news

Mock-you-mentary: The Yes Men Turn Guerrilla Theatre into Raucous Film

Published on May 20, 2009

By Zach Dubinsky

The Yes Men

Call them pranksters, culture-jammers, activists, investigative journalists — and now, filmmakers. The Yes Men are the duo (plus accomplices) of rabble-rousing media hoaxsters who ran the satirical website GWBush.com and who, posing as representatives of the World Trade Organization (WTO), have been invited around the world to international conferences.

In the guise of WTO officials, they’ve given speeches touting such parodic fare as the “reBurger” — a plan to transmogrify industrialized countries’ sewage into food for the developing world. They also lectured an audience of real trade bureaucrats, tongue lodged in cheek, about the benefits of “private stewardry of labour” — aka slavery — as the solution to economic woes in the most troubled parts of Africa. Comprising Americans “Mike Bonanno” and “Andy Bichlbaum,” the Yes Men construct their ruses to draw public and media attention to corporate malfeasance. Ironically, and gallingly, their audiences of business bigwigs rarely bat an eyelash at the talks.

Now, Bonanno (real name Igor Vamos) and Bichlbaum (Jacques Servin) have made a film, The Yes Men Fix the World, documenting several of their media interventions, among them their most notorious. In December 2004, Bichlbaum posed as fictional Dow Chemical spokesperson Jude Finisterra and announced on BBC World news that the company had decided to pay billions in reparations to the victims of the Bhopal disaster in India. The company’s shares lost $2 billion in value, before recovering hours later, as the news spread around the world. But more than just dinging stock prices, the stunt got people talking again about the industrial catastrophe that killed 18,000 people and the corporations responsible.

It’s not the first Yes Men documentary. The 2004 movie The Yes Men, by filmmakers Dan Ollman, Sarah Price and Chris Smith, followed the activist duo’s WTO impostures in Austria, Finland, New York state and Australia. In a rare moment of satirical earnestness for the pair, posing as a WTO functionary in Sydney, Bichlbaum announced that his organization had recognized that its efforts had only exacerbated world poverty and that the WTO had decided to dissolve. His half-hour-long speech to a group of accountants detailed the failures of the WTO over the years and pledged reform; most of the audience approved.

This time around, Bonanno and Bichlbaum have taken the reins and turned out their own film, with co-director Kurt Engfehr (who edited Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11). The result is a production that’s gussied-up far beyond the vérité style of the first doc: scripted filler scenes of sight gags intersperse fly-on-the-wall footage of the prankster pair’s missions and segments of them talking to the camera.

The new film captures, among others, a Yes Men stunt in Alberta, where they keynote a symposium of petroleum execs with ExxonMobil’s “solution” for future oil shortages and climate-change calamity. The Yes Men’s mocking proposal? Vivoleum — fuel derived from the bodies of the millions of humans who would die in such a scenario.

The Halliburton Survivaball in action.

In another gag, Bonanno and Bichlbaum pose as representatives of oilfield services company Halliburton. They present an insurance industry conference with a personal-security solution for a dystopian future: the SurvivaBall, a Michelin Man body suit built to withstand nature’s and terrorists’ wrath.

The Yes Men Fix the World screened at the Hot Docs documentary festival in Toronto earlier this month, from where Arts Engine correspondent Zach Dubinsky caught up with Mike Bonanno AKA Igor Vamos to discuss the perils and pleasures of activist filmmaking.

The first Yes Men movie was shot by three established filmmakers (Dan Ollman, Sarah Price, Chris Smith). But you and Andy decided to make the sequel yourselves, with co-director Kurt Engfehr. Why?

Mainly we decided to do it this way because the people we did it with last time were already busy on another project and there weren’t any filmmakers who were stepping up to do it. We ended up doing it ourselves. The drawback is it’s a huge amount of work on top of what we already are doing. Each little prank is like putting on a major production — there’s costumes, scripts, audio-visual components, PowerPoint slides, animations. And it ends up then being a whole other layer on top of it to have to think about making a movie. But I guess overall, it ideally gives us the opportunity to do more wacky things that otherwise probably wouldn’t have happened with observational documentarians. We made a much more polemical film.

Do you see the movie as a thing apart from the Yes Men’s activism on issues of corporate villainy — something that merely documents it, say — or was making the film itself part of your activist process?

It was definitely part of the deal, part of the activism. The film takes on a life of its own. It lasts and gets passed around in a way that making momentary media spectacles doesn’t. People use it as a teaching tool. It really has a different kind of life in that it festers and makes its way into the consciousness of the public. Temporary news stories are just so fleeting, so it does make a big difference to us. We have several different audiences: When we do a prank, we have an audience, but that’s always really small. Then we try to spin it into a media event, which is a much larger audience. And then a movie event, which is sort of a meta-event about the event, and that ends up reaching people in a more profound way as well.

