At the Movies

Cape Wind film spins out of control

A movie made so everyone interviewed will still like Robbie Gemmell

At least the cocktail party was a success. The revelers were treated to booze and food before the preview. While the crowd was a mix of pro and anti wind farm folks, after an hour a noticeable separation occurred with the antis (wily provocateurs that they are) occupying the vital territory next to the bar. CapeCodTODAY photo.

The director is affable & cute, and cute rots the intellect

By Walter Brooks

Orson Wells once said, "A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet."

In the case of last night's semi-preview of "Cape Spin Wind - The Movie", the camera was only capable of doggerel.

Film theorist Paul Rotha offers an in-depth and analogous definition:

"Documentary defines not subject or style, but approach. It denies neither trained actors nor the advantages of staging. It justifies the use of every known technical artifice to gain its effect on the spectator....To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention...  
   Documentary approach to cinema differs from that of story-film not in its disregard for craftsmanship, but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put.
   Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The pot-maker makes pots, and the documentarian documentaries."

The necessary ingredient of a good documentary is not the authenticity of the material, but the authenticity of the result.

A "documentary" is not a "feel-good" piece. The job of a documentary filmmaker is to educate, illuminate and make the viewer re-think their convictions.

Cape Spin Wind did none of these.

Missing the chance of a lifetime

Director Robbie Gemmell should spend a year viewing the documentaries by Massachusetts-born filmmaker Frederick Wiseman to understand his function as a documentary filmmaker and changed a few small pieces of our world which badly needed changing.

Throughout cinema history, documentary filmmakers have made us think and re-think our assumptions and prejudices. These filmmakers took a stand, and many changed the world for the better.

The director of this film seemed to be trying to make sure everyone still liked him after the film was made. The best parts of this segment of what will be a longer film were when the film's editors juxtaposed MS Hill and MS Parker in an amusing way.

So, Robbie, you've missed the chance of a lifetime to make a difference for your country and the environment. In the coming decade many communities will struggle over this same issue, and a brave film may have helped them do it right, and do it faster.

Director Gemmell and his crew spent days filming the kitchen habits of the Alliance's Audra Parker and the gardening skills of Clean Power Now's Barbara Hill.

He filmed the blathering of the Cape Cod Times Editorial Board of Paul Pronovost, Peter Meyer and Bill Mills, and visited Beth Daley in the Boston Globe newsroom.

He spent God knows how much time filming the Great Gadfy, Peter Kenney, one of the least respected sources on the peninsula. Peter  is a charming, witty and data-heavy dude, but I know of no media on the Cape which uses him or his views. other than the Yarmouth community TV which is free to anyone with times to waste where his blather is watched by 17 viewers on occasions. Yet Gemmell's film seemed to view him as a player in his comedy.

Robbie Gemmell seems more interested in making us like him than doing what a documentary maker does.

The only voice of reason and wit was Bob Whitcomb, VP and Editorial Page Editor of the Providence Journal who co-authored the book "Cape Wind" with Wendy Williams, both of whom the movie also forgot to mention as it did the ten-year, 17,000 pages of testimony and reports in the two massive, reviews of the project by both the USACE and the MMS.

The reel story Gemmell missed

The director filmed ad nauseum the screams and yells of the WINDys and the NIMBYs, and managed to not take a stand or move a heart. Every tear in my ducts remained unjerked. At one point during the excruciatingly boring and childish second segment on how electricity is generated, I turned to Cape Cod Times Education Editor K. C. Myers and said, "I'd rather be at the dentist."

The film by Robbie Gemmell has been in the making for five years with countless hours of raw film interviewing every pro and anti on the issue, except the ones that really mattered. 

Gemmell seems smitten with the very powers who have spent the last decade preventing America's move to energy independence. The recent BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was the result of a 17 page environmental study by the same agencies which have spent ten years and 17,000 pages deciding about Cape Wind.

The August 2007 Daily Show did in 5 minutes what Cape Spin Wind didn't manage to do in an hour.

Gemmell doesn't seem to realize the real story was how the old media, allied with big oil and wealthy oceanfront homeowners, has been beaten, and beaten badly, by new media like this newssite, the people like the 14,000 members of Clean Power Now, and the off-Cape media like The Boston Globe and The New York Times, The Providence Journal and the Boston Phoenix which have covered the story honestly and well from the start.

$50 million & counting

Nowhere in his work do we see him take a stand, expose the truly evil motives of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound and the Cape Cod "establishment" here on Cape Cod which abetted their immoral and deeply unpatriotic and selfish acts.

The Alliance and its fossil  fuel friends have spent over $20 million and delayed the project so long it cost Cape Wind over $30 million to get up the fight. This too apparently wasn't on Robbie's radar.

After a painful hour of watching this preview, I doubt that anyone will pay to view it.

I doubt anyone will view it for free.

As Shaw once told a budding novelist, "Your work is both good and original. But the parts that are good aren't original, and the parts that are original aren't good."

Robbie, get a copy of The Daily Show and Jason Jone's five minute hoot on Cape Wind, and see what you could have done for America and your own clean air, fossil-free future.