There were more than a few needles in a haystack that Bonni Cohen, Pedro Kos and Jon Shenk had to find when they committed to making their latest film “The White House Effect” entirely with archival material, sorting through thousands of hours of footage to recreate the headwinds of American culture politically and otherwise from the 1970s through the early 1990s. However, the brief window of opportunity where consensus on a proactive approach to climate change seemed like a real possibility that becomes the film’s central thrust seems as much of a major discovery as any other, identifying the unexpectedly progressive appointment of Bill Reilly to lead the Environmental Protection Agency by the first Bush Administration, making him the first conservationist by trade to run the government agency at a fortuitous moment when the world at large was ready to convene on a global plan of action.
The trio of directors have accrued a wealth of first-hand knowledge about the environment, with Shenk having partnered with Kos on “The Island President” about Mohamed Nasheed, the president of the Maldives who literally found the ground shifting beneath his feet in the country as the sea level rose, and then with Cohen on “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” following Al Gore as the former vice president continued to sound the alarm around the world about the increasingly catastrophic conditions that scientists have forecast. However, it could be even a revelation to them that President George Herbert Walker Bush, the scion of an oil dynasty, was open to committing to a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions – and by extension, fossil fuel production – based on the research of scientists that had been raising concerns since the Nixon Administration when the EPA was first created. The issue hadn’t been politicized and the practical benefits of a new policy could be seen even when any progress at preventing the worst would be abstract as America’s dependence on foreign oil had gotten it into various foreign wars.
Yet as anyone watching “The White House Effect” will know, no sweeping measure was ever taken despite an alignment of politicians that boggles the mind today and the film rivets as momentum on the issue starts to fade as some within the Bush cabinet such as Chief of Staff John Sununu sabotaged any strides on the issue to appease allies at oil companies and a larger effort was afoot at Exxon, Shell and other industry giants to sow discord through the media that led to political polarization, exposed by internal documents that Cohen, Kos and Shenk get their hands on. The conclusions of the film may come across at first as devastating when the effort to establish an environment policy with real teeth came so close with little to ultimately show for it, yet the fact that the will was even there in the first place for a number of strange bedfellows is energizing when it makes the improbable seem possible again, as is the propulsive clip that the filmmakers rev up to document the palace intrigue as various parties inside the Bush Administration take on one another.
Even though it spans decades, “The White House Effect” can feel as if it’s playing out in real time, both because of its verve and its unforced connections to the precarious present moment and Cohen, Kos and Shenk intricately piece together major events in climate consciousness and mundane scenes from the White House and beyond that make both the time and issue feel as if it’s still within reach. Hot on the heels of Cohen and Shenk’s moving “In Waves and War,” about an unlikely PTSD remedy, recently debuting on Netflix and Kos’ narrative debut “In Our Blood” now in theaters, it was truly special to get to catch up with all three filmmakers to talk about “The White House Effect” as it comes off a celebrated run on the festival circuit and begins streaming on Netflix.
From what I understand, this might’ve been inspired by Nathaniel Rich’s piece “Losing Earth,” but I wondered did this go back even a little bit further to when Bonni and Jon did the “Inconvenient Truth” sequel as far as knowing there was a story here to tell?
Jon Shenk: Yeah, Bonni, Pedro and I share a passion for the environment and one of the things that’s happened over the course of our career is that the climate crisis has become a kind of subgenre within documentary. There’s so many great films out there, some of which we’ve done, including “The Island President” that Pedro was the editor of. That’s how we met. And we all read separately that Nat Rich piece “Losing Earth,” and a light bulb went off in our minds like maybe there’s a historical story to tell about the origins of the political aspect of the climate crisis that hasn’t been told quite yet on film. That was really it. Man, that started us down a rabbit hole. 14,000 clips later, we had “The White House Effect.” We had versions of this film that were hours and hours long, that started in the 1800s and went to 2023, everything in between. It was a real process to get to where it is, and a million lessons learned along the way, including a lot of history that we didn’t know about. So it was really an amazing opportunity and privilege to work on this.
