Everything’s Cool
Directed by Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold
Working Films
2007, 100 minutes
Everything’s Cool, an award-winning documentary, is playing in New York and Los Angeles. If it’s not playing at a theater near you, find out how you can host a screening in your own community.
About the Film
After two decades of research, computer modeling, and miles of ancient glaciers melting away, most scientists around the world agree that human behavior is causing global warming and it is happening faster than ever anticipated. Policymakers around the globe are now more than ever looking incredulously at the United States and waiting for some action; if the U.S. as a nation and a government does not aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, the problem of climate change will eventually dwarf all other economic and social problems. Inaction by the U.S. places everyone else on the planet in jeopardy.
The good news is that many leaders of the industrialized world are finally focusing on strategies for a low-carbon future. The bad news is that here in America, while Al Gore has certainly put a respectable dent in the impenetrable wall of American denial about climate change, there is still no federal strategy on the issue and the only energy bill on the table lavishes billions of dollars on the very industries that are the source of the pollution and problem. The people of the United States and millions of not-yet-born future citizens are in very deep trouble. Enter Everything’s Cool, a “toxic comedy” about global warming coming to America.
Filmmaker’s Statement
“For fifteen years now, some small percentage of the world’s scientists and diplomats and activists has inhabited one of those strange dreams where the dreamer desperately needs to warn someone about something bad and imminent; but somehow, no matter how hard he shouts, the other person in the dream—standing smiling, perhaps, with his back to an oncoming train—can’t hear him. This group, this small percentage, knows that the world is about to change more profoundly than at any time in the history of human civilization. And yet, so far, all they have achieved is to add another line to the long list of human problems—people think about global warming in the way they think about violence on television or growing trade deficits, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all.”—Bill McKibben, 2003
Directors’ Statement
Everything’s Cool is a toxic comedy about the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action—Global Warming.
Everything’s Cool follows the life and death struggle between two groups of global warming messengers: the “good guys”—latter day Paul Reveres warning the world that the “Warming is Coming”—now is the time for action; and the “bad guys”—mostly industry-sponsored hacks who have until now derailed media and public attention, and paralyzed the nation with their manufactured doubt.
At the core of the film is a quest to find the iconic image, the proper language, the points of leverage that would galvanize a new social and political movement to tackle global warming in America. As much about messaging as it is about the messengers, as much about human nature as it is about humans’ impact on nature, Everything’s Cool explores what it will take to move America from laggard nation to world leader on global warming.
Our goal: to offer a fun, factually accurate, passionate, and more-than-timely film that will move our audiences from merely embracing the origin and urgency of climate change, to marshalling the public and political will necessary to create a new energy economy—and hopefully some new clean energy into public office.
—Judith Helfand and Dan Gold
Directors’ Bios
Judith Helfand (Writer, Director, Producer)
Filmmaker, activist, and educator Judith Helfand is best known for her ability to take the dark, cynical worlds of chemical exposure and heedless corporate behavior and make them personal, resonant, highly charged, and entertaining. Her films, The Uprising of '34 (Co-directed with George Stoney), the Sundance award-winning Blue Vinyl (for which she and Co-Director Daniel Gold were nominated for two Emmys), and its Peabody award-winning prequel A Healthy Baby Girl (a five-year video-diary about her experience with DES-related cancer), explore home, class, corporate accountability, intergenerational relationships, and the ever shrinking border between what is personal and what is a critical part of the public record.
