‘Gasland’ catches fire

By FRITZ MAYER

REGION — With the premiere of “Gasland” on HBO on June 21, the film, which garnered a Special Jury Award at the Sundance Film Festival in January, is getting a new burst of media attention. The Internet is full of reviews and articles about the film, and while a few question whether filmmaker Josh Fox was journalistically as precise as he might have been, most also give the film high marks for raising awareness about the issue of gas drilling.

For those who may not have seen or heard about the movie yet, Fox was prompted to make it when he received an offer of nearly $100,000 dollars to sign a gas lease on the 19 acres his family owns in Milanville, PA. He interviewed many people who had negative experiences with drilling, and the message of the film is clearly that gas drilling is dangerous.

In The New York Times, reviewer Mike Hale wrote, “Mr. Fox shows a general preference for vivid images — bright red Halliburton trucks, beeping but unidentified scientific instruments — over the more mundane crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of investigative journalism.”

But he also wrote, “If you are predisposed to distrust big business and the bureaucrats who regulate it, then ‘Gasland,’ a soberly muckracking film about the health and environmental dangers of the current nationwide rush to drill for natural gas, will light a flame in you.”

Writing for The Washington Post, reviewer Hank Stuever commented on Fox’s role in the film as a truth-seeker on a mission to discover as much as he can about people who have been impacted by drilling. Stuever writes, “Fox makes for a warmhearted and darkly humorous road-trip companion. It’s less about inconvenient truths and more of a memoir wrapped around an unfinished ‘60 Minutes’ exposé.”

Dave Shiflett of Bloomberg News wrote that “Josh Fox… may go down in history as the Paul Revere of fracking… The story he tells is alarming, educational and sometimes funny.”

In writing about the many contaminated wells shown in the film, Joshua Alston in Newsweek, wrote, “‘Gasland’ heaps the blame for the problem on the usual suspects: greedy corporations, corrupt regulators, Halliburton. But by reframing this as something other than an oil-only issue, ‘Gasland’ demonstrates that there is no magic bullet, no energy source without its fair share of risk. The moral of the story: when we pay lip service to our own complicity in the energy crunch, rather than try to contribute in meaningful ways, we all get mucked up.”

At the college

The filmmakers are continuing their efforts at screening the movie in as many public spaces as possible. On June 18, “Gasland” was shown at Sullivan County Community College and one member of the panel that led a discussion after the screening was Weston Wilson.

Wilson, a 30-year veteran of the Environmental Protection Agency and a whistleblower, criticized the agency’s 2004 study of fracking, which concluded that the practice was safe and did not need further study. That position has since been reversed and the agency has begun a new two-year study of fracking.

“Gasland” features many people who say drilling has ruined their wells and made them sick. Asked how the industry could continue to insist that hydraulic fracturing has never been proven to contaminate a single well in the face of such evidence, Wilson responded, “State governments and the federal government have not been out there looking to see if there is a problem. What the industry is telling you is: we’ve got away with this for 60 years, and you haven’t caught us.”

He said when contamination does occur, the drilling companies buy the land and require the owners to sign nondisclosure agreements.

“Gasland” will be shown on July 9 at Grace Episcopal Church in Honesdale at 7:00 p.m. The cost is $5.