Interview with Kirby Walker, Producer of Toxic Hot Seat Documentary
The Chanler Group was fortunate enough to be able to interview Kirby Walker, a director/producer of the documentary film Toxic Hot Seat. This documentary reveals the truth about toxic flame retardants in our furniture, how they arrived there, and why they remain despite advocacy and legislative efforts. Kirby Walker is an environmentalist, activist, and award-winning independent film and video producer.
Before we even started, Kirby jumped in with a little background on the funding for the film:
When we were making the film, we weren’t allowed to take any funding from anybody on either side of the issue! In fact, HBO wouldn’t have purchased it. If we had, we wouldn’t have been able to sell it. Just a factoid.
So it was entirely privately funded?
My partner James Redford and myself, we were just putting our own money into it for the proof of concept. We took the 12 minute proof of concept to HBO, and they gave us more money and wanted first right of refusal. If they chose not to buy it, we could keep the money. We went to them with our rough cut and they bought it outright, so we didn’t have to do any other fundraising. We were very fortunate.
What inspired you to make this movie?
I was a trustee for a long time at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and now I’m an honorary trustee. They invite people periodically to brown bag lunches, and I am very fond of the public health work that’s going on at the San Francisco office. So I went to this brown bag lunch, and a colleague who I know very well—Sarah Janssen, who is also a medical doctor at UCSF—started talking about this whole flame retardant issue and how they’ve been trying to get them removed for five years, that they’re not effective and dangerous and were linked to all these health defects. And I was sitting at this brown bag lunch and I was getting more and more outraged: How can these things that don’t work and are harmful be in our baby products and our couches?
I went home and called Dr. Sarah Janssen, and she said, well, if you really want to know more about this, you have to reach out to Dr. Arlene Blum, the chemist at UC Berkeley who discovered that these chemicals were mutagenic in the 70s. (She’s in our film, you remember?) So I called Dr. Blum and she said, I’m sorry, I don’t take meetings with people, but do you want to hike with me? Of course I was delighted, and a couple of hikes later she said, you really must come to the Flame Retardant Dilemma, it’s an all-day symposium I’m having at UC Berkeley with people from across the country who’re working on this issue in all different fields, from different hospitals and organizations. Come, I’ll put you on the list. That was on February 9, 2012, that I went to the Flame Retardant Dilemma. I almost didn’t go; I woke up that morning and thought, oh my God, yes I’m interested, but all day at a flame retardant symposium? My husband was like, why don’t you just go, if it’s boring you can leave.
Long story short, I got there and most of the characters that you see in our film, like Andy McGuire the burn survivor and MacArthur Fellowship winner who worked all his life for fire-safe cigarettes, and Tony Stefani the firefighter were there presenting. As I was sitting there I wasn’t thinking of a film, because even though I’m a filmmaker, the whole concept of a film about flame retardants had seemed ludicrous, because how boring would that be? So I had my environmental hat on and my activist hat on, not my filmmaker hat. But as I was sitting there, these people were absolutely compelling. You can’t create that. They had so much to say, and nobody’s listening. And I just had to make a film. A month later, we were rolling, and didn’t stop as the story just kept growing.
And what goes around comes around, because this year at the symposium, I was a presenter! We showed the trailer and talked about what had happened since the film came out in November. I went from being a skeptical participant to, two years later, being a presenter.
So when you were making the film, what did you learn? What was the most shocking?
Oh boy. Let me back up for a second.
We heard from all of our characters about Citizens for Fire Safety being a front group, we heard that actually, big tobacco had a hand in why we have furniture flame retardants instead of fire-safe cigarettes. We heard about all these conspiracies, lying burn doctors—which we didn’t put in, but was in the Tribune—and we had all this on tape, but when we did the 12-minute proof of concept, we decided that since we didn’t have proof of all of this, it was just so conspiracy theory and outlandish, that we would just tell the story that these chemicals are known carcinogens, they were outlawed from pajamas in the 70s, and now they’re in all our furniture and many baby products, and by the way they don’t work. We had enough to back that up, and we couldn’t put all this other stuff that we’d heard in our proof of concept: It sounded too far-fetched. Well, May 9th, the Chicago Tribune, which had been pursuing this story at the same time as we were or earlier, though we didn’t know it—
Oh, so you were making this film before the Tribune ran their series!
We got a lot of our interviews before that we could never have gotten after, a lot of which were proven to be lies. Like the guy who works for the chemical industry who was saying all of the stuff, the talking points for the industry? He said all that in our film, but he would never have agreed to our interview after. We were lucky that we’d started shooting in March but the article didn’t come out until May, so we already had a lot of that stuff in the can. When that article came out, when we found out that everything we’d been hearing was actually true and was worse than what we’d been hearing? We’d left it out of the proof of concept because we thought it was so outrageous! So that was a shock to us.
For me, the worst was going to these hearings, watching the lobbyists representing the Citizens for Fire Safety, hearing them before our lawmakers who’re trying to make appropriate decisions, sitting there and spouting off about how they were a consumer group of firefighters and mothers and doctors—and it ends up that the only members of that whole organization were the three chemical companies. That was the worst.
What do you want people to get out of this film? Do you have any goal in mind?
Yes, our goal is really for meaningful TSCA (Toxic Substances Control Act) reform at the federal level so that states don’t have to go state by state trying to regulate the safety of their citizens and coming up against what we saw in this film: false advertising, false citizens groups, all of those bad apples that are out there trying to prevent meaningful TSCA reform. So we wanted to create awareness, and urgency, and anger around the fact that we are not being protected and we need to reform TSCA.
