Letting History Speak: Bonni Cohen on “The White House Effect” and Archival Truth

What if America had seized its moment to tackle climate change in the late 1980s? This question drives The White House Effect, an archival documentary that examines a pivotal chapter of environmental politics. At IDFA 2024 in November, Amanda Rogers from Cinetopia sat down with director Bonni Cohen to discuss this film, which had its European premiere at the festival's Eye Cinema.

The White House Effect, co-directed by Cohen alongside John Schenk and Pedro Cos, employs what they term "archival vérité" to examine the critical years between 1988 and 1992. This was a period marked by the devastating 1988 drought, emerging congressional hearings on the greenhouse effect, and a unique political moment when both Republican George Bush Sr. and Democrat Michael Dukakis campaigned as environmental champions. The film draws extensively from 15,000 archival clips sourced from news media, presidential libraries, and private collections, including previously unseen material from a former Exxon publicist's garage. Yet this window of bipartisan environmental opportunity ultimately closed, leaving us with decades of inaction. The film, which we screened on 21st April 2025 as part of our Cinetopia:DOC series in Edinburgh, arrives on Netflix this October.

The following conversation explores the film's methodology, its implications for contemporary climate politics, and the power of archival truth in an era of information fragmentation.

Key image from The White House Effect

Amanda Rogers: Tell me, Bonni, why you wanted to make this film, this archive-based film about climate change?

Bonni Cohen: We've made, this is our third climate film. John and I, as I said, we made the Island President. Then that was followed in 2017 by an inconvenient sequel with Al Gore. And we care very deeply about all the issues that face us around the climate crisis. And we talked a lot together about what kind of film we could spend our time making that could really move the needle. And it felt to us that... the climate hero model, which was the model for our previous two climate films, has its place. And it gives people hope and it shows what the individual can do and how brave you can be in coming forward and standing up for your country or the world...

In this case, we thought that diving back into history in an archival context, we called it "archival vérité", sinking you into an immersive experience of this particular period of time... could have sort of an irrefutable argument to it. There are no experts intervening. We're not chasing something contemporary, but in fact, just looking at this historical period of time where you can have the experience of where you were at that moment and look, see a reflection of yourself back, in this case as an American.

AR: Why is that period of time so important? Why did you find that was such an important part to focus most of your film on?

BC: We had actually read an article by a journalist named Nathaniel Rich. He had written a piece called Losing Earth for the New York Times Magazine, which he then subsequently turned into a book. And it focuses on that exact period, 1988 to 1992, because as you see in the film, there are a number of things that kind of coalesce in that four-year timeframe.

There was a terrible drought in the country, in the United States, in 1988. All the climate science was starting to become really obvious, and there were congressional hearings at that time around the significance of the greenhouse effect and what scientists had discovered. So the science was in. And third, there was a moment in politics where both candidates in the 1988 presidential race, George Bush and Michael Dukakis, Republican and Democrat, both ran as a pro-environmental candidate.

So it was a fascinating time to see this opportunity for the American people where a window was open for a short period and we could have done the right thing. And the drama of the film is that we had that opportunity and we didn't do right by the climate.

AR: It seems like it's coming... you did have a lot of focus on, you know, the news, but you're starting to see this kind of C-SPAN and 24-7 television that is purposely trying to get you to have a polarised one view or the other.

BC: Well, we first have a focus on the news disseminating information. Yeah. And that starts to shift and change as the climate crisis becomes a political, sort of claims a political identity. And then disinformation starts to seep in and radio broadcasters and television broadcasters start to take that on. It starts to become this thing that everybody agreed about becomes a fight and a struggle.

And we were really interested in that. When was the moment when the disinformation sort of seeped into this? And how was it co-opted by the media? And then how did it then transmit into the living rooms of the American public?

AR: It's a great deal of work to find that much material though, and to find that much quality material... and it's also a lot of money to license that. So tell me a little bit about your process of the archive research that you did.

BC: So we worked with these terrific archival producers, Gideon Kennedy and Rich Remsberg... We ended up amassing about between about 15,000 video clips across a multitude of sources that were in these different buckets. You know, there was news media, there was politics, there were the presidential libraries, there were... private collections. Like one of our producers in New York found a guy who used to be a publicist for Exxon, and he had all these tapes in his garage that he hadn't looked at since the 80s.

So it was this sort of full court press on behalf of like, we had a team of about eight people that had fanned out to find all this specific material. It took almost three years to find it all. Yes, it's expensive. We did a combination of licensing materials, but also we had a very solid fair use attorney working with us... I would say maybe half the footage in the film, a third to a half of the footage in the film was able to be fair used.

AR: It's amazing to see the oil company and Exxon sort of role in the way that things eventually become part of the narrative... How do you get access to like that kind of information?

BC: Well, I mean, we found those Exxon documents in, and there have been journalists... we stood on the shoulders of journalists who did a lot of this work and have released pieces, in some cases, frontlines on PBS. You know, we went to the sources, journalistic sources, who had uncovered some of the documents from that time that proved that Exxon was doing the research into the carbon, the effects of carbon in the atmosphere very, very early on.

