Perhaps I'm just getting old, but it doesn't feel like eight years since Davis Guggenheim's climate-change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” was very much in the mainstream conversation — and, of course, an unstoppable force in the Oscar race.
Grossing $50 million worldwide (half of that within the US) and winning two Oscars (the only doc ever to win an award outside its own field) was a pretty remarkable feat for a film that effectively amounted to a PowerPoint presentation by Al Gore, but such was the burning urgency of its subject matter in 2006, when “global warming” had become a household phrase and measures against it were made a matter of public duty.
Certainly, Guggenheim's film did its share of awareness-raising, but producer Lawrence Bender (also known for his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino) believes their work is far from done — if anything, he says, public consciousness of the environmental crisis has since backslid enough to necessitate a potential follow-up film.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at a fundraiser for UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, where he was honored with an award, Bender accused the fossil-fuel industry of encouraging public skepticism about global warming, and teasing the possibility of a sequel: “We have had conversations. We've met; we've discussed. If we are going to make a movie, we want it to have an impact.”
Obviously, that's far from a promise, and another producer, Scott Z. Burns, suggests any such project is very much in the conceptual stages: “[We] would only support doing a follow-up if we have a really, really amazing way of attacking the issue and reinvigorating it.”
That would presumably entail something a bit different from an Al Gore slideshow, which is fine by me. What do you say? Is there a need for this topic to be addressed again? Should this team be the one to do so? Most importantly of all, should Melissa Etheridge compose another theme song, or can be baton be passed? These are the questions.