And then we wanted people, on the more direct level, to demand that their furniture not have these chemicals in it and speak with their wallets, not buy stuff that has flame retardants. We’re hoping to change some of the big retailers, to say they won’t sell any that have these in it.
We’re going for all these changes, on the one hand national, as well as down to people’s homes. We especially want parents to ask, before they buy changing pads and nap pads and those things. It was awareness and also hoping for national change.
Do you think there has been a shift in public awareness around these issues?
I know the American Chemistry Council has been paying attention. Google “toxic hot seat” or our advocacy arm, which is “give toxics the boot,” which is an action campaign that we’ve been doing with the International Association of Fire Fighters and the Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families coalition. We’ve been working with them on “Give Toxics the Boot,” using the film to promote awareness and the next step is pushing for advocacy. If you Google either of those, you’ll see the American Chemistry Council saying, do you want to know the truth about flame retardants? And it’s a paid ad above us. It’s been like this for five months now. We called them out on our website and said we consider it a badge of honor that they’re paying attention.
So what was the overall experience of making this film like? Was it rewarding? Fun?
It was so much fun! We only shot a day and a half in Chicago with the Tribune reporters, and at the end of the first long day, we’d had these amazing interviews with Patricia Callahan, who you saw—we just knew that the interviews were just gold, and it was so fun getting to tell the whole story that we’d been uncovering. At the end of that day, my partner and I high-fived, like, is there anything else in the world you’d rather be doing than this? We knew how incredibly lucky we were, it was just so compelling, we knew we had a really good story, we knew we were going to be able to rattle some cages, and it was so much fun in the process. Rewarding, of course it’s that, but it’s amazingly fun.
It’s so gratifying to be able to do work that’s rewarding and fun.
It’s not always that way, but we were blessed. We could have gotten into it and any number of things could have happened, but what happened was the Tribune reported, the governor changed the regulation in California, the firefighter we were calling got called back to Washington, all these things were just luck. You’re already in the story, you can’t create Boxer calling the two people we were already following, or have the Tribune reporters’ story be so good and so eloquent. The stars were aligned for us to tell this story.
Do you think this signals a shift in awareness that all these things are happening at once?
I do! You know, I’m an optimist. I don’t give up easily, or I probably wouldn’t be a documentary filmmaker! I believe that once the public knows—and the public doesn’t like being taken advantage of, we as citizens—and the story that we tell in our film is that these are not good people that are trying to tell us that we’re safe and everything’s fine, when they’re doing things that are clearly wrong, lying, and deceitful. It’s going to catch up with them, and people are going to get mad and demand change. I think things are changing on these issues. A good TSCA bill was in the works, before Lautenberg died, but now look where we are a year later, with this Chemicals in Commerce Act. In some ways it feels like we’ve gone backwards in the six months since the film came out.
I guess I just contradicted myself, but I am an optimist. The signs are looking like the forces against us are really picking up their pace on not allowing change.
What advice do you have for consumers who’re wondering about their furniture or other household items?
I would say, do your research! I for one don’t believe in—not that I could afford it—getting rid of all the furniture that I have. We don’t have a safe way to dispose of it anyway. I’m not a proponent of starting over. It’s not practical, it’s not really environmental. But we can demand change going forward so that we don’t have this legacy for the next 30 years. The average piece of home furnishing is in people’s homes for a really long time. This is an environmental justice issue too: as the foam breaks down, there’s more of that dust in the home. Lower income people end up with furniture that’s been used longer.
And I think people should demand from their retailers that they carry safe products, because that’s going to change things. The government might be legislating and that helps, but if consumers start demanding it from their retailers, that’s when you’re going to see change happen. They’re going to walk in and ask if this couch has flame retardant chemicals, and if the salespeople start telling the people at headquarters, they’re going to pay attention. People aren’t apathetic, they just don’t have the knowledge. I didn’t know until that brown bag lunch. But I don’t know how many people watch documentaries on HBO either.
It’s up for wider distribution now, right?
It is. We’re being distributed by ro*co films, which is the largest educational institutional film distributor. They have a 25,000 film library for colleges and universities, so you can get it that way. In six months it’ll be available for streaming through Amazon, iTunes, and things like that.
So what are your future plans beyond the film? What’s next?
We’ve been really on the road with this Give Toxics the Boot, I haven’t even had time to start development for another project. I’m not sure what it is yet, so I’m not talking about it! There will be more, but I don’t think we’ll stay with toxics. We want to do a film where we don’t have so much liability for us and everyone else. Boy, we had to spend a lot of time with lawyers! We’ll keep Give Toxics the Boot alive, and we might do another ThunderClap.
Is there anything else you’d like us to know?
No, I think you’ve hit all the important things! You’ll be hearing more from us if anything starts happening with this Chemicals in Commerce Act. We’ll reach out. For now, our main goal is to not let that pass. It feels weird to be on the end of “just say no” instead of offering a solution, but that’s where we are.
Kirby Walker’s documentary “Give Toxics the Boot” aired in late 2013 and will be available for widespread viewing within the next six months. It is currently available to colleges and universities through educational film distributor ro*co films and HBOGo.
The Chanler Group represents citizen enforcers who, acting in the public interest, commence actions against businesses offering products for sale in California that contain chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive harm without first providing the health hazard warning required by Proposition 65. Citizen enforcers bringing Proposition 65 actions in the public interest may obtain a Court Judgment imposing civil penalties, an injunction requiring reformulation of products, and/or provision of health hazard warnings. The Chanler Group has represented citizen enforcers of Proposition 65 for more than twenty years.