Bonni, I actually thought there had to be some all-archival project like this in your backgrounds, but there wasn’t at least to this extent. Was it a different way to tell a story?
Bonni Cohen: I did direct a film called “The Rape of Europa” many years ago, which was about the history of Nazi art looting during World War II. Of course, that was filled with current day interviews. But the basis of the story was told in archive. The big difference here was we were trying to create a discipline around this storytelling where if we picked up a camera or we brought any contemporary voices onto the screen in a situation where we are trying to show when the climate crisis was not a political conversation, we would inevitably be inserting some kind of political agenda from any contemporary voice today because that’s the world we live in. So we thought why not stick with the irrefutability of history and try and keep everyone who speaks on screen from that time period so that you could sink into, as Jon has been calling it, this “archival verite.” Even though it’s history, you’re intensely in the present day. It was certainly a different way of filmmaking. Pedro can tell you best from running the editorial team, If it didn’t exist in the archive and we wanted to tell an element of the story, we had to figure out a creative way to do that, whether it was through memos or thoughts that came off the streets from the American people. We had to craft that idea through elements that existed for us in the archive.
Pedro, is that the nightmare or the dream as an editor when you have to get creative as possible?
Pedro Kos: It depends on the day. [laughs] There were days where we knew of an event or a story point that we wanted to get across and as Bonni said, if the material existed, then we could include it. But the hardest material to cut is the one that does not exist. When you’re faced with a challenge like that, you think beyond and that also propelled us to dig deeper. And I think that led us to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library archives, where we were able to find things that have never seen the light of day before, like all the stuff that you see in the Oval Office. Who knew President Bush had a camera person with him at key moments, like when he discovers the extent of the Exxon Valdez spill? And then there’s that White House cameraman who was there to capture the moment as he’s finding out the details before the press is let in. Or when he swears in [John] Sununu as chief of staff. All those things were in tapes in a box way back in the library that we found.
Also, we found all that correspondence between Bush and Sununu and Bill Reilly [the director of the EPA at the time]. And one of the things that was revelatory for us was the fact that President Bush was open to taking action. He was amenable, and he did really value and he was the first president to really appoint a bonafide environmentalist as EPA administrator, something that I don’t think any other president has done, so there was a real chance. He really did respect Bill Reilly and we were really surprised because we thought, “Hey, Bush is an oil man,” but no, he actually really took this to heart. He ran as an environmentalist and what we saw in all the materials we dug up is that there was a real chance. We wanted to bring that to life as as much as possible, using the documents using all this incredible footage that we were able to unearth.
Jon mentioned that this spanned a longer period of time at one point. How did you find the first Bush Administration the period you most wanted to cover?
Jon Shenk: In the movie, you see these wonderful sequences where we show history unfolding in this archival verite. You’re there. And then we fast forward in time to show the consequences of decisions that were made in the late ’80s and ’90s. And then like Superman flying backwards around the earth to save Lois Lane, we spend time backwards in the movie. And to Pedro and the editing team’s credit, it really takes on this almost “Dunkirk” or “Interstellar” vibe where you feel like the film is playing with time in this very magical way. But to get there, we had to chisel this thing out of a lot of footage and to say that we were lost in the weeds is an understatement. We had moments where we didn’t know which way was up anymore.
Bonni Cohen: We were going back to the first oil drilling.
Pedro Kos: Yeah. In 1859.
Jon Shenk: I remember there were two or three days during the pandemic where I did nothing but look at early photographs from the 1840s of national parks and what the snow glaciers looked like at that time in America. I mean, we were in the weeds and we had some beautiful sequences that didn’t make the film. But once we discovered that core drama — the battle for Bush’s soul in the late ’80s — we realized that’s really what movies are right there. They’re human dramas about emotional journeys. And you see this fateful history unfold before your eyes. Once we had that, we knew we had a structure that we could hang all this on.
