Pro-fracking ad at odds with film
Before many Pennsylvania moviegoers settle in for Matt Damon’s film about the fight over natural gas drilling, they will see a message from the energy industry offering “straightforward facts” about hydraulic fracturing.
The unorthodox, onscreen pre-buttal of Promised Land, which opened nationwide Friday, is part of an industry campaign aimed at heading off criticism about the process, also called fracking. Instead of direct attacks, which the industry used against the documentary Gasland, they are trying to paint Damon’s movie as derivative, condescending and cliched.
Taken together the industry campaigns — at Pennsylvania movie theatres, on a website and using social media — underscore efforts to combat negative perceptions about the practice, deal with persistent questions about the risks of pollution and head-off calls for more oversight and regulation.
“The oil and gas industry is at the bottom in terms of public respect, and this movie is not going to help it,” said John Hanger, the former top environmental regulator in Pennsylvania. “It describes the oil and gas industry as fundamentally dishonest, and willing to do anything to win.”
The film, directed by Gus Van Sant, pits Damon as an out-of-town gas-company land man facing off against an environmentalist played by John Krasinski (Jim Halpert in the television series The Office) in fictional McKinley. The industry uses cash bribes, hard sells and Machiavellian manoeuvres to get its way.
“Fracking is a great premise for real drama,” said James Schamus, the head of Focus Features, a unit of Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal Media LLC that produced and distributed the film. “It represents Americans deeply conflicted about how to deal with these issues.”
The energy industry’s public relations pushback against the film echoes the fictional stealth “propa- ganda campaign” depicted in the film, he said.
The onscreen ad being showed in 75 per cent of Pennsylvania theatres lasts 16 seconds and refers the audience to an industrysponsored website, www. learnaboutshale.org, for “a community conversation on natural gas.” It’s sponsored by the Pittsburghbased Marcellus Shale Coalition industry group.
Chris Tucker, a spokesman for the Washingtonbased drillers’ group Energy in Depth, said it’s being deliberately restrained, as it doesn’t want to pick a fight with Damon or offer a detailed critique of a work of fiction. That contrasts with its attempts to rebut Josh Fox’s Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary Gasland, which showed a homeowner living near a fracking site setting fire to water from his kitchen tap.
“Gasland lends itself to rebuttal and correction in a way that Promised Land does not,” Tucker said.
At an industry conference in November, Tucker said the Promised Land script showed Damon defending fracking for two-thirds of the movie, “and he does a pretty good job of it.”
Tucker’s group created a site featuring landowners, RealPromisedLand.org.
“On this site, you won’t find any actors, scripts or manufactured storylines,” Energy in Depth said on the site, which doesn’t specifically mention the movie or Damon. “What you will find here is real people, with real stories, about how development has impacted them and their families.
“These aren’t stories you’re likely to see out at the movies. But we think they’re pretty remarkable, just the same.”
Proponents of the drilling practice in Armstrong County, Penn. — where the movie was filmed — posted comments on Facebook expressing their disappointment with the movie’s tone.
Mike Knapp, vice-president for land at MDS Energy Development LLC, which is based in the western Pennsylvania county, said the movie sets up a false dichotomy.
Knappsaid he has been a land man, just like Damon’s character, but he is from the area and not an out-ofstate interloper. “One of the things that really aggravates me, is that they seem to have a very condescending view,” by portraying farmers as greedy or unsophisticated, he said. “It’s a movie, and everybody is going to get crazy about it.”
Fracking and horizontal drilling has opened up deep rock formations in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Colorado to drilling and production, boosting local economies and spurring manufacturing growth because of lower gas prices.