News

July 28, 2010 - [ Huffington Post ]

We want to urge fans to see Countdown to Zero and join the movement to eliminate nuclear weapons and ratify the new START Treaty.
 


Directed by Lucy Walker and Produced by Academy Award Winner Lawrence Bender, the Film presents compelling stories to inspire a demand for a nuclear free world.
 


We wrote the song about extremism -- about the importance of finding a middle ground for the sake of humanity as a whole. We support Global Zero and want to encourage people to see Countdown to Zero because it is imperative that we come together to end nuclear proliferation.
 


We collaborated with Participant Media on a video of our new single, "Headed for the End of the World" off of our album "Mr. Sad Clown" that promotes both the film and the Global Zero movement.
 


Countdown to Zero opened in New York City and Washington DC July 23rd and will open in twenty other cities nationwide on the 30th.

July 23, 2010 - [ The Washington Post ]

Since "An Inconvenient Truth" came out in 2006, Participant Media has become a brand name for creating documentaries expertly machined to educate, terrify and galvanize. And the formula works again in "Countdown to Zero," Lucy Walker's alternately edifying and alarming film about nuclear proliferation.
 


As a template, Walker uses John F. Kennedy's 1961 speech to the United Nations -- in which he described a "nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident or miscalculation or by madness" -- then proceeds to give examples of how close we've come to having the sword lowered. Using archival images of mushroom clouds and imploding houses, street interviews with everyday citizens who have no idea who has nukes or how many, and a plethora of wise talking heads, Walker makes a clear, cogent and irrefutable case for the total elimination of nuclear weapons. (Walker made the 2006 documentary "Blindsight;" her 2009 film about artist Vik Muniz, "Waste Land," just played Silverdocs.)

July 23, 2010 - [ The Huffington Post ]

Watch the film. Watch it again. 
 


Academy Award winning producer Lawrence Bender and director Lucy Walker's documentary Countdown to Zero is an extraordinarily powerful and disturbing film that lays out the case for global nuclear disarmament.
 


I had the privilege of interviewing Lawrence Bender on this issue.
 


"This movie is like a wake up call and it's an edge of your seat, urgent kind of scary movie about this issue. So people watch it and go 'holy shit'."
 


But the question of how we get to zero is not one easily answered.
 


"It's not easy and it's going to take some time to do. And it's an idea that was started by the great liberal president Ronald Reagan. Obviously in the movie we have some of his speeches He had many speeches where he believed that the best thing for the world was abolition of nuclear weapons.. And this is an idea that's been around for a while. It's not a liberal idea or a conservative idea. But I do believe it's an idea whose time has come. So from Reagan and even with Nixon, when he talked about reduction, this is an idea that's been around for some time and again, it's weird, because in the 1980's the nuclear freeze movement was primarily a liberal movement but it was effective. There were 70,000 nuclear weapons and now we're down to 23,000 - so it did have an effect. But today most people just don't think about this and as President Kennedy says in the movie, you have this Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads. The problem is no one is looking up."

July 22, 2010 - [ Bloomberg ]

Near the end of Lucy Walker’s doomsday documentary “Countdown to Zero,” New Year’s Eve revelers celebrate in Times Square as we hear about the gruesome impact of a nuclear blast in New York: people instantly vaporized, massive fires and shards of glass rocketing through the air like missiles. All to the cheerful sound of a ukulele playing “Over the Rainbow.” 
 


While it may seem heavy-handed, the film has a deadly message: The rise of terrorism, the threat of rogue states and the black market in nuclear materials have made the world even more dangerous than it was at the height of the Cold War. 
 


“Countdown to Zero” may do for nuclear weapons what Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” did for global warming: sound the alarm about a potential cataclysm that many people aren’t aware of. 


July 22, 2010 - [ Movieline ]

The tale of erstwhile CIA counterterrorism agent Valerie Plame Wilson has been told a million times elsewhere — not likely better or more comprehensively than her own memoir Fair Game. The quick and dirty version would summarize her exposure by the late columnist Robert Novak, which was subsequently traced back to the upper echelons of the Bush Administration as payback for her husband Joseph Wilson’s editorialized criticism  of the rush to war in Iraq. The rest is history.



