The oil and gas industry, which usually finds itself doing battle with politicians and regulators, has recently been taking on an unlikely foe: Matt Damon. Locally, the Louisiana Oil & Gas Association is churning out responses to the actor’s new film, Promised Land.
The flick, shot in Pennsylvania, digs into a national debate over fracking with disturbing images of groundwater contamination and flaming water faucets. LOGA President Don Briggs first issued a column entitled “Facts Not Required” characterizing the film as a “mass scale public relations campaign” against hydraulic fracturing and urging the oil and gas industry to better educate the public on the safety of the process to “beat Hollywood to the punch.”
The organization followed up this afternoon with the release of a five-minute video offering the history of hydraulic fracturing and facts about the process meant to “debunk the deceptive content of Promised Land.”
This isn’t the first time the industry has taken on Hollywood. Drillers mounted a similar campaign against Gasland, the 2010 award-winning, anti-drilling HBO documentary.
Focus Features CEO James Schamus tells The Associated Press Promised Land is not intended to be a propaganda movie about fracking, but rather a Frank Capra-style story about “working-class identity, about aspiration, about money and what it does to you.”
But Briggs says even a work of fiction can deeply affect public sentiment.
“It’s dangerous to the industry because it’s not factual,” Briggs says. “The general public gets misled by all the Hollywood hype. Then it creates an attitude toward the industry and the first thing you know legislators and the government and everyone wants to start controlling the industry and putting more regulations on it than are necessary.”
