When Al Gore took his global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth to the 2006 Sundance film festival, he told reporters there was one movie in particular he wanted to see while traipsing through snowy Park City, Utah: Who Killed the Electric Car?, an investigation into the life and death of an automobile that released none of the toxic CO2 Gore has spent much of his life railing against. In fact, as Gore put it to WKTEC? director Chris Paine at the An Inconvenient Truth Los Angeles premiere May 16, ''We should be the double-bill for the summer!''
At first Paine, a former dot com entrepreneur, meant his documentary to be a light-hearted look into why the electric car, particularly the speedy and silent GM EV1, became an object of utter devotion for its California owners. Paine himself is so dedicated to the car that in 2003, after GM had halted the EV1 program and requested all the owners give up their cars at the end of their leases, he organized a mock funeral for the car at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery featuring impassioned eulogies by the likes of Ed Begley, Jr. (Naturally.)
But then a tip from a fellow EV1 activist led Paine to rent a helicopter and head to the GM proving grounds in Arizona, where he discovered a phalanx of the beloved cars crushed and piled into a dusty heap. ''The film became darker [after that],'' says Paine somberly, ''and more of a murder mystery.'' Here was a hip, fast, and fun-to-drive automobile that liberated its owners from ever going to the pump again — here was the future quietly charging its batteries in garages across California and Arizona — and then, suddenly, they were, in a word, killed.
Paine wanted to know why, and the reasons GM was giving — demand for the car, the company argued, never came close to justifying its research, development and production costs — did not seem to add up. If demand was so low, why was it so difficult, even for celebrities like Mel Gibson (more on him in a second), to buy one? And if GM had sunk so much money into the car, why did the EV1 marketing campaign — blurry photographs of the car seen from across a desert; actress Linda Hunt's voice ominously ruminating ''what makes it go?'' — come off as pretty much the opposite of the hard sell?
Finding the answers to these questions and others like them meant more interviews with industry experts and more research into the science of emission standards and alternative fuels. And Paine somehow had to deliver all this esoteric information under the looming box office shadow of a certain documentary titan.
''The Michael Moore legacy has raised the bar on making documentaries entertaining and really fun,'' says Paine, so he and his team enlisted Dean Devlin (producer of the blockbuster Independence Day) for some much needed financing muscle and commercial know-how — not that Devlin required any prodding to come onto the project as an executive producer. He named his production company Electric Entertainment in honor of his late father, a passionate supporter of the electric car who was among the first to own the EV1 when it first hummed onto the market in 1996.
Devlin even managed to make the mercurial Mel Gibson an EV1 disciple after showing off his car to the star while they were making 2000's The Patriot. Five years later, a phone call from Devlin was all it took for Gibson, rarely seen in public after The Passion of the Christ shook the world, to happily agree to sit for an hour-long interview with Paine — right as Gibson was starting production on his Mayan epic Apocalypto, no less.
(Devlin had told Paine to expect the unexpected with Gibson, but they were all still rather shocked when they discovered the former Sexiest Man Alive had managed to grow a huge grey-streaked beard reminiscent of a certain recently felled middle eastern tyrant. ''That was a surprise,'' laughs Paine. ''He opened the door [to his hotel room] and said 'I've got my Saddam Hussein beard, what do you think?!''')
Even Gibson's, er, divine presence, however, has not lifted the Electric Car box office to anywhere near Inconvenient Truth's numbers — it did just $5,600 per theater in its first week in limited release — but its makers are undeterred. ''The fact that we even got into theaters at all was a really an exciting thing for us,'' says Devlin, who points out that marching penguins are still the exception, not the rule, when it comes to documentaries.
Still, Paine remains hopeful that summer moviegoers continually suffering at the pump will ultimately seek out his film — at the very least, those ever-rising gas prices certainly don't hurt. ''I went out and bought $500 billion worth of oil futures to try to drive summer gas prices up,'' he deadpans. ''So, sorry about that.''
