To readers who are running out of things to get outraged about: There’s always Katrina. Satirist, filmmaker and radio host Harry Shearer is all too happy to provide fresh grist for the mill in his new documentary The Big Uneasy, showing Thursday at the Del Mar in a special event featuring a question-and-answer session with Shearer himself.
Better known for mockumentaries like This Is Spinal Tap (which he co-wrote and starred in), for radio’s scathingly funny Le Show and for the voice of Mr. Burns on The Simpsons, Shearer fell upon the idea of making a straight documentary in 2009 when President Obama went to New Orleans and referred to Katrina as “a natural disaster.” The assessment flew in the face of what Shearer had learned from local news reports, namely that shoddy work by the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) had left New Orleans unacceptably vulnerable to a pretty average hurricane. It was a man-made disaster, not a natural one. “I thought, radio and blogging are not working,” he says. “And I thought, well, people make feature-length documentaries.”
The 95-minute film follows post-Katrina investigations of the ACE that found serious construction problems with the levees, starting with the fact that when work began in 1969, the meteorological models the Corps was using were already outdated. Shearer marshals a procession of missed deadlines, bad engineering decisions and cost-cutting moves to expose the picture of a doomed enterprise. It’s data-dense, dramatic and the furthest thing from comedy.
“Because it conflicted with five years of mainstream narrative on the subject, I thought it had to be absolutely rigorous to have any hope of influencing public awareness,” says Shearer, adding: “I’d made fun of documentaries, so I knew what parts I didn’t like and didn’t want to have in this one.”
Chief among those irritants are self-important narrators. Staying carefully off-screen, Shearer interviews Army brass, journalists, local residents, mid-level Corps managers and a Corps whistleblower and researchers who paid dearly for their roles in the investigations.
So why does it fall to a comedian to set the record straight? Shearer criticizes the media’s habit of parachuting in and allowing first impressions and “logistical bias”—basically covering the closest thing to the airport—to determine lasting narratives.
“They covered it as a hurricane, but they were out-of-towners, so they went away,” he says. “As the news [about the ACE] was coming out, their version had long since hardened.”
THE BIG UNEASY screens Thursday, May 19 at 7:30pm at the Del Mar Theatre, 1124 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz, followed by Q&A with director Harry Shearer. Tickets $10.50 at www.thenick.com or Del Mar box office.
