OIL IN THE FAMILY

Short Synopsis

A feature documentary about filmmaker Jon Goldman's attempt to understand his family's connection to oil and the film Louisiana Story.  Using Robert J.Flaherty's classic film as a point of reference he returns to the bayou sixty years later and discovers the price of progress on the land and its people.

Description/Treatment

For the past one hundred and forty years, oil has been at the center of our culture.    It has made us rich; kept us warm; made us more mobile than any society in history.  But it has also given us the most disposable, the most detached connection with how we use our resources.  Now, it threatens to destroy our environment, our way of life, even, ultimately, our planet. 

Oil in the Family is a feature-length documentary film that is both poetry and policy.  It explores our marriage to oil through a uniquely personal journey.  New England filmmaker Jon Goldman traces his roots (and good fortune) back to his family’s Louisiana oil field.  There, he discovers that his grandmother played a vital role in the creation of one of the most celebrated – and derided --- documentaries ever made, Robert J. Flaherty’s Louisiana Story.

The Father of the American Documentary, Flaherty did the film for hire.  Standard Oil wanted a puff piece, showing that an oil derrick in the bayou was nothing to be feared it would leave the land clean,and the people better off.  It also wanted a work of art, and Flaherty delivered on both counts.   Released in 1948, the film’s record of a now-vanished world is priceless.  But its paid-for theme of an industry benign to the environment seems remarkably naïve and out of touch with a legacy of toxicity,energy dependence and political strife. 

Goldman undertakes an odyssey to retrace Flaherty’s steps.  He finds beauty, good people, ruin, guilt, greed, miles and miles of canals compromising the health of the bayou, and new attempts to store toxic materialsin the salt mine that used to be his family’s.  And questions. How can we live well without destroying our neighbors, and ourselves inthe process?  What is the price ofprogress?

In the end Goldman learns that it is by individual action that change can come.  New cleaner energy sources are growing in Louisiana and the larger world, and, perhaps, they may finally fulfill the promise that Flaherty delivered so long ago.

Mixing archival and new footage, Flaherty’s story with the people of Louisiana’s, Oil in theFamily makes the connection between the way we live our everyday lives and the very big story of oil. 

Joseph Boudreaux, who starred in Louisiana Story at the age of 10, is now a 73 year-old man, living in the bayou in a FEMA trailer.  He is still a model of closeness with the nature around him, and is thrilled that, 60 years after Standard Oil floated in the first oil derrick, the birds are beginning to return to his home.

The family in Oil in theFamily is us – all of us in America and in the developed world. By looking at one family in particular, his own, Goldman tells our story with a film that is both at peace and at war with itself.  This was Louisana Story… this is Oil in the Family.

Oil in the Family is a documentary delving into the impact the search for oil has made on the U.S. economy and environment over the last fifty years.  Sixty years after Robert J. Flaherty released his landmark film Louisiana Story about a young boy who comes across an oil derrick in his bayou in South Central Louisiana, the larger world has changed as a result of the oil exploration.

Oil in the Family follows filmmaker Jon Goldman as he traces the story of his maternal grandmother’s involvement in the making of LouisianaStory.  It is in Abbeville, Louisiana where the 1948 classic was filmed that Goldman meets Wilma Subra, an environmental chemist and MacArthur Fellow who introduces him to an original cast member, Joseph Boudreaux. Along the way, Goldman visits the small town of Weeks Island, Louisiana, two hours west of New Orleans to learn how the residents have lived in the heart of oil exploration. It is here that Goldman’s family has had interests in a salt mine where some of the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves have been stored. Meeting Daniel Edgar, a local shrimper, crab and oysterman he goes on airboat to the location where Louisiana Story was filmed. It is easy to see the comparison of the original site and the current site with its alligators and cedar knees that still exist today. And although there are small shacks still on the occasional side bayou, there are vistas of refineries, with the largest natural gas pipeline at the Henry Hub, not too faraway.  The original film and other archival footage will be used as a cinematic touchstone and transitional device from which to build a current look at where fossil fuel production has permeated life on the Bayou for good and bad.

In interviews with Subra and Boudreaux, Goldman learns how the petrochemical industry has both provided an economic base for some in the community, but has also affected their environment and lifestyle.  While researching the region to understand his grandmother’s history and participation in LouisianaStory, Goldman learns further about the salt dome of Weeks Island, formerly a Strategic Petroleum Reserve andnow a proposed site for oil exploration waste.

“This operation could be avery large disaster,” says Wilma Subra. “The people in the community of Lydia (Louisiana) are really concerned, but most of them work on the island and are scared to speak out.”  Subra has long been along been vigilant on the role local industry has had on the toxicity levels ofher community.  Now she is standing up once again against the powerful oil interests in this rural Southwestern part of Louisiana.  Subra says she has had “a lot of concerns” about the use of the Weeks Island Salt Dome forplacement of bi-products of oil exploration as waste storage, known as“E&P” (exploration and petroleum) waste.  Although E & P waste is exempt at the national level from being regulated, the EPA and several other studies have shown “40-70 percent will test as hazardous,” says Subra. She is concerned that there could possibly be creep in the salt cavernswhich could lead to eventual fractures in the structure of the walls. 

Characters will include Ricky Leacock, the cinematographer for Flaherty’s Louisiana Story; Sonia Shah, author of Crude, The Story of Oil; Robert Kaufmann, Director of the Center for Energyand Environmental Studies at Boston University; Wilma Subra, MacArthur Fellow and former EPA scientist from New Iberia, Louisiana; Lisa Margonelli, author of Oil on the Brain, Andrew Revkin Science and Environment Writer, New York Times;  Dr. Paul Lucier, Professor of GeoSciences, University of Rhode Island; Darryl Malek-Wiley, environmental justice organizer for the Sierra Club in New Orleans; representatives from the American Petroleum Institute; Joseph Boudreaux, the star of Louisiana Story from Sweetlake, Louisiana; and a to-be-named representative of the oil industry with exploration rights in Louisiana to speak to the advantages of exploration to the Louisiana citizenry and the country.