During your pranks, your business audiences rarely bat an eyelash at even your most hideous satirical proposals (like restoring slavery for some African countries). Why is that?

Andy and Mike rest by the roadside.

When we first started doing this, we were surprised when audiences didn’t react, but we came to realize that was the norm. Then it subsequently became surprising and delightful when audiences did react. When people are in the presence of what they assume to be power, and they are in some way beholden to that power — like at these conferences we go to, they’re there to collect our business cards because they think we’re important — they tend to shut up and nod in agreement.

You’ve seen that throughout history with large-scale national movements, where people will blindly follow anyway someone who’s insane. We’re not saying people are stupid, but that human nature has frailties, and that’s why we need responsible government and laws that make sense so that we don’t get ourselves into these problems.

Surely, with the provocations and stunts you pull, you’ve had some close encounters with the law?

We’ve had some run-ins with security. When we were impersonating Exxon in Calgary, it was actually kind of funny. The security for the conference, which is normally the security for the rodeo, carted us away after getting very confused. They’re used to carting away drunken rodeo cowboys who are rowdy and crazy, so they were really confused that they were being asked to haul away the speakers at the conference who were dressed in suits, who were calm and hadn’t been drinking. But the conference managers convinced them to escort us. One of the managers who grabbed me and escorted me out was really tall, and while it doesn’t look violent in the movie, there’s actually times when I had my feet off the ground.

We got into this holding cell that was basically an office, and it took about an hour for the police to arrive, and they really presumed that the police were going to haul us away and that we had committed some heinous crime. We’d stuck to the same story the whole time — that we were from ExxonMobil — but when the police arrived we told them our real names and the real story, and they laughed and said, “That’s great, we’re gonna see what we can do to get you out of here as soon as possible.” The police were great.

How do you see The Yes Men Fix the World in terms of the various genres of documentaries — would you say you draw on the Michael Moore style of “agitator” films, for instance?

I haven’t thought too much about where it fits within documentary, but often to describe it to people we describe it as a cross between a Michael Moore and a Borat, because it’s weirder than a Michael Moore, even though we share some political views, and even though Michael Moore does pull pranks in his films. Our pranks are a bit more extreme, a bit more in the Borat camp. Someone once called us “Borat with balls,” which is kind of funny, but then, I think Borat has balls. I’ve seen them in that G-string thing. Someone else called it a “thinking man’s Borat,” which I liked.

A campaign group for Bhopal victims has called your BBC news prank about Dow Chemical a “cruel, cruel hoax,” saying you gave false hope to victims that they would receive thousands of dollars in reparations. How do you see it?

The assumption that we know how victims will feel about something like this is already a little bit corrupt — we, too, fell victim to this idea that we had caused false hopes. When it was reported in the media, we felt horrible for a day and a half, because we thought we had hurt people. But what we actually found out when we met them and talked to them was, for one thing, they were more sophisticated about their position in the world than a lot of people would assume, and secondly, they basically just told us that they had been hoping for years that Dow would do something, so thinking it was true for less than an hour didn’t hurt them at all. One guy we talked to said he felt like he was in heaven for an hour, and he thanked us for it. They recognized that we weren’t victimizing them — they knew who was victimizing them, they knew it all too well.

We have two modes that we operate in: one that we might call the “Modest Proposal” mode, after Jonathan Swift, where we take something that’s operating in a harmful way and take its logic to an extreme, what you might call the nightmare proposal. Then we also have a dream proposal, what we think the company or government should be doing, and then we announce them implementing it — and you get a much different reaction from that. But then we also get accused of raising false hopes because the victims feel it’s being put right. But we have yet to encounter any victims who have been enduringly hurt by this.

Are there any issues too grave for one of your actions, any topics you wouldn’t design a stunt around because it could be seen as too flippant or disrespectful?

Not really. I think that we’ve only chosen our issues based on what seemed most pressing at the time or what opportunities fell in our lap. So we certainly are open to any suggestions, and if anybody has some special information that they’d like to give us, we’re open to lots of other topics. There is not much that’s more sobering than the Bhopal catastrophe. It’s the largest industrial accident in history and was caused by complete and utter negligence, and if you’re to apply other terms to it, it could be called murder, given that so many people knew the plant was faulty. And me and Andy can’t resist a good Holocaust joke — we even had to put some in the movie, even though we both had grandparents die in the Holocaust. But lots of people don’t laugh when it happens in the movie. We have been in audiences of Jews who were split down the middle — half thought it was funny and the other half thought horribly inappropriate.

Your work is typically described using terms like culture-jamming, activism, pranking — but a number of people have also discussed the Yes Men in terms of performance art. How do you feel about that?

