Today we would like to focus a little bit on James Cameron, one of Hollywood’s biggest and most successful movie directors and producers. Canadian-born, Cameron came to the forefront in Hollywood with his 1984 blockbuster The Terminator that he both wrote and directed. He would go on to make many more award winning blockbuster movies such as Aliens, Rambo 2, Terminator 2, and Titanic, to name but a few.
Titanic became the highest grossing film of all time after its release in 1997, taking $1.8 billion dollars at the box office. It was only topped by Cameron’s 2009 blockbuster movie Avatar and it is this movie that brings our attention to the director in respect of the global warming movement.
Avatar & Environmentalism
Avatar’s storyline is coded with a strong environmental theme. It’s essentially about a man who turns against his evil and greedy corporate bosses who are in a plot to pillage the natural resources of a fictitious planet and ruin the indigenous people that he has become attached too. “I wanted to do a film that had a deeply embedded environmental message … but do it in the form of a science fiction action adventure,” Cameron told local public radio host Elvis Mitchell. Though Cameron claims all his films harking back to his early days had environmental messages, this is the one that’s most explicit in its message.
The film itself has lead on to thrusting a lot of media attention on Cameron in respect of the global warming movement as he gets further involved with environmental groups, he has aligned himself to take on right-wing climate deniers. Speaking at a fundraising event in February 2010 for the environmental group National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), he said “…if we don’t do something, we’re all going to die! What’s it going to take, a big f*cking disaster with all kinds of people dying? We need to change our priorities fast.”
Cameron Debates
Following on from the success of Avatar, Cameron recently became involved in a high profile war of words with several personalities in the so-called “Climate deniers” camp which culminated in a series of challenges he put out to them, asking them for a face to face debate. In March 2010, in a press junket he calls out Glenn Beck (Fox news personality) and climate deniers, “I want to call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.” Speaking about the global warming deniers, “Anybody that is a global-warming denier at this point in time has got their head so deeply up their ass I’m not sure they could hear me…Look, at this point I’m less interested in making money for the movie and more interested in saving the world that my children are going to inhabit. How about that? I mean look, I didn’t make this movie with these strong environmental anti-war themes in it to make friends on the right, you know…But you know they’ve got to live in this world too. And their children do as well, so they’re going to have to be answerable to this at some point.”
Cameron’s tirade culminated in a call out via his activist ‘proxy’ Richard Greene to Rusty Humphries, a well known syndicated radio talk show host for a public debate on the issues. Later, again via Richard Greene, he challenged another three well known personalities – Andrew Breitbart a New Media entrepreneur, filmmaker Ann McElhinney and the executive director of the website ClimateDepot.com Marc Morano. The latest challenge was sent out on the eve of a climate summit in Aspen, Colorado called the American Renewable Energy Day (AREDAY) with the debate scheduled to take place at its conclusion.
Unfortunately Cameron cancelled both debates, with the other participants having spent time and money in making arrangements and negotiating terms of the debates, his cancellation was met with derision from his would-be opponents who called him chicken and were left angry with his excuses of a) that he needed to attend an eco-emergency in Brazil, and b) that he actually preferred to debate with others such as Glenn Beck, even though he had called the others out and spent time negotiating the debate terms. When asked about it the reply was “Morano is not at Cameron’s level to debate, and that’s why it didn’t happen”, from Cameron’s proxy procurer Greene. Whether these debates will be rescheduled or Cameron will once again come out and challenge these people and give some facts and reasonings is yet to be seen.
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