It’s also serious culture: Fair Game’s film adaptation opens this fall with Naomi Watts playing Plame opposite Sean Penn’s former ambassador Wilson. (The story was more loosely adapted two years ago in Rod Lurie’s Nothing But the Truth.) And now comes Countdown to Zero, an extended look down the barrel of the world’s lingering nuclear threat. Forget the Cold War, Cuba, Dr. Stranglove and the quaint evocations of armageddon past. Zero surveys the nuclear ambitions — and potential — of the world’s terror elite. Director Lucy Walker consults with everyone from former Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to president Jimmy Carter to Russian uranium smugglers to the folks who once stood missile-side in the mountains, ready to launch the end of the world at a moment’s notice. It’s potent, petrifying stuff, never more so than when the prospects for nuclear devastation are laid out via city grids and staggering casualty projections.

July 22, 2010 - [ Entertainment Weekly ]

Countdown to Zero makes old terrors radioactively new again. Lucy Walker, the director of this documentary about the still clear-and-present danger of nuclear weapons, has her finger on the ultimate hot-button topic, and she doesn't let go. The film features spine-tingling descriptions of the moments when we risked toppling into a nuclear conflagration — like in, say, 1995, when a wayward U.S. missile caused the Russian nuclear football to be opened in front of Boris Yeltsin. (Fortunately, he wasn't drunk.) 
 


The film also illustrates how easy it is to buy enriched uranium on the black market. At times Countdown to Zero comes close to being nuclear-anxiety porn, yet it's the rare film that could trigger and unite the reflexes of the left and the right. It makes getting rid of nukes seem less like a ''cause'' than an imperative. A-

July 21, 2010 - [ Tribeca Film ]

In Lucy Walker's nuclear answer to An Inconvenient Truth, ex-CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson and others make the case that the end of the Cold War is no reason to feel safe.
 


“Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when this planet may no longer be habitable. Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”
 


President John F. Kennedy spoke those words in an address before the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 25, 1961. Almost 50 years later, the sentence in bold serves as the backbone for Lucy Walker’s new documentary, Countdown to Zero. Walker interviewed world leaders—Carter, Gorbachev, Blair, Musharraf—defense specialists, and historians to paint a broad picture of the evolution of nuclear arms in order to make the case for complete disarmament. Without the benefit of deterrence inherent in the U.S./Soviet Cold War—and with the increased availability of nuclear ingredients to rogue elements—why risk having nuclear arms at all?
 


Lawrence Bender, the producer of An Inconvenient Truth (and numerous Quentin Tarantino films, among others), spearheaded the project when he was looking to replicate the social awareness created by Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s film about global warming. Though Obama was not yet in office when work began on Countdown, the new president has supported the elimination of nuclear weapons, beginning with the Global Zero project, launched by 100 world leaders in December 2008. Obama continues to work with Russian President Medvedev to lead by example.
 

July 19, 2010 - [ ABC News ]

The Queen talks about a new film that is working to get rid of nuclear weapons.

July 17, 2010 - [ The New York Times ]

THE unlikely summer blockbuster of 2006, “An Inconvenient Truth” — the global-warming documentary based on Al Gore’s slide-show lecture — proved that socially conscious movies about calamitous subjects could raise awareness and also do big business. (It earned nearly $50 million at the global box office on its way to winning an Oscar.) 
 


In the wake of its success Lawrence Bender, a Hollywood veteran who was one of its producers, found himself fielding numerous pitches for advocacy documentaries, projects like “the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ of water or the ‘Inconvenient Truth’ of poverty,” he said. All significant topics, but the one that grabbed his attention came from the president of a research organization called the World Security Institute. His idea: the “Inconvenient Truth” of nuclear threat. 
 


Mr. Bender said he and Jeff Skoll, the founder of the socially minded company Participant Media and an executive producer of “An Inconvenient Truth,” realized that nuclear peril — like climate change — is an “umbrella issue,” something that “affects life on a planetary basis,” and so a worthy candidate for another sound-the-alarm documentary.

PRESSURE COOKER NOMINATED FOR EMMY AWARD FOR EXCEPTIONAL MERIT IN NONFICTION FILMAKING

July 8, 2010 - [ Academy of Television Arts & Sciences ]

Pressure Cooker is one of five nominees for an Emmy Award for Exceptional Merit in Nonfiction Filmmaking. The other nominees are: Brick City/Sundance Channel, My Lai/ PBS American Experience, Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)/PBS POV, Patti Smith: Dream of Life/PBS POV and Sergio/HBO.  The winner will be announced at the Emmy Awards ceremony on August 29th, airing live beginning at 5PM Pacific time on NBC.

