Great Movie About a Dangerous Business

Last year nearly 20 million gallons of petroleum products were consumed a day in the U.S.. Maybe that’s why oil spills are not environmental catastrophes, as much as economic catastrophes. In 2010 the bashing of BP was constant after its Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Companies large and small as far inland as Auburn, Alabama were looking to collect from BP, claiming they were harmed economically by the spill. The blowout became, as most accidents seem to, a giant legal tangle and money grab.

People who pull oil out of the ground or bottom of the ocean are heroic. It is frightfully dangerous work that allows millions to simply slip in behind the wheel, turn the key (or push the button) and get where we need to go.

The movie “Deepwater Horizon,” which debuted in theaters over a year ago to little fanfare and came out on DVD this January, portrays that heroism in exhilarating fashion. The movie is reminiscent of the movie “Hellfighters” with John Wayne playing a Red Adair inspired character who travels the world extinguishing oil well fires.

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Deepwater Horizon, started out, shall we say, underwater. Pamela McClintock wrote for The Hollywood Reporter, just after the movie opened,

The movie cost Lionsgate, Participant Media and a Chinese partner $110 million-$120 million to make after tax incentives and rebates brought the budget down from a hefty $156 million, but it debuted to a disappointing $20.6 million over the Sept. 30-Oct. 1 weekend. (As one example, the production costs included building a model that was almost as big as the oil rig itself surrounded by a custom-built water tank.)

“Deepwater Horizon is a hard sell. This should have been a $60 million film. The budget was out of control,” says box-office analyst Jeff Bock. “It was always going to be tough to get audiences interested in one of the largest ecological disasters in U.S. history.”

Google tells me the film has since brought in $119.5 million.

Movies portraying normal people working at unusual jobs is exciting all by itself. In the case of Deepwater Horizon that starts with checking in at Port Fourchon, Louisiana to board a helicopter to fly 40 plus miles to live on what amounts to a platform boat, housing 126 workers, with a drill thrust three and a half miles into the depths of the ocean and floor below.

To explain to the audience what goes on at Deepwater Horizon, Mike Williams’ (Mark Wahlberg) young daughter rehearses her “what my daddy does” school project for her dad and mother  Felicia (Kate Hudson) before Mike leaves for his three-week stint on the rig.

The oil is a dinosaur that is angry and under millions of pounds of pressure, she says. It wants to burst through the ocean floor. She punches a metal straw through the bottom of a full coke can to illustrate. And to keep the angry dinosaur from rushing up uncontrollably, the straw is packed with mud (she uses honey).  I won’t tell you what happens in the movie, but parents, don’t let your kids do this at home.

Hollywood amped up the tension between rig owner Transocean and rig lessee BP so as to have good guys and bad guys for a story where everyone knows what happens.  And what better bad guy than John Malkovich with a thick-as-mud Cajun accent to play BP company man Don Vidrine, who complains the project is 50 days behind schedule (actually 43) and sees what he wants to see to get the project back on schedule.

Vidrine’s nemesis is Transocean’s Jimmy Harrell (Kurt Russell), who lands on the rig angry when he sees Halliburton employees leaving, meaning that certain testing hadn’t been done. Vidrine and Mr. Jimmy, as he is called, have it out in the bridge, until Harrell is called away to the galley for a surprise; the awarding of the rig’s seventh safety award.

The reality was, BP and Transocean had grown overconfident and were pushing too close to the edge, explains James B. Meigs for Slate. And, impressed by the team’s good safety record, federal regulators routinely rubber-stamped the BP/Transocean proposals.

Despite the string of safety records, as the movie portrays, numerous things on the rig did not work. When Vidrine challenges Williams to name something in particular, the chief electronics technician quickly provides a long list that is far from complete.

Vidrine finds Williams later for further explanation. Williams tells him, “Running out of fuel as the plane tires touch the ground is not smart.” and finally, “Hope ain’t a tactic.”

Despite these issues, Williams, Mr. Jimmy and the crew continue their work as usual.  When the blowout begins, Williams is on skype with his wife.  Mr. Jimmy is in the shower. What goes wrong and the results are confusing to the average viewer.  Those who have worked on a rig would likely know exactly what was happening.

However, there is no confusing the heroism. Workers risked their lives helping others get to the lifeboats sent by a ship (the Damion Bankston) that was there to take away the mud.  While the Coast Guard received a flood of calls from employee family members, it is portrayed as responding slowly, with dispatch operators too concerned with following protocol.  While eleven people died on the rig, 115 survived, no thanks to the Coast Guard.

What the movie doesn’t address is what incentive BP had for drilling in such deep water, so far from the coast. Matthew J. Novak explained it succinctly in a piece for mises.org in 2010, “In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Deepwater Royalty Relief Act (DWRRA), which was ‘intended to encourage natural-gas and oil development in the Gulf of Mexico in waters at least 200 meters (656 feet) deep by offering royalty relief on qualifying natural gas and oil lease sales.’ This act has since expired, but there remain continued incentives for drilling in deep water.”

For projects with high risk and high cost, “the government specifically passed laws that gave the oil companies incentives to drill far offshore — that is, in deeper water where risk is presumably higher. In addition to the higher risk of accidents, the cost of solving any problems are necessarily greater in five thousand feet of water than in, say, 250 feet of water,” Novak explained.

The Deepwater Horizon well was as much about side stepping Uncle Sam’s greedy grip as resource recovery. Novak writes, “by law, there was a five-fold incentive for them to go out into deeper waters. Who could blame a company for trying to achieve a minimum relief volume, which would guarantee billions of dollars in royalty-free sales of petroleum and natural gas?”

For those who haven’t, Deepwater Horizon is well worth seeing and is a reminder of the danger government incentives cause.

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