Available on DVD, 'Dirt!' combines science and humor as it digs into the history and current state of the living organic matter, explaining how four billion years of evolution have created the resource that recycles our water and provides food, shelter and medicinal properties. However, mankind has endangered the planet with destructive agricultural, mining and urban-development practices that are yielding catastrophic results: mass starvation, drought, floods and global warming. 'Our film was one of 900 documentaries submitted to Sundance for 2009,' Benenson says. And it was at Park City, Utah, back in January, where 'Independent Lens' started negotiating with the Benensons to acquire 'Dirt!' Benenson believes that it could even become the program's sole submission for Best News Documentary come Emmy season. In a long career that has seen Benenson executive-produce such theatrical films as 'Mr. Johnson' with Pierce Brosnan, 'The Lightship' starring Robert Duvall, and 'A Walk on the Moon,' about the Peace Corps (not the 1999 movie starring Diane Lane), 'Dirt!' represents his return to the documentary format. His first two, 'Diamond Rivers' and 'The Marginal Way,' were created for WNET in the late 1970s in New York City, where the Columbia University graduate grew up.
Brazil RPCV Bill Benenson and his wife Laurie are the filmmakers behind "Dirt: The Movie"
Palisadians Dig into 'Dirt! The Movie'
By Michael Aushenker, Staff Writer
2010-05-13
By design, the documentary 'Dirt! The Movie,' a 2009 Sundance Film Festival entry, was broadcast on the PBS series 'Independent Lens' on Earth Day, April 20.
As it turns out, 'Dirt!' is a Pacific Palisades family affair. Bill Benenson, who co-directed with Santa Monica Canyon resident Gene Rosow, is a Palisadian, as is the film's executive producer: his wife, Laurie Benenson. Even the narrator, Jamie Lee Curtis, lives here.
  'Besides being a neighbor, Jamie is a friend and a dedicated environmentalist,' Bill Benenson tells the Palisadian-Post. 'And she is particularly interested in the history and consequences of the American Dust Bowl. When Laurie told Jamie about our project, she volunteered to narrate it for us. Of course, we accepted her offer with jubilant enthusiasm. Her spirit and voice help animate our film.'
  Available on DVD, 'Dirt!' combines science and humor as it digs into the history and current state of the living organic matter, explaining how four billion years of evolution have created the resource that recycles our water and provides food, shelter and medicinal properties.
  However, mankind has endangered the planet with destructive agricultural, mining and urban-development practices that are yielding catastrophic results: mass starvation, drought, floods and global warming.
  'Our film was one of 900 documentaries submitted to Sundance for 2009,' Benenson says. And it was at Park City, Utah, back in January, where 'Independent Lens' started negotiating with the Benensons to acquire 'Dirt!' Benenson believes that it could even become the program's sole submission for Best News Documentary come Emmy season.
In a long career that has seen Benenson executive-produce such theatrical films as 'Mr. Johnson' with Pierce Brosnan, 'The Lightship' starring Robert Duvall, and 'A Walk on the Moon,' about the Peace Corps (not the 1999 movie starring Diane Lane), 'Dirt!' represents his return to the documentary format. His first two, 'Diamond Rivers' and 'The Marginal Way,' were created for WNET in the late 1970s in New York City, where the Columbia University graduate grew up. (Post-college, Benenson went to Brazil for a couple of years, where he served with the Peace Corps.)
  'The documentary world has changed radically since I left it,' Benenson admits. 'Thanks to the Internet, we're having screenings in England right now without having anything to do with it. We've been invited to film festivals in Korea and Taiwan.'
  Unlike this year's documentary category Oscar-winner 'The Cove' and nominee 'Food, Inc.,' 'Dirt!' does not end on a bleak note, despite its inherent gloom-and-doom caveats.
  Benenson says, 'It's divided into three parts. Dirt is alive, the damage to earth, and how to remediate and regenerate life through composting. So it's much more optimistic. If you treat dirt properly, you can grow your way out of a lot of problems.'
Laurie Halpern Benenson moved with her family from Brooklyn to Phoenix when she was 7 because her father had asthma.
