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When the Personal is Environmental: The Legacy of Blue Vinyl

Published on July 17, 2007

By Judith Helfand, co-director of Blue Vinyl and co-founder of Working Films

On August 7th (and repeating on the 9th, 10th and 12th), Blue Vinyl and its epilogue Ek Velt will be featured on the Sundance Channel's new series "The Green."

This is the second time Blue Vinyl was broadcast; in 2002 it premiered on the acclaimed series "America Undercover," bringing the message about the threat of bioaccumulation of toxic chemicals and vinyl to millions of viewers right after the highly-rated Six Feet Under. Blue Vinyl's second broadcast life on "The Green" firmly places family and intergenerational relationships within the mainstream popular notion of what is "environmental."

Judith Helfand's A Healthy Baby Girl was her first documentary exploration of how decisions made by government and corporations have very real effects on families.

Reframing the concept of environmentalism to include parent-daughter relationships has been a central goal of mine since I was diagnosed with cancer seventeen years ago as a result of in-utero exposure to the synthetic estrogen DES, an anti-miscarriage "wonder drug" prescribed to my mom and millions of other hopeful mothers-to-be from 1947 to 1971. Because of this carcinogenic, hormone-mimicking chemical (that the pharmaceutical companies knew was dangerous) I underwent an emergency radical hysterectomy at age twenty-five. They say that when one door closes another one opens. As I lost my chance to have a biological child, I gained a profound understanding of how delicate and how very "environmental" reproduction and parenting are. My social change filmmaking also turned personal. I embarked upon a five-year documentary odyssey exploring the impact of DES on my life and on my relationship with my mother. This became the film A Healthy Baby Girl, which begot Blue Vinyl.

So it goes without saying that I prepared for the 2007 special Mother's Day broadcast of my films on Sundance Channel with equal parts nakhes (Yiddish for pride) and deep humility. It was a triple feature that spanned seventeen years of my family "in the movies" -- A Healthy Baby Girl followed by Blue Vinyl and the world television premiere of Ek Velt: At the End of the World. It was one long, loving exploration of motherhood and the impact of DES exposure and cancer on our lives--as a family, as consumers and as citizens.

The three-hour retrospective was indeed a milestone for me. It celebrated my commitment as a filmmaker to the challenge of making the invisible visible by bringing to light toxic chemical exposure, the threat it poses to reproduction and health and its effects on personal relationships.

It also traced the growth of a burgeoning environmental health and justice movement that was evolving concurrently with the production and distribution of my films. In fact, Blue Vinyl, which I co-directed with Daniel Gold and that we co-produced with Julie Parker Benello, grew directly out of A Healthy Baby Girl's community outreach and education campaign (featured as a case study in MediaRights.org's Independent Producers' Outreach Toolkit). This triple feature broadcast also recognized the mission and work of Working Films, which Robert West and I co-founded in 2000 to institutionalize, codify and ratchet up the process of actively linking nonfiction filmmaking to on-the-ground organizing.

Lastly, the Mother's Day Special memorialized my beloved father Ted Helfand who had passed away two months earlier after a long and painful illness, making it an unintentional but very beautiful tribute. He was my most unexpected filmmaking collaborator and the real "star" of Blue Vinyl. He was also my greatest ally, knowingly and perhaps most importantly unknowingly, especially when it came to making the films relevant and resonant, from his early reticence to believe that vinyl was a problem to even (gulp) moving to a vinyl-sided retirement community (more about that below).

Writing this article has offered me an opportunity to stop and reflect about the process of making environmental films with and about my family, about their meaning and use in the world and about my need to make a difference and create some tangible impact.

Over the years, audience members have consistently remarked about how very personal my films are. My response has been consistent--while my films might seem personal because one gets hurt from DES and toxic chemical exposure and reproductive cancer on a personal level, these stories are no longer considered only personal. They are truly a part of the public record.

