authorities would seize custody of our kids? If so, you are the ideal audience member for a provocative new film, titled Pandora’s Promise. This documentary focuses on five thoughtful environmentalists who were once terrified of radiation, and thought nuclear power was imperiling the planet’s future, but after educating themselves, they gradually realized that their assumptions were wrong. For people who are instinctively opposed to nuclear power but open-minded enough to consider evidence that goes against their predilections, this film will, and should, force them to question their certitude.

(…snip…) 

As someone who had to learn about radiation in a hurry after Fukushima, I was gratified to see how the educational process worked with these five environmentalists. Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, recalls being bewildered at first by the plethora of radiation exposure measurements (in millirems, microrems, millisieverts, microsieverts etc.). “You’re looking and squinting. ‘Okay, that looks like a large number. Is that a number I should worry about?’ Compared to what? What’s the background radiation level relative to all this?”

Like me, the enviros in the film were astonished to come across extensive evidence about the minimal physiological impact of contamination from major nuclear accidents. The best example is Chernobyl, where the radiation emissions in 1986 were by far the largest in history; nearly three decades later, studies show that the main effects on the general population in the area have overwhelmingly been on the mental and emotional health of people who thought they were doomed to cancer and succumbed as a result to maladies such as depression and substance abuse. (The chief documented exception is the 6,000-odd cases of thyroid cancer contracted by children after drinking milk from cows fed on grass contaminated with radioactive iodine. Soviet authorities failed to warn people of this danger, though only a handful of the victims have reportedly died of the ailment, which is one of the least lethal forms of cancer.)

Paul Blustein was formerly the Tokyo correspondent for the Washington Post.

A surprisingly good interview, and better questions than I expected, with typically frank answers from Robert Stone. Here are a few snippets: 

The disaster has definitely made this film an even more topical work, which actually is probably good for drawing people to see it. Do you see it as sort of benefit?

Sure. The grim joke among documentary filmmakers is that the worse things get for your character the better things get for your movie. If your central character dies or gets shot or run over by a bus, as sad as that may be, it’s drama for your movie. In my case nothing worse could have happened to nuclear energy, if you consider that my central character, than what happened to Fukushima. But it did provide a level of drama and story that I think does make the issue more relevant, more on people’s minds.

(…snip…)

When you say this was a difficult film to embark on as a documentarian, do you mean because the angle of the film is so against what the popular belief and consensus is on the subject?

If I had decided particularly after Fukushima to make an anti-nuclear film, given my background I could have gotten funding in a heartbeat. I probably could have done a dozen anti-nuclear films. But this film, nobody wanted to touch it. None of the sources of funding that I normally approach — PBS and places like that — wanted to go near it. They didn’t want to do a film that was pro-nuclear. They didn’t want to do a film that profiled people who changed their minds. The whole approach to it ran counter to what was the established thinking in that world.

But I was determined. I wanted creative control over this film. I wasn’t going to change my way to do it. I knew the story of conversion was the way to tell the story, that the same people who are anti-nuclear become pro-nuclear. That was the hook. Rather than having pro-nuclear people and anti-nuclear people, which certain television people had pushed on me.

(…snip…)

Nuclear is simply a means to an end. Nobody thinks… and I certainly don’t; I don’t give a damn about nuclear power; I’d be happy to power the world on algae if that would work. In that sense it’s not a pro-nuclear film, it’s a film that’s offering a viable solution to the climate crisis and is in fact a really hopeful environmental documentary, which is a rare thing these days

 (…snip…)

One of the most amazing screenings I had was at Mountain Film in Telluride, which is an environmental film festival. All the leaders in the environmental movement were there. Wind power people and solar people… There was a big environmental conference going on. There were about ten anti-hydro-fracking movies there. It was an activist, environmental film festival. There were 650 people packed to the gills, and they watched the film and it was like 98% that the people in that auditorium were won over. People were coming up to me saying they completely changed their mind. People who’d been against nuclear their whole life.

 (…snip…)

Now that you’ve seemingly made one of the most challenging docs of all time, what’s next? Or are sticking to this film and devoting your energy to its message for a while?

I do not know what I want to know next for a movie. This is probably the movie that’s going to be on my obituary. It’s probably the most important film I will ever make. It’s more than a movie for me. This really is about something way bigger than anything I’ve ever been involved in. And the people I’ve met along the way are some of the most incredible people I’ve ever met.

My mission is to get as many people from the United States and around the world to see this movie and to start talking about this and to truly try to make a difference. As long as I can keep doing that, I’m going to keep doing that. I’m having a great time showing this film around. And I feel like I’m actually making a difference and maybe making a little small dent in the universe, which, who could ask for more than that?

It is just possible that his film could make a “dent in the universe”.