The story behind it:

Gore film puts him on screen during busy box office season

By BILL THEOBALD
Tennessean Washington Bureau


WASHINGTON — Behind all the attention Al Gore has been receiving in recent months is the film about his campaign to warn the country, and the world, about the imminent danger of global warning.

"An Inconvenient Truth" opened May 24 in New York and Los Angeles and has been shrewdly marketed by Paramount. By gradually releasing it in more theaters each weekend, the studio has extended the attention the film receives and produced good box office receipts for a documentary. (It officially premieres in Nashville on Friday.)


The first weekend brought in $367,311 in only four theaters in New York and California, and the studio promoted the "record-breaking" per screen average of $91,827.

The next weekend, the movie brought in $1.35 million in 77 theaters, ranking it the No. 9 movie in the country that weekend.

The third weekend brought in $1.5 million in 122 theaters, and the film was to expand to 400 theaters this weekend. The total box office: nearly $4 million, a far cry from the $74 million moviegoers have spent to see the animated movie "Cars."

An innovation associated with the film is its producers' commitment to make it "carbon neutral."

A company was hired to calculate the film's "carbon footprint," the amount of carbon dioxide emission created from auto and jet travel, hotel stays and other promotional activities associated with the film.

Then Paramount and Participant Productions agreed to split the cost of renewable energy credits that will fund construction of a native Alaskan village, farmer-owned renewable energy projects and other ventures