July 2, 2010 - [ Los Angeles Times ]

"Ordinary people are the only people that will save the world," says a London public relations executive in the gentle and artful documentary "Climate of Change." It's a quote that offers a logical and immediate key to our planet's preservation but also nicely encapsulates director Brian Hill's approach here to depicting grassroots ecology.
 
Hill traveled the globe capturing a variety of average citizens leading regional efforts to defend their environments and, in turn, help to mitigate the potential effects of climate change. Whether it's an activist in Togo urging solar cooking methods, New Guinea natives practicing sustainable logging, West Virginians protesting the ravages of strip mining, or schoolchildren in India articulating the perils of plastics, the movie highlights the many inconvenient truths about the Earth's fragility and how we fit into its destruction — as well as its protection.
 
There's as much beauty in the deeply felt commitment of the film's environmentalists as there is in its visual splendor and in Tilda Swinton's lyrical narration (written by British poet Simon Armitage). And although little revealed here breaks particularly new ground, the movie proves another essential plea for environmental vigilance. As one Indian youngster so profoundly reminds us, "We are the renters of this world, not its masters."

July 2, 2010 - [ LA Weekly ]

The best film in this week's Tribeca Film showcase is Brian Hill's fantastic Climate of Change, a sobering look at the havoc wreaked upon the planet as we race to harvest natural resources while simultaneously creating both nonbiodegradable refuse and staggering amounts of pollution. (The film focuses on the coal and timber industries but gains urgency against the backdrop of the BP oil disaster.) Tilda Swinton narrates a poetic script (penned by Armitage), as the film darts from India and Africa to Papua New Guinea, England and West Virginia. If Climate occasionally drifts into PSA mode, Armitage's images are frequently haunting (such as the massive storage building in the Arctic, which houses seeds for almost every known plant), and the facts he trots out are grim. But hope is provided in the forms of everyday people — a fiery, self-described hillbilly activist; an "ethical" PR woman in London; precocious school kids in India — who doggedly fight the power.

July 1, 2010 - [ TakePart.com ]

What if there were a way to help our Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans re-enter society and find a career they loved that also healed the trauma of combat?
 


Michael O'Gorman, one of the pioneers of the organic food movement and founder of the Farmer-Veteran Coalition, may have done just that—through the rejuvenating power of growing delicious and healthy food.
 


A father of a young veteran, O'Gorman started the Farmer-Veteran Coalition after he learned that many men and women from rural and farming communities were entering the army. When they came back, they were left with trauma and a lack of employment opportunities.

July 1, 2010 - [ USA Today ]

In 2006, An Inconvenient Truth shined a light on global warming, bringing images of collapsing ice sheets and drowning polar bears to multiplexes nationwide.


Could 2010 be the year moviegoers get the angry urban parent with a hand-drawn placard, demanding more high-quality charter schools and an end to teacher tenure?
 


This summer, no fewer than four new documentaries, most of them independently produced, tackle essentially the same question: Why do so many urban public schools do such a bad job — and what can be done to help kids trapped in them?
 


Among the new films:
 


Teached, directed by activist and one-time Teach For America corps member Kelly Amis: It tackles teacher tenure, bureaucracy and "anti-child work rules that permeate every school in America," among other issues.
 


The Cartel, directed by former TV news anchor and reporter Bob Bowdon: It takes on the "unconscionable failure" of New Jersey's public schools.
 


The Lottery, an intimate look at four families' attempts to get their children into an oversubscribed Harlem charter school.
 


The biggest and flashiest of the four? Waiting for Superman, directed by Davis Guggenheim, who won an Oscar for ... An Inconvenient Truth.
 
Guggenheim's film, to be released this fall, casts the widest net, following five families, from the Bronx to Los Angeles, as they search for better schools for their kids. At once moving and disturbing, Waiting For Superman illustrates the dysfunction of a system that seems to have lost sight of its most basic function: to educate everyone.

June 16, 2010 - [ Elle ]

The Cold War may be over, but the nuclear arms race is hotter than ever
 


If Lucy Walker weren’t a filmmaker, she could have been a cop. She can make anyone talk, whether it’s the camera-shy Amish elders in her 2002 documentary, Devil’s Playground; idealistic mountaineers in 2006’s Blindsight squabbling over how to help blind Tibetan adolescents climb Mount Everest; the impoverished Brazilians who glean what can be salvaged from the country’s biggest dump in Waste Land (2009); or the amazingly chatty Russian truck driver caught smuggling weapons-grade uranium to terrorists in Walker’s most gripping documentary yet, this month’s Countdown to Zero. Walker jokingly calls herself “the queen of access,” but she’s dead serious about her new film, a vivid, heart-pounding wakeup call to an intensifying nuclear-arms race that makes the Cold War’s saber-rattling standoff seem almost cozy. (Sometimes it was: Her most shocking revelation details how in 1995 the hard-drinking Soviet premier Boris Yeltsin literally saved all of our lives.) Unlike the superpowers, terrorist groups want to get their hands on nuclear weapons for one reason only: to use them on the rest of us. Imagine 9/11 with nukes. “It’s the scariest stuff ever,” Walker says, “the most urgent threat we’re facing.”

