DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
n 1990, my former partner and I were hired by some filmmakers to conduct interviews for a proposed documentary about General Electric (GE) and Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a small manufacturing city almost totally dependent upon GE. They were unable to secure funding and dropped the project.
I was haunted by my interviews with Ed Bates and Charlie Fessenden, GE Managers who spoke about working with PCBs, polychlorinated bi-phenyls, a man-made chemical used as an insulating fluid in GE transformers.
I began in 1992 to shoot more interviews and public meetings.
Mickey Friedman
Throughout the 12 years it has taken me to make this film, GE has been one of the world’s most powerful and popular corporations, and its CEO, Jack Welch, who lived and worked in Pittsfield for many years, was one of the world’s most successful and revered corporate leaders.
Although I have had some success in fundraising for other film projects, I was unable to raise funds for this project. And so for twelve years I took whatever money I earned from other projects to subsidize this. Luckily the extraordinary breakthroughs in digital video and computerized editing systems made it much more possible for filmmakers like me to continue on. I began to shoot Mini-DV on a SONY VX1000 and editing the film using Final Cut Pro on my Macintosh G4.
The story developed before my eyes. And as GE abandoned Pittsfield, moving jobs to the American South and overseas, and as more and more people began to realize how contaminated GE had left their city, former GE workers would agree to talk to me.
Simultaneously a very rare coalition of people (rare, at least in the United States) of blue-collar working people, hunters and fishermen, environmentalists, local politicians, and small business owners began to put enormous pressure on state and federal environmental regulators to force GE to clean up its mess.
12 years later, my film chronicles the very mixed victory of this coalition: workers who will die without any acknowledgment from GE that toxic chemicals hastened their deaths; a successful movement amongst Pittsfield homeowners to force the clean-up of 150 contaminated residential properties; and a multi-million dollar clean-up of the first two miles of the Housatonic River.