Pedro Kos: Yeah. We had cuts that started way back in the 1840s and 1850s and spanned all the way to the present. But one of the things that we actually saw within the materials and past 1992 is that the dialogue hasn’t changed that much. Once the American public was split [politically on this issue], the story [on the climate crisis] doesn’t move forward. And part of the digging for materials, we found all of this man-on-the-street [interview footage], what we call the Vox Pop and that became one of our pillars because we are characters in this story as well. The American public is, and how our opinion has been shaped by all the other forces and how we’ve shaped the government by our choices.
At the end of the day, this is a film about choices and we needed to kind of bring it back home to us. So from 1988, there’s a big drought that science is in and it basically says, [the climate crisis] is a problem that we need to tackle. There is public consensus to the point where, as you see in the film, a radio station in Des Moines, Iowa, calls it a mom-and-pop apple pie issue that everyone can get behind and then four years later, in 1992, you have a split electorate that is confused. Now it’s become a political football. So depending what party affiliation we’re at, it dictates what you believe in. That is one of the main reasons why we zeroed in in that four-year period of 1980, because it became a political football [then] and since then, it’s very similar dialogue.
Stephen Schneider, one of the scientists who can be seen testifying before Congress at the very start of the film, becomes a recurring figure and you end up with a few central characters like that who you can check back with. Were there certain pillars you found that you could build around?
Bonni Cohen: It’s interesting that you bring up the scientists because there were certain scientists. There was Michael Oppenheimer. There was Steven Schneider. There was Jim Hansen. And all of them were doing this really important work at the time. It turned out that for our purposes, Stephen Schneider was in front of the camera more than others. He was on a lot of the late night talk shows and he had press always coming into his office at Stanford. So there was just more grist for the mill. They were all part of this community that we wanted to highlight, but we needed a spokesperson for the scientific community, and he emerged as that person. He also had a particularly interesting way of talking about how the creeping in of disinformation was really confusing the American people. Just that idea from a scientist was super important for this film because we were really trying to pinpoint the moment where we went from consuming facts to having an open opportunity in this country for disinformation to seep in and make it out onto our media airwaves. He was able to break that down and talk about how if you give credibility to two scientists, one of which telling you facts, the other one is being paid off and propagandizing to you and it’s inevitably going to confuse the American people.
Creating a lot of that confusion is actually outlined in a trove of confidential memos you include from Exxon. How did you get your hands on those?
Pedro Kos: Those Exxon files are housed at the library at the University of Texas of Austin, but access is actually has been restricted because a journalist Kert Davies published an article, he started this [site] climatefiles.com where they house all these files…
Bonni Cohen: It was not too long before we started embarking on this project.
Pedro Kos: And so Exxon retracted access to the public or made it much harder. But we were able to get in touch with [Kert] and he provided that correspondence and the Exxon studies. And by the way, Shell Oil also has the same, so what we saw from these climate files is that the major oil companies were doing their own studies in the 1980s, just to confirm that if this was actually going on and their scientists did confirm the NASA scientists [findings] and all the other scientists that were looking into this, and just a a really quick addendum is that the predictions that you see in the film from the mid to late ’80s of what would happen 25 years later for where we are now are actually becoming true. What we are living through, they correctly foresaw [as far as] the rate of warming that we’re seeing. We’re on the upper end from those scenarios, so that was something that was really shocking and also revelatory to us.
Jon Shenk: One thing I wanted to underline in what Pedro said is this film is held together by these tenuous, sinewy connections between all these tranches of treasures that we found in history. Each one of them is the work of an individual or a group of people that were working with their head down, essentially trying to figure out the truth or document it for themselves, for history, for humankind. And one of the hallmarks of the fight to spread the truth about the climate crisis is despair. The oil industry always seems to win. But in a way, even though this film is a mic drop of truth, we look at it as a hopeful thing because it shows the strength of activity and of good work out there to keep the truth alive and make it known to the public. All we did in a way is we went back into history and we found what evidence we could of the nature of this truth, and we presented it in a way that hopefully is entertaining. But it makes me want to remind young people that whatever your passion is in regards to climate change, do it, because it will count. Maybe not right now, but in the annals of history, it will count and we hope the film is a testimony to that.
“The White House Effect” will start to stream on Netflix on October 31st.