Smart premiere for The Age of Stupid
The VIPs are arriving by bike, rickshaw and electric car. The cinema is powered by the sun, and the red carpet has been replaced by one that is green and fashioned from recycled bottles. Any way you slice it, the global unveiling of The Age of Stupid is not your average movie premiere. It may, however, turn out to be the biggest.
Directed by Franny Armstrong (a documentary film-maker and outrider for the Guardian's 10:10 campaign), The Age of Stupid cast Pete Postlethwaite as a mournful archivist in 2055, looking at footage from 2008 of flash floods and rampant air travel and wondering where it all went wrong. The film's future, by contrast, looks rosy. Five years after it was first ushered into production and six months after it opened in the UK, The Age of Stupid is merrily recycling its way towards world domination.
On Monday "The Age of Stupid Global Premiere" will be held at a solar-powered cinema tent in Manhattan, with the event simultaneously streamed to 400 screens across America. The event also makes room for live music from Radiohead's Thom Yorke and satellite linkups to melting glaciers and withering rainforests. Following the screening, there will be a panel discussion in which Armstrong and Postlethwaite are joined by the likes of Kofi Annan, actor Gillian Anderson and the former Irish president Mary Robinson.
Then, 24 hours later, the rest of the world is invited, as the film is rolled out to 200-odd venues in more than 50 countries, from cinemas in Lebanon and Tehran to a sports stadium on the Pacific island of Kiribati, where the coastline is being fast eroded by the rising tide. "The whole place is literally going under because of climate change," says Lizzie Gillett, the film's producer.
As Gillett sees it, an event on this scale is unprecedented. "Nobody has done anything like this, and God knows if it's going to work. We've been told that the Star Wars world premiere had 800 cinemas and we're trying to beat that." She adds that, in nations where the premiere is not booked at a bona-fide cinema, it will be available free on the internet. "So that gives us hope," she says. "I think we'll manage more screenings than Star Wars, even if it's less actual cinemas. And wouldn't that be amazing? If our little film ended up beating Star Wars?"
Yet so many aspects of The Age of Stupid are confounding. When making the film, Gillett hoped that it would serve as a rallying call, perhaps sparking a grassroots public uprising. In the event, she says, it has been the other way round, with politicians of every stripe keen to be associated with it. The makers have been asked to organise special screenings for representatives of organisations from the UN to the World Bank, the Environmental Protection Agency to Obama's thinktank.
Is there a danger here? One wonders if The Age of Stupid has become so successful that it risks becoming a gift-wrapped PR opportunity for politicians and business leaders – allowing them to bask in its reflected glory without doing anything substantive to head off the pending apocalypse. "Well, we have to be aware of that," says Gillett. "But I think it's a case of us hijacking them as opposed to them hijacking us. If these people think we are going to let them use this as some PR opportunity, they've got another think coming."
By rights, The Age of Stupid's unlikely success story should crest with next week's event. And yet, even now, mired in fraught, last-minute preparations, Gillett is predicting a further renaissance for the film on TV and DVD, where it will continue to sound its stern Cassandra cry until the world either wakes up or sicks beneath the waves. In the meantime, it has clearly taken its toll on those who made it. "It has its own life now," says Gillett, poised to dash from one meeting to the next. "That's just as well, because it's killing us."