  ''Pack up your asthma' was Arizona's slogan,' Laurie remembers with a chuckle. She attended Reed College in Oregon before transferring to Arizona State, where she earned her bachelor's degree in English literature.
  After traveling the world and toiling at odd jobs, Laurie settled at the Arizona Republic copy desk for three years.
  'I really wanted to write, so they let me do book reviews,' Laurie says. 'I started to establish myself at the Arizona Republic and I met my first husband. He was going to get his doctorate in business so we moved to Los Angeles in 1976. We split up, and I worked at Architectural Digest [as a caption writer], the late Herald-Examiner [copy editor and feature writer], and New West magazine [copy editor].'
  Four years later, in 1985, she and her ex-husband, Boris Krutchensky, launched Movieline magazine.
  'I was the editor-in-chief until it got bought out [in 1991],' Laurie recalls.
  In 1988, Laurie met Bill Benenson, as she recalls, 'through my very dear friend Susan at New West. She had known Billy when they were growing up in New York. She had run into him again and he mentioned that he and his wife had split up.'
  Laurie agreed to a blind date. The night before, she went to a screening of 'Bull Durham' and knew that Bill was planning on seeing 'Wings of Desire' at the same theater.
  'Somewhere in this crowd is the guy I have a date with tomorrow night,' she said to herself on her way out of the movie. 'I saw a guy, and even though I had never seen a picture of him, I [had a hunch it was him].'
  It was. The next night, the couple hit it off at the now-defunct Louie XIV, a trendy La Brea Avenue restaurant.
  'We talked all night,' Laurie recalls. 'He called me the next morning at 7 a.m. with this great promotional idea for Movieline. He suggested putting a poster in every issue. We did it and it worked.'
In 1990, the couple married. They lived in Santa Monica while Laurie was pregnant, then moved to the Palisades a year later.
'We both had a thing for Rustic Canyon,' she says. A sycamore tree and a small stream sold them on their first home. After nine years, they relocated to their current home in the canyon.
  The 'Dirt!' road began in earnest with the filmmaker's late mother.
'My mother, who just died last year, told me 10 years ago that she had seen an exhibit at the Rose Center of the Universe at the New York Planetarium, which posited the idea that everything on this planet comes from outside of our solar system,' Bill Benenson says. 'We only get hydrogen and helium from our sun; there's nothing on this planet that is physical that doesn't come from a supernova explosion. Essentially, we're all made from stardust. My mother asked if it would make an interesting film and I said, 'I'm not an astrophysicist.''
However, the 1995 book 'Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth' by Bill Logan, deepened his interest. In 2002, Benenson optioned Logan's book, but acknowledges, 'It was a hard topic to make presentable to a lay audience.'
'I wrote narration for the movie,' Laurie says of her role on the film. 'Billy and I discussed the footage every night.'
The production took its small crew to India, Brazil, France, Kenya, Haiti and all over the United States, and Benenson had trouble nailing down some key on-screen interviews, including Dr. Vanana Shiva in India, mushroom expert Paul Stamatz, and Sebastian Sagato, a renowned social photographer who has planted a million trees on his farm in Brazil.
  'A very important person is in Los Angeles and he's Andy Lipkis of TreePeople,' Bill says. 'He's someone we return to over and over in the film.'
  Far from the jungles of Kenya and the rainforests of Brazil, Pacific Palisades offers respite for our world-weary documentarians, yet they still can't escape from their documentary's subject.
  'Dirt is not so far away,' Bill says. 'We filmed one sequence [of 'Dirt!'] in our backyard, 'Part of the sustenance for me has been the Santa Monica Mountains; being able to hike there has been my solace.'
  The Benensons' 18-year-old daughter, Amanda, is a senior at New Roads and works at Village Books on Swarthmore. Bill has a son, Stephen (a chef living in Portland, Maine) from his previous marriage.
The Benensons hope people viewing their documentary will grasp its subtext.
'Dirt is critical to our continued survival on the planet,' Laurie says. 'The thing that always struck me about dirt, even the word 'dirt' has negative connotations. What we've characterized as having little value turns out to be the most valuable substance we have.'
Visit dirtthemovie.org or pbs.org/dirt.