And then we went about trying to find the material to substantiate that. The sort of internal Exxon press conferences, for example, having a press conference for their conference for their shareholders or doing press around some of these findings. We found all of that, a lot of it in this garage of this publicist, but also other places, C-SPAN, CNN, et cetera.

AR: What is your ambition for the kind of audience that you want to [watch this film], and what do you want that audience to get out of this film?

BC: I mean, I think that what's unique about this film... there have been a lot of films that point fingers at politicians and the fossil fuel industry and the sort of complexity of the culpability around the climate crisis. We really wanted to obviously own that, but also our deep hope is that audiences see themselves in the American public. And that's why there's so much opportunity to see... man on the street interviews and people in their living rooms absorbing information.

We basically use the American public as one of the main characters of the film. And the takeaway should be, our hope is that the takeaway is, I see myself in these people. Oh my God, I lived through that period of time. I don't remember these three things coming together, the climate... the greenhouse effect, the campaign, the drought. And once we put all of those things together and you remember being a person, an American citizen in that time period, you start to feel something really personal.

...we're going to continue to live through these periods. We're living in one right now, which is arguably a lot worse. And we're facing a new president, a new old president whose... feelings about the environment, as everyone well knows, it's not at the top of his list of priorities to keep the greenhouse effect in check.

So... our hope is that Americans in particular, but folks around the world, see how important elections are. Your vote matters. What we stand for matters. And it has these direct results in terms of the Keeling curve going up and up and up. And that relationship, that's the goal of this film is to be able to see yourself in that experience and also see the relationship between your vote and the carbon in the atmosphere just going up.

Image from The White House Effect

AR: I felt quite culpable and also feel a little bit of despair at the end because it was so long ago... do we have what positives can we take from this? And what can we learn from this?

BC: Yeah, I mean, you're having the desired effect. I mean, I think as artists, we want you to feel that rage and that despair because that creates activism. There are different routes to activism. Hope also can create activism. But in the case of this film, it's the rage. And we are very specific about that and how the film ends. But as I say, votes matter, but also the real heroes of this film, I hope you saw are the scientists and the way that they keep going and keep going and keep discovering and keep trying new things.

There's a sequence at the end of the film where you see... scientists all over the world, up at the North Pole and down in Antarctica... taking measurements and studying glaciers and doing the work to really make sure that we as a human civilization understand exactly what's going on and how we can continue to seize control and sort of wrest control back from what we've lost.

You know, it's inarguable we've lost some things, but there is still a ton of work that can be done to say what we have. That's still the truth.

AR: Taking this “archive verite,” new interest in continuing to focus in on archive and having archive tell this story or other stories, other political stories...

BC: I mean, I think it's a really interesting form. I think that this new age that we're unfortunately living in of sort of confusion about truth and disinclination, we're turning back to history and to archive for these irrefutable claims and these irrefutable arguments. So yes, I think there's really a place for it.

...when something happens in the world and you go to try and find the news about it these days, there are all these different tracks, political tracks that sort of represent the same event. And as Steven Schneider says in the film, if you confuse the public about what the truth is, they are not going to know what to do or how to vote. And so archival truth is really significant right now, and investigative journalism is more important than ever.

AR: Why and how does documentary film play a role in this as well?

BC: Yeah, I mean, there's a whole conversation to have about documentary versus journalism because there are so many similarities, but there are also very specific differences where... I think the White House Effect is kind of both. It is a piece of journalism, but it's journalism plus, because we do have a point of view in the film. We are inarguably tracking for 90 minutes towards a conclusion that we believe in as filmmakers, and that's what we were going for.

So artists have something to say. Those that have the benefit of being at a documentary festival and hearing and seeing all of these different perspectives, I think are best suited to have a stance on particular issues. I think there's so much of people sitting alone in their living rooms reading their own news feed, which is basically being fed. They're being fed the same information that they've metricked for. And so coming out in the world and being at a place like this and having the opportunity to experience these stories from particular perspectives as distinct from journalism is incredibly important in this time.

AR: Just also thinking about your personal journey... since becoming parents, how has that influenced your work?

BC: Yeah, you know, I have two kids. John and I are actually a married couple and we have two kids that are in their 20s and we... have always been very interested in the environment and environmental causes. But since becoming parents, which is now 20 years plus, it's become really important to us. And we feel like we have something to say. And this film felt like an opportunity to really for our kids and people their age to look at this period of history where we grew up... and where we could have done something because they're facing a moment right now, which is very, it's existential.

It's a time when they can do something... and so we're sort of, for me, it became an opportunity to say... I lived through this period in the 80s and 90s and I was really aware politically. And I didn't know how bad this was and I didn't know what this opportunity was. So that was sort of the intention. And it really, it just became exaggerated after the film came out. And we are now seeing ourselves reflected back in the young audiences that are that are watching. And that's been very moving for us.

Watch the full interview below