Harry Shearer on The Big Uneasy

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Harry Shearer — lovable actor from This is Spinal Tap, Best in Show, and many other films as well as creator of seemingly every other voice on The Simpsons — is mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it anymore. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina hitting his beloved adopted city of New Orleans, he saw the national media focusing on shallow sentimental stories while closing their eyes to overwhelming evidence of neglect and mismanagement by the Army Corps of Engineers. Infuriated by hearing President Obama refer to the flood as a “natural disaster,” he decided to make a documentary to show the rest of the country what New Orleanians already knew. The result, his documentary The Big Uneasy, hits theaters in New York and Los Angeles today. It’s at once the most biting and the most good-hearted of all the Katrina documentaries to date. Shearer spent some time with Paste by phone recently to discuss the project.

Paste: At this point, everyone’s seen a lot of things about New Orleans and Katrina. But there were three big differences I saw in your documentary that really excited me. First, I loved that you had the balls to blame somebody. And you constructed a really strong case.

Shearer: Well, they weren’t my balls. They were borrowed balls. I was just in New Orleans as the local media began to report, really early on after the flood, the findings of these two investigative teams. They had come down to New Orleans from major universities, one from Berkeley and one from LSU. And the leaders of those teams looked at the explanations given by the Army Corps of Engineers, and then looked at the evidence, and said, these don’t match. So they launched a parallel investigation, an independent investigation. And we were getting the interim findings through the local New Orleans media, and none of this was being picked up by the national media, even though as you’ll recall, at least two networks announced with a great deal of bravado, “Oh, we’re opening up a bureau in New Orleans.” So I was wondering, what would be more important for these New Orleans bureaus to be covering than why the flood happened? But I think the New Orleans bureaus were just an excuse to move the Atlanta bureaus somewhere with lower rent. So you found the New Orleans bureau chiefs covering stories in Houston and Birmingham and everywhere but New Orleans. And so when President Obama came to New Orleans in October of 2009 and called it a natural disaster, even after the final versions of those reports had been a matter of public record for over three years proving exactly the opposite, I just thought, someone’s got to do something about that. And here I am. I had interviewed many of the major figures in this film on my radio show previously, so I knew them and hoped that they’d trust that I’d be fair to them. And so basically the balls were the property of those who led these investigations, and notably the whistleblower from inside the Army Corps of Engineers, who I feature in the film. These are the people that stood up and took major knocks for telling the truth. But the agency that a federal judge held culpable for almost destroying a major American city — nobody paid any price at that agency for that. In fact, they got rewarded with a $15 billion contract to do it again, better.

Paste: See if you can screw up even worse.

Shearer: Yeah, screw up even bigger. I mean, it is part of the story we tell in the film. And I have to underline, none of this is me talking. I’m a guy from the comedy world. When I was in school, I walked past the engineering building faster than anybody, lest anything rub off. I just put the camera in front of the people that really did the work, really went through the muck, really withstood the intimidation. And they stood up and said, here’s what we found, here’s the proof, here’s the findings. And I’m just basically making the connection between them and as much of the American public as I can reach.

Paste: And not to give away some of the developments of your film, but they did that at great cost to themselves.

Shearer: Exactly. That’s why I say it’s borrowed balls from them. I go back and do my work in show business, and I’m unbothered in terms of any ill effects of doing this film. They’re the ones who’ve paid the price.

Paste: By the way, that’s what the behind-the-scenes featurette should be called. “Borrowed Balls: The Making of The Big Uneasy.”

Shearer: (laughing) Not a bad idea. I’m gonna use that.

Paste: Second big difference. I won’t call any names, but a lot of the work that’s been done about Katrina and New Orleans has wallowed a little bit in sentimentality and victimhood. And I love that you have a major theatrical documentary that actually asks, practically, what can we do about this, to make sure it doesn’t happen again?

Shearer: You understate the argument when you say “wallowed a bit in sentimentality.” My antennae were up the minute I had an encounter with a major anchor at a major news network about a year after the flood. I said to this person, “Why is it that your viewers don’t yet know why the city flooded?” And the answer was, in so many words, “We just feel the emotional stories are more compelling for our audience.” And yet, this same anchoring was bemoaning the fact that viewers were emailing in asking why they were still doing stories about New Orleans. And their answer was apparently not to tell the viewers why this happened, but just to keep emotionally bludgeoning them. So of course the viewers were going to object. And the missing piece is that the networks didn’t tell the audience that you, the American taxpayer, paid half a billion dollars to create the suffering and almost destroy an American city. So when I decided to do this documentary, I was determined that there wouldn’t be any of that kind of footage. I had ninety minutes to undo all the misinformation that had been laid across the country for the last five years. I couldn’t spare a minute for either fooling around or for showing you something you’d seen before. And I thought that since we’re living in what we laughingly called the Information Age, I’d do something radical and fill the movie with information.