by MATTHEW HAYS

It may sound odd, but as filmmaker Chris Paine explains it, his feature film debut began as a comedy. Doesn’t sound like a very likely genre for a movie about the sinister disarming of a hopeful weapon against both America’s dependence on foreign oil and global warming, but Paine says that was his starting point.

“Only in L.A. would you have a funeral for a car,” says Paine, director of the new documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, of a publicity stunt held by electric car owners that appears in the film. Thus Paine envisioned the dead-car story as one that would be best played for laughs. “It just seemed so absurd. So the question was, ‘Who would hold a funeral for a car?’ And then it became, ‘What kind of a car would you hold a funeral for?’ As the story unfolded, and we kept digging, it became much, much darker.”

No kidding. Who Killed the Electric Car? is ingeniously structured like the mystery it represents, guiding us through the bizarre and sadly telling story of an experimental vehicle that was far ahead of its time. The reasons for the death of the car are nefarious, and the doc joins a legion of exemplary non-fiction features—among them Why We Fight and An Inconvenient Truth—that sharply call into question government and corporate policies.

Paine’s forensic examination goes back to 1990, when California was again finding itself in a smog crisis—pollution was up, dramatically, and along with it went asthma rates, rising temperatures and dangerous levels of toxins in the atmosphere. The solution would be a government-mandated one, with the state’s Air Resources Board requiring two per cent of state vehicles to be emission-free by 1998, 10 per cent by 2003.

GM to the rescue?

Seeing an obvious need, GM rose to the occasion, introducing the EV-1 to the marketplace in 1997. There was great hype around its arrival; after all, the car needed no gas, no oil, was devoid of mufflers and didn’t need a brake change. Those things put together, Paine points out, are a billion-dollar industry alone. But six short years later the EV-1 was gone. GM had never actually sold the cars; they were only leased out. All of the leases had been cancelled, the cars had been recalled and they had all been destroyed. Though there was some local coverage in the California press, the mainstream media completely missed the story.

Here was a car that its leasers loved; it ran quietly and efficiently, could be recharged at night at home and driven cleanly during the day. And now it was gone.

Paine stumbled over the story first-hand. “I drove an EV-1 for several years,” he recalls. “I got one and kept my gas-run car in the garage, in case I needed it for longer trips. But I soon found myself rarely, if ever, using the gas-run car. The EV-1 was a dream car—it required practically no maintenance and handled beautifully. I fell in love with that car. When GM cancelled my lease, in fact, I even thought about stealing the thing, but the contract I had made that very difficult indeed.” Paine, who was then an experienced producer on such docs as Faster (2003) about motorcycle racing and William Gibson: No Maps for These Territories (2001), about the celebrated Vancouver-based author, decided this would be perfect fodder for his feature directorial debut.

“I’ve always believed in environmental issues,” Paine says. “But it’s too bad the way a label can put people into a certain niche. In the past, I had always thought of oil as this American thing. But at a certain point it stopped being North American, and became something we had to import from other places. Basically, oil is destroying us, both in terms of our environment and our foreign policy. It seemed the EV-1 was a perfect way to move us further towards domestic energy sources. When it was taken off the road, I felt we were losing much more than just a car.”

Total recall

Paine conducts extensive interviews with EV-1 owners, all of whom express horror and dismay at having their cars recalled, despite having no complaints about the automobiles. The doc effectively completely undermines the arguments of supply-siders, who’ve long argued that those who build a better mousetrap will win in the marketplace; despite the rave reviews of owners and their every effort to hang onto their cars, GM wouldn’t budge.

But while many point to corporate malfeasance, Paine was very careful to give everyone a voice in the film—he also interviews engineers, legislators and automaker execs. And while he says he’s been influenced by many documentaries—he cites Peter Davis’s Oscar-winning 1974 anti-Vietnam-War doc Hearts and Minds as a standout—Paine says the plot of the film ultimately felt a lot like the Agatha Christie mystery Murder on the Orient Express. “There were multiple suspects, and it was unclear who was specifically responsible for the death of the electric car. It seemed like there were a series of different culprits, not just one.”

The result is a mind-boggling bit of cinematic road rage, a trip that takes us through the worst elements of a culture ruled not so much by consumer demand but by the defence of existing profit margins. And in its earlier versions, Paine says the film did look a bit more like a Michael Moore film. “Originally I was going to be in the film,” he recalls. “I’d owned one of the cars, of course. But I felt like I was just too close to it all. So I took myself out of it.”

Moore isn’t less

But Paine is quick to add, “Michael Moore’s done a lot for documentary film, and we all owe him a debt of gratitude. He actually introduced our film at a screening in New York and said very kind things. What Moore has done is make it very hard to get interviews. People are afraid they’re going to be made fun of.”

Paine found himself in a similar spot as Moore has when he was working to publicize Who Killed the Electric Car?, defending his film to clueless members of the mainstream press corps. In June, he appeared on MSNBC to discuss the movie, then premiering on both coasts. “In order to create some sense of balance, MSNBC had taken all this information from press releases put out by car companies, and they were putting graphics up on the screen, presenting this information as if it were unquestioned fact. It was very strange. I really wish they hadn’t invited us on the show, if it was just going to result in an apology for the auto industry. But you know, about one out of every four TV commercials is for a car, so it’s hard to expect TV news to press too deeply into this issue.”

Critical beatdown

But Paine says the most surprising responses to Who Killed the Electric Car? have come from left-wing critics. The Village Voice, for example, dissed the film, suggesting its conclusion was too upbeat. “The characters we interviewed were upbeat about the future, so we felt that we could conclude the film on that note. The left-wing press didn’t seem to like that we had Hollywood celebrities [like narrator Martin Sheen] involved in the film. The weird thing about celebrity involvement is that you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Without them no one will pay attention to your film. With them, you’re accused of selling out. People also argued that the EV-1 was strictly a car for rich people. But if you’d mass-produced it, the price obviously would have come down.”

Paine adds that “You have to maintain a certain level of optimism. Like Gorbachev said, I’m an optimist before I’m a fatalist. It was Churchill who said that Americans always do the right thing, after trying everything else.”

Paine stands by his decision to end Who Killed the Electric Car? on a more upbeat note. “Many of the people we interviewed really believe that the electric car will come back. It may take several major crises, and it’s not going to happen in Detroit, but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. And that will be the best revenge.”

Who Killed the Electric Car? opens Friday, Aug. 25. chris paine will conduct a Q&A after the 7:45 P.M. screening at the amc forum that day

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