Writing this article has also given me an opportunity to reflect about my father, the process of making these films with him and what they and he have come to mean and in some cases exemplify. All of a sudden this experiment in using the power of personal filmmaking to show how we are linked across class and across race because of our collective exposure to toxic chemicals and the unnatural and toxic life cycle of something as banal as vinyl siding are parts of my dad's legacy. And damn--when your father who retired before he was "done working" is now almost done living, you want him to know that his movie and his sense of humor and his sense of right and wrong made a difference. You want him to know that he made a difference.

So two weeks before he passed away, I sat on his bed and replayed for him on my laptop some of the Blue Vinyl DVD activist extras, which had been produced by Toxic Comedy Pictures and Working Films to document the process of shifting policy and making concrete impact, in this case, transforming a toxic marketplace. I thought it might make him feel better.

Changing hearts and minds is to a great extent ephemeral and very hard to quantify. While it is hard to document changes in attitude, our hope and mission at Working Films is to take that shift, which often comes in response to compelling storytelling, and to link it to the organizing--the social change work that is ongoing, committed and all about (in the case of the Blue Vinyl campaign) lowering toxic chemical exposure and making healthy building materials accessible to everyone.

Judith Helfand and co-director Dan Gold laugh at the corner of Corporate and Trust Boulevards during the making of Blue Vinyl.

From the time we started making Blue Vinyl in 1998 to when we premiered at Sundance and broadcast on HBO in 2002 to the DVD release in 2004, the world of healthy building materials had started to change, in part due to our film and our collaboration with Working Films who created a dynamic and resonant outreach campaign. It was starting to look like someday average consumers would be able to afford fiber cement board and PVC-free flooring. And so some of the very problems explored and revealed in the film were actually addressed and even answered in the activist DVD extras.

The success of Blue Vinyl's outreach campaign stemmed in part from showing the trailer and rough cut of the film early on to a broad coalition of environmental health advocates and organizers, people with whom I had worked on the outreach for A Healthy Baby Girl and through whom I was becoming part of a movement. They agreed that we were asking and weaving the right question throughout the film's narrative--Why can't middle- and working-class people afford to buy building materials that don't harm anyone at any point in the materials' life cycle?

And so it was with joy that I was able to sit on my father's bed and show him the construction in New Orleans of the first "green," healthy and affordable PVC-free Habitat for Humanity house, sponsored by Greenpeace and by the Healthy Building Network.

The owner was Shayla Lewis who was to live there with her four children. The goal was to make this house look like all the other Habitat houses in this historic part of New Orleans and to make it a model that could be replicated. This goal was met. All extra expenses above the average sixty thousand dollar Habitat house, in this case, about three thousand dollars, were costed-out based on the fact that they would be offset by long-term savings to Shayla. Her linoleum kitchen floor would last three times longer than vinyl. Her Energy Star lights would last ten times longer than regular bulbs. And her energy efficient appliances and heating and cooling systems were chosen knowing that they would save her hundreds of dollars a year. And statistics suggested that her fiber cement board would last for fifty years, long after her neighbors, who flanked her in vinyl-sided habitat homes, would have had to replace their vinyl siding once or maybe twice.

This was the plan. And it was so successful, that the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity was scheduled to announce that fifty other "healthy Habitat homes" were to be built. And then, just days before the press conference and formal announcement were scheduled, Hurricane Katrina happened. Shayla was one of the lucky ones and was ultimately able to repair her home and return with her family.

And with pride, hoping he could really feel it too, I showed my father Let the Consumer Revolution Begin. This DVD extra represented the collective dream we had as filmmakers for how the movie could truly be of service to the burgeoning phase-out-PVC and affordable healthy/green building movements. This was a dream we shared with a broad coalition of environmental health activists--anti-toxics campaigners, policymakers and environmental justice activists from the manufacturing fence-lines of Louisiana to the urban and suburban incinerator communities of Detroit and Davis County, Utah. It also included architects, interior designers, nurses, hospital waste managers and procurement directors, and even rabbis and ministers who realized that the millions of dollars spent annually on faith-based construction and renovation could be turned into a powerful leveraging tool in the struggle for just and ethical building materials.

The first scene of Let The Consumer Revolution Begin is the last day of shooting for Blue Vinyl. It is night, the cicadas are out in full blast and there is a jib camera in the backyard. Dan Gold is directing the jib operator, who is shooting my parents and me, surrounded by two thousand square feet of used blue vinyl siding, cut up into two-by-two inch squares with little chad-like holes punched through for easy beading. We were placing stickers on each of the thousands of pieces--warning labels that read "This is vinyl. Don't burn this and don't throw it away." They are in piles all around us, deftly placed by a set designer we hired for this closing tchochkie-making shot. My parents and I are making what would become known at film festivals as the "swag to be had" and what would become famous in the environmental activism world as that "radical Blue Vinyl totem." These tchochkies mean a lot to me and especially to my father.

My father loved metaphor. He knew that people needed something as quotidian as a starter ranch in Merrick, Long Island and the problem of what do with two thousand square feet of used blue vinyl siding in order to grasp the problem of the bio-accumulation of toxic chemicals. My father loved that people all over the world were wearing a piece of his house on Mardi Gras beads with a warning sticker about PVC. And he loved that the Blue Vinyl tchochkie had become the bathroom keychain of choice at several leading, influential American architecture firms. Pieces of his house had become the radical totem of the environmental justice movement.

In making movies, my father was my comrade and collaborator, my dearest, most unexpected of allies. When my mom was reticent about appearing in Blue Vinyl, he said, "Florence, you had your movie [A Healthy Baby Girl]. This is my movie." She relented reticently; glad to see him so energized. And then, one day during production, he asked me how the film would end. "Well," I told him, "it started when you took the red wood off and put up the blue vinyl on the house..."

Judith Helfand's mother and father string Mardi Gras beads through squares of blue vinyl that previously covered their house. The pieces were distributed at film festivals and outreach events around the country.

We were both quiet. Then, together, he and I both realized how we would have to end the film. Actually, I think he figured it out first and I intuited it from the slow, delicious smile that spread across his face. Then, mid-smile, he realized that my mother would never go for it. He would have to be the one to talk her into letting us take the vinyl off the house.

Some dark jokes emerged in the Helfand family. For a year, every time I saw my father, I'd remind him to whisper in my mother's ear in the middle of the night while she was sleeping. I would mime the delivery of our covert plan, cupping my hand to my mouth and whispering, "Florence, give her the vinyl. Say yes. Consider it a mitzvah. Good things will come of it. It's for the good of humanity, for the childrens' health and for our grandson Benjamin's generation."

And then my father had his first bout with congestive heart failure. On my first visit to the hospital I found him in good spirits. Relieved, I told him about the very dark, fantastic image I had conjured up: my father in his hospital bed with my mother by his side and him saying in a raspy voice, "Florence, cough...cough...Give her the Vinyl, cough...cough.

He found this so funny that his heart monitor jumped enough for the nurse to come in and check on him. "Is everything okay Mr. Helfand?"

"Everything is okay with me. The problem is with vinyl."

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina ironically offered an amazing opportunity to put our ideas to the test under the most difficult conditions. Frustrated that the rebuilding in New Orleans was taking so long and had gotten so embroiled in red tape, the Healthy Building Network moved forward to construct the first Unity Homes prototype, a modular prefab house built to green building specifications.

This past spring, Healthy Building Network started the process of creating a factory to mass-produce affordable, green, healthy homes for distribution throughout the Mississippi and the Gulf. This initiative will close the loop by providing not only housing, but also jobs in a region where everything was devastated simultaneously. With proper financing, these factories will be built in other regions to make these homes available for purchase by the general public and to create healthy "green collar" jobs for residents. Hopefully, many communities will benefit from the green economic revolution.

While all of this very good organizing and green movement-building was happening, my parents (who in their own suburban, middle class, Jewish, reluctant way had become radical environmental justice messengers) were in the throes of a very real dilemma. (It's one that many of us independent filmmakers and activists will likely face too.) My parents needed to finance a healthy retirement. Luckily, they had a house! They needed to sell their smartest investment and only real equity--this blue, reclaimed wood house that had unexpectedly become a symbol of a movement--in order to retire comfortably. But finding somewhere to live that was affordable, up to my mom's standards and close to the town where they'd raised their kids and were part of a community...that was tough.

Ultimately, the nicest, most affordable retirement community that had a one-floor unit so that my dad could avoid stairs, a washer and dryer in the house and was still on Long Island was also (gulp) made of vinyl. Beige vinyl.

I drove my sorrow, shame and outrage at this irony (how could this have happened to us of all families?) into making a film, and that's how Ek Velt: At the End of the World came to be. We featured Ek Velt as an extra on the Blue Vinyl DVD to illustrate the very real struggles facing average consumers like my parents, who want to do the best they can, but can only do the best they can afford.

But l decided to "spin" the pain. I decided that in the great tradition of twisted irony, this move was another one of my parents' great lessons--a reminder that one starter ranch alone can't change Home Depot. If you really want to transform a toxic market place, you have to think big. You have to think Walden Pond, the fifty-five and older community that my parents moved into--the same kind of vinyl-sided "adult community" that is being built every day somewhere in America.

So as I drove around the complex trying not to get lost, since every townhouse looked exactly the same, I would whisper to myself and repeat like a mantra, "Change is happening. Blue Vinyl is making a difference." Mega-consumers like hospitals, faith-based institutions, city and state governments--even the Pentagon--are setting up purchasing standards that honor health and justice as much as the bottom line. And the more that institutions go the eco-friendly, sustainable route, the sooner alternative materials will be the norm, even for suburban developers.

The Healthy Building Network is constructing Unity Homes, affordable modular prefab houses built to green building specifications.

Personally, I decided to believe my mother and father when they told me, "Home is where the heart is." And in my free time, my brother and I looked for a vinyl-free retirement community much closer to New York City. Which we succeeded in doing, and last October we moved my parents to a beautiful and affordable brick apartment building, ten minutes from my brother and thirty minutes from my place in Manhattan's Upper West Side.

As far as achieving environmental health and justice, we are by no means there yet. But perhaps we are on the right path. I know that things are different than when we started making Blue Vinyl in 1998--very different.

And it is with great pride as a filmmaker, knowing that my films have been intricately linked to the evolution in thinking that is changing the way consumers and mega-consumers choose to build, that I send you to five wonderful pioneers of the green, healthy, affordable and just building movement: Healthy Building Network, Unity Home, Center for Health Environment and Justice, Greenpeace, Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life and GreenFaith. (I am pleased to announce that The Building in Good Faith project, jump started by Working Films and the Healthy Building Network when Blue Vinyl premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2002 and nurtured for a few years, has found a formal home at GreenFaith, something that Working Films always strives to accomplish for their campaigns).

So...back in the brick apartment building, when I showed my dad all those DVD extras and the business plan for the Healthy Building Network's Unity homes, and with complete conviction and belief and gratefulness for getting to do this work and link it to my family's life and dreams, I said to him, "Look what our house did, Dad. Look what Blue Vinyl did. Look at all it has inspired." But by this point my father was not talking much. He needed all his energy just to breath and eat a little and sit up and down. But he smiled with his dark brown eyes and shook his head in the way that always meant he got it. And he did. And I was grateful to be a "social change" filmmaker, to hold that title tight to my heart, knowing that every bit of that extra outreach work was worth it. And it was, and the work continues.

Watch the DVD extras. Buy Blue Vinyl on DVD from Docurama and 10% of sales supports Arts Engine.

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.