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little movies, big headaches
Documentaries filmed on shoestring budgets bring anonslaught of badpublicity for corporate giants.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published December 12, 2006
LOS ANGELES - Starbucks Corp. was one of the companies that turned down interview requests from Nick and Mark Francis when the brothers were shooting their documentary about rampant poverty among Ethiopian coffee growers. But after Black Gold attracted attention at the Sundance Film Festival in January, the coffee giant invited the British brothers to its Seattle headquarters as it prepared for a barrage of bad publicity. Black Gold, now being screened at festivals and art houses, is the latest in a growing genre of documentary films shaking up the business world. They are taking critiques of corporate power that would once have been the province of newspapers and magazines to movie theaters and DVD shops, where they're finding an increasingly receptive audience. The trend, which started with Roger and Me in 1989 and more recently featured Super Size Me and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, is forcing some corporate targets to counterattack - and, some say, even change business practices - to dodge claims of unfair wages, unhealthy products or environmental degradation. "When you're talking about a documentary, it's something that's being presented as if it's fact, so that's a huge problem for companies," said Paul Argenti, a professor at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University. Jon Else, who teaches documentary filmmaking at the University of California in Berkeley, thinks the growing interest in corporate-critical documentaries is a reaction to the extremes of wealth created by an untamed free market. Nick Francis said Black Gold stemmed from the brothers' outrage about the poverty that persists among Ethiopian growers even as multinational coffee sellers make huge profits. Starbucks sent an e-mail to employees in the United Kingdom characterizing Black Gold as "inaccurate and incomplete" before it played at the London Film Festival. At Sundance, the company distributed a statement saying it thinks "coffee farmers should make a living wage and be paid fair prices." Else said the filmmakers are akin to the rabble-rousing reporters who took on the railroad empires and mining giants of the early 20th century.
[Last modified December 12, 2006, 00:09:21]
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