June 30, 2006

The mysterious death of the EV1

NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) -- There were no dead bodies and no weapons, just plenty of murder suspects.

So when General Motors killed its EV1 electric car program some six years after its 1996 launch, director Chris Paine, with the backing of Sony Pictures Classics and production outfits Plinyminor and Electric Entertainment, set up his own investigation to find out why.

The resulting documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?" (recently opened in New York and Los Angeles, with a wider release throughout the summer) has encountered many roadblocks, including skeptical media outlets and an ever-morphing edit.

The film's long trip to the screen started when Paine leased an EV1 in 1997 "as a lark" but soon found he was using it as his primary car. At the time, he'd mainly assisted writer-producer Michael Tolkin in the early 1990s, while also producing shorts.

After creating a marketing/software services company in 1999, Paine returned to his first love, producing documentaries, and began shooting EV1 car footage for the fun of it on various forms of hand-held digital video.

But when the California Legislature changed a 1990 clean air law in 2003, effectively eliminating car companies' requirement to make electric cars, his footage began to turn into a film.

To commemorate GM's subsequent cancellation of the program and car recall, he and other activists planned a mock funeral that summer with a parade of EV1s. "We thought of it as kind of a goofy, droll, 'Spinal Tap' moment, like only in L.A. would this happen," Paine says.

He kept shooting as GM kept demanding their lease-only cars back, spending about $50,000 of his own money. Paine shopped around a trailer taken from some 100 hours of footage before bringing on Plinyminor partner Tavin Marin Titus in fall 2004.

She later was joined by her husband Richard. After shooting an interview with a GM spokesman saying the cars were being recycled and not crushed, Paine got a tip and hired a helicopter to shoot a junkyard where the cars were, in fact, being demolished.

"We'd planned it as a murder mystery and a comic investigation of what an electric car is," Paine says, "but then the comedy became kind of a tragedy."

A review by The Associated Press, in giving the film three stars out of four, quotes EV1 owner Peter Horton ("thirtysomething"), who was the last Southern Californian to have his EV1 taken away. "I've never seen a company be so cannibalistic about its own product before," he said.

Drivers even offered GM offered $1.9 million to buy the cars, but GM turned them down, observed the AP review.

Marin Titus had worked with Electric Entertainment CEO (and fellow EV1 driver) Dean Devlin for years, so Devlin was quite enthusiastic when she and her husband brought the project to him, putting up most of its budget of about $1 million.

SPC purchased North American rights to the film in November, just before it was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival.

"It was the best and worst thing that could've happened to us," executive producer Richard Titus says. The filmmakers had two months to complete what he estimates was six months of work, restructuring the footage into a film all parties could agree on.

Only two weeks before the fest, when the filmmakers couldn't see the forest from the trees, SPC brought in Oscar-nominated director Alex Gibney ("Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room") to offer his ideas.

SPC has several grass-roots marketing plans for the film, including screenings through environmental groups like MoveOn and a recent New York screening co-hosted by Michael Moore, a nemesis of GM since his breakthrough 1989 documentary "Roger & Me."

"I don't want to have this be a liberal crybaby thing," says Paine, who managed to interview everyone from Mel Gibson to Frank J. Gaffney Jr., Ronald Reagan's deputy assistant secretary of defense, in an effort to be unbiased, ultimately implicating uninformed consumers along with oil and car companies as guilty parties.

"It's about this huge problem all of us face: a dependency on foreign energy," Paine says.