June 15, 2010 - [ Moviefone ]

AOL is featuring the ‘Shock and Awe” viral video and Lesley Chilcott interview on the MovieFone homepage today.  
 

QUEEN NOOR OR JORDAN AND LAWRENCE BENDER ARE COUNTING ON "ZERO"

June 14, 2010 - [ Hollywood Reporter ]

Producer Lawrence Bender, Participant exec Diane Weyermann and Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan hosted a luncheon for a handful of journalists Friday to discuss the nuclear non-profileration documentary “Countdown to Zero,” directed by Lucy Walker.
 


Magnolia Pictures, which grabbed North American rights to the doc after its premiere at Sundance in January, is releasing the film in New York City and D.C. July 23 and then rolling it out to a dozen more cities (San Diego, Chicago, L.A., Austin, etc.) the following weekend. The History Channel will later air “Countdown” on TV, but the theatrical platform is designed to qualify the film for Academy Award consideration.
 


Bender and Participant last partnered on the global warming doc “An Inconvenient Truth,” which Paramount Vantage shepherded to $41.6 million in worldwide grosses and a Best Documentary Feature Oscar in 2006. The success of “Truth,” Bender said at the Four Seasons’ newly refurbished restaurant Culina, led directly to “Countdown.”

June 14, 2010 - [ STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS ]

“Define your dream and chase it with as much rigor and authenticity as you can muster,” entrepreneur and philanthropist Jeff Skoll advised Stanford Graduate School of Business 2010 graduates.



“Arguably, most all of you are already successful according to conventional definitions,” said Skoll, MBA ’95, who became the first president of eBay and has gone on to create Participant Media, a firm whose films carrying social messages have won four academy awards. “But while you’re thinking about making money, make sure you’re also thinking about making meaning. Money without meaning can be an unfulfilling life.”



Moments before introducing Skoll to the audience filling Frost Amphitheater on the blazing hot afternoon of June 12, Dean Garth Saloner had given some of the same advice:  “Our alumni care not just about themselves and their families, but about their fellow man and woman. And because they are GSB alumni they are action-oriented and do something about it.”



The ceremony honored 351 students who received MBA degrees, 14 PhDs, 54 who earned the Sloan Master of Science Degree, and 3 Master of Arts in Business Research Degrees. Of the students receiving the MBA degrees, 17 also earned masters degrees in education, 3 earned law degrees and 6 were awarded additional masters degrees in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources.

June 12, 2010 - [ Daily News ]

When Jeff Skoll was a high school student in Canada, a teacher asked the class to write down what they wanted to appear on their tombstones after they died.
 


"What I came up with as a kid was to make a difference in the big issues in the world," eBay's first president and second full-time employee recalled this week. "At the time, I thought I would do that as a writer. I also wanted to have a good family life."
 


A couple of years ago, he revisited that exercise and added a line: "Have fun too." 
 


He says he needed that reminder because he's worked what he describes as "an immense number of hours" using his eBay-generated wealth to fulfill his life goal of influencing world issues.
 


Today, Skoll, who earned a Stanford MBA in 1995, will be the first-ever commencement speaker for the Stanford Graduate School of Business. This week, he pondered his own career and how it might serve as a possible path for students looking for jobs in the midst of the Great Recession.

June 12, 2010 - [ Reuters ]

Queen Noor, the widow of King Hussein of Jordan, sat down with a small group of reporters at a private luncheon on Friday to discuss the documentary, "Countdown to Zero" about nuclear bomb proliferation, which hits U.S. theatres in July.
 


LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - In a town known for famous moviemakers, Queen Noor of Jordan is something of an anomaly in Hollywood -- until you consider the movie she has helped make.
 


As founding leader of Global Zero, a movement aimed at phasing out nuclear weapons around the world, Queen Noor served as a special consultant on the film in her first foray into Hollywood moviemaking.