Hello from the Cool Corporation!

SUSTAIN CITIES. REDUCE CORPORATE HARM. PROMOTE COOL PROJECTS.

Mark Achbar & Katherine Dodds chat about The Corporation & Hello Cool World

Kat: This is our pilot e-zine to launch the collaboration between The Corporation and Hello Cool World. (We did send out a few newsletters over the years from The Corporation.) We hope to make this a regular ‘zine and to use it as a way to showcase the projects and issues that we care about. We also want to build a more sustainable way to get to know all of you — the folks that have over the years become our “members” and who have been receiving and responding to the emails we send. We’ve been promoting many films and projects over the six years, like The Take and ScaredSacred. Lately it’s been Manufactured Landscapes and Radiant City. (More about them in our Hello Cool Cities section). But it all started with The Corporation…

Mark: It might have actually started with Manufacturing Consent. Remember? That’s how we met. We were on a “Culture Jamming” panel with Stephen Marshall, who went on to create the Guerrilla News Network - you were working with Adbusters.

Kat: Right. That was just after I saw Manufacturing Consent. At that time when I had no TV and I was trying to live without plastic! It converted me into a media activist because it really showed me the power of the media to communicate. I realized people wanting social change had to be working in the media realm. So that film inspired all of what has become Good Company and Hello Cool World, actually. The irony is that a film critiquing the media converted me to work in media, and The Corporation -- a film that critiques corporations led me to form a company! I think the power of both these films is that they really do inspire life-changing actions in people.

Mark: Of course, you’re a socially responsible, single proprietor, not a publicly-traded, psychopathic, transnational corporation.

Kat: Well not yet anyway. LOL.

Mark: I’ve been fortunate that the two major films I’ve been involved with have prompted people to advocate for them to friends and family and they’ve put pressure on the media to give them space and air-time. Peter Wintonick and I were among the first filmmakers to use the internet, which was only just coming into widespread use in 1993, to put pressure on local, public television programmers to preview Manufacturing Consent. When you and I had discussions about The Corporation in its formative stages, I remember how we were already thinking about how to shape a grassroots campaign with an online outreach component. The film is divided into 23 chapters and each of those chapters is a potential thematic entry point for individuals and groups with diverse sets of concerns.

Kat: It’s kind of a “webby” way to make a film. Multiple entry points. Which is what gave me and the Hello Cool World grassroots team the material we needed to engage with activist groups in every city where the film played. It covers so much ground, each group could see their issue contextualized within the larger framework and as a result, they viewed promotion of the film as promotion of their issue—which it was. Our audience is an audience that wants something to happen because of these films. They don’t just want films to happen, they want something to happen.

Mark: It was important, before the film was finalized, to involve audiences and what the advertising industry would call “focus groups” to work through the film scene by scene to really understand how people coming from various perspectives would read it.

Kat: Not all filmmakers care about audiences as much as you do. I think that is one thing we have in common - we actually want to know what people think. And with our opt-in database, our allegiance is to our audiences (that’s all you readers of this message!) That’s what makes us idea distributors. We can work with filmmakers and distributors to get a film out, but ultimately our mandate is bigger than just selling the “product”. It took us a while to get our mission into one line – but here it is: “Ideas to audiences, audiences to action, action to outcome.” And that applied to projects that may not even include a film.

Mark: Isn’t that called defining a brand identity?

Kat: Branding can be a force for social change; it doesn’t have to promote breakfast cereal or cars. The Corporation is a success, the film was made, it obviously did have an impact – there’s a lot to be proud of, but from my point of view at Hello Cool World, we now want to take that third part of our mandate and actually see some results from it. Use the “corporation brand” to dig into the issues themselves and see if we can make an impact on the corporate form itself. But I don’t see it as a six-month project, I see it as a ten-year project, just like the film – like it’s been ten years since the idea for the film was born; this is the same sort of thing.

Mark: It was only six years from idea to actual launch of the film. But it was almost ten years to break-even. People really want to know what they can do or how they can help us.

Kat: And hopefully we can make room for connecting ideas to action and offer ways to get involved through this e-zine!