I don’t see anything wrong with it. There’s nothing wrong with calling it performance art. The only reason to react negatively to it is if the story’s being covered in a place where people automatically consider performance art to be stupid. There’s a certain perception of performance art by people in the U.S., and it’s not good to play into that.

But I don’t see a reason to separate out these things. For too long, we’ve been forced to kind of categorize ourselves within these disciplinary boundaries that are, in many ways, absurd. There are people in business who are doing creative things, and there are activists doing creative things, and a lot of times it crosses over into what might be considered art in another context.

Mike and Andy, post-apocalypse.

There’s lots of examples of art that we would not want to be considered in the context of. A lot of standard stuff that goes into the art market is another form of speculation, the ultimate fantasy: creating value out of nothing – sorry, not creating value, but creating money out of nothing, which is a big difference.

What we do is precisely interested in criticizing the power relationships that exist in the world, and there’s a lot of great art that does that. And if we can be considered along with the great art, and the great politics, and the great activism, then yeah, we’d like to be a part of that.

How successful were you at financing your film?

Financing was insane from the beginning. That was the stupidest part, if not the most difficult. We completely failed to finance the film we ended up with. We thought we were getting money from Day 1 because various entities were promising it. We even signed contracts saying we were getting it, so we ended up spending it, which was a real problem because we never got it. We ended up in a huge amount of debt. The broadcasters that offered us the money to this day have provided just a fraction of what they said they would. The broadcasters provided part of it, but it’s crazy. There is one bright light in all of it, which is the Britdoc foundation, which offered us money and gave us money immediately.

Right now we’re trying to sort out a huge mess. We have signed contracts from three or four years ago where they basically didn’t follow through. It was supposed to be co-production money — it wasn’t even finishing funds. But we didn’t see any money until they saw a finished film, which was like two months ago. They kept saying, “You’re gonna get the money, you just have to jump through this one more hoop.” We kept jumping through the hoops, but spending a lot of money to do so. Unfortunately, in the end, we only got a fraction of it because it turned out that they ended up just using huge amounts of it for versions of the film, like a foreign-language version of the film, and withholding the money. So we got out half of what we’d been promised at the beginning. That was basically what we needed to make a print for Sundance.

What was your budget?

The financial burden is really hard to nail down. It depends on whether people are being paid, if me and Andy are being been paid. Initially when we went for TV production money, we put salary money in there for us, imagining that we’d get paid for our work. Our budget, in which we get paid a very modest amount and in which we paid friends who worked for us, was $1.2 million. And that’s mainly for major expenses, like $60,000 to $80,000 on legal fees. Errors and omissions insurance was another $20,000. Doing the legwork to clear rights — because we have at least 300 different clips of video and still images — another $50,000. When you add up those big numbers — and then there’s the finishing costs, which were high in part because we used so many different formats — the numbers add up really quickly. So in the end, that was our budget, but we only raised about $500,000 in total, and we spent a lot more than that. We didn’t spend the whole budget, because the part that we didn’t spend was paying ourselves and our people, including our producers.

The actual cost of filming is quite modest, just the filming and stunts. If somebody wanted to make a movie like this and just release it on the internet, or make DVDs and release it, and say screw getting it legal to go on TV, then pretty much anybody could do it on hobbyists money, as a moonlighting thing from their day job. Because that’s essentially the way we made it. But the rest of it, when you want to put it on TV, then all the broadcasters need the insurances and rights clearances and you’re in a totally different world. The amount of work you need to get that done, you need people who know what they’re doing, or you’re doing it yourself.

• • •

Billed as North America’s largest documentary showcase, this year’s Hot Docs festival in Toronto featured more than 150 films long and short from 38 countries, Argentina to Zimbabwe. Canadian and American fare predominated, but there were also programs of docs from South Korea and two slates of international screenings.

Several themes emerged from the offerings, some serendipitous, others deliberate: the environment and humans’ exploitation of it (H2Oil; Black Wave: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez; Waterlife), pets (Cat Ladies; The Tiger Next Door), prisoners (René; My Greatest Escape), and Afghanistan (Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi; Audition; Afghan Star).

As usual, some of the best documentaries dealt with abiding social issues. Prom Night in Mississippi, about the first racially integrated prom in actor Morgan Freeman’s hometown — he had offered for a decade to fund the event, but it took place only last year — generated major buzz and sold-out screenings.

Oscar nominee Hubert Davis’s feature-length Invisible City, about two teens and their mentor in a Toronto housing project, laid bare the on-the-ground reality of so-called urban revitalization plans. And yet another Academy Award nominee, Kirby Dick, presented his latest — the controversial Outrage, which outs gay American politicians with strong anti-gay voting records.

No Comments | Leave a Comment | Share: