Big Screen, Big Crucibles VI: Erin Brockovich

Warwick Fairfax:
Erin on the other hand feels that for the first time in her life, she is part of something that’s important. She has maybe the possibility of making a difference, maybe a significant difference, and at this point in the story in the life of the Jensen family, maybe to somehow make PG&E pay for what they may have done.

Gary Schneeberger:
Making a significant difference is the goal of anyone hoping to lead a life of significance, and it’s certainly the vision the title character of Erin Brockovich is committed to living out. This week, in episode six of our summer series, Big Screen, Big Crucibles, we discuss how Erin overcomes being underestimated and seizes the opportunity her job at a law firm gives her to help residents of a small town fight back against an energy company whose shady business practices have caused many of them to get seriously ill. Erin beats long odds with her intelligence and passion to expose the company in court, winning a multi-million dollar verdict to help her clients cope with the crucibles the company caused them.
Well, welcome folks to this episode of Beyond the Crucible. You’re in the midst of our summer series. We had so much fun last year in our summer series on classic films and the lessons they can teach us about surviving crucibles that we’re doing it again this summer with a little bit of a twist. We’re calling it Big Screen, Big Crucibles, and this is week six, week six of our series, and we’re taking a look at films that feature a wide variety of crucibles and insightful lessons they can teach us about how not only to bounce back from those crucibles, but casting a vision to and charting a course for a life of significance. And our film this week is Erin Brockovich. It came out in 2000. And here’s the synopsis, the log line, for the film: A single mom struggling to support her family gets a job at a law firm and discovers a hidden link between a company’s toxic waste and a small town’s illnesses leading her to fight for justice against a powerful corporation. Her determination to help the vulnerable along with her curiosity and self-belief make her someone to reckon with.
And as you will see as we go through this discussion, there are some crucibles that Erin Brockovich goes through. Warwick, I’ll ask you again. Hopefully no one’s getting sick of this, but this is the third time we’ve done films for our summer series, and just again, to level set everybody, why movies? What can they teach us that are valuable to what we talk about at Beyond the Crucible?

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, Gary, we both love movies and we’ve enjoyed talking about movies the last two or three years from Beyond the Crucible perspective. Movies typically portray a protagonist facing very significant challenges that they seek to overcome. And we’ve covered movies involving superheroes, sports heroes, and historical heroes. In fact, last year we looked at movies from the American Film Institute’s Top 100 movies. So this year we thought we’d look at movies that were some of the best ones that showed people overcoming significant crucibles to lead a life of significance, a life on purpose dedicated to serving others.

Gary Schneeberger:
So as I said, our movie this week is Erin Brockovich. So let’s start talking about that. The year is 1993. That’s when the movie’s set, 1993. We meet Erin, the title character, who lives in Southern California while she’s in a job interview. She doesn’t have all the requisite skills for the position, but she points out to being a mother of three and three young ones makes her an extremely fast worker, but it doesn’t help her to land the position. As she’s driving home… Crucible number two, I guess, because crucible number one, she didn’t get the job. As she’s driving home, crucible number two happens to her. She is hit in her car by another vehicle. She’s not seriously injured, but hurt enough to seek out a lawyer to sue the driver of the other vehicle who turns out to be a doctor.
She hires Ed Masry who owns a small firm in town out and he makes big promises to her as some lawyers can do sometimes about winning the case and punishing the other driver, but he loses. Erin’s angry expletive-laden testimony under cross-examination is why he loses and Masry tells her that’s why indeed she lost the case. Warwick, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that the Erin Brockovich we meet here is a bit rough around the edges when we first encounter her, right?

Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. Erin’s had a tough life. She has three kids to raise, including a nine-month-old. She doesn’t have a college degree and her ex-husband is not in the picture. Never turns up in the movie. There is understandably simmering anger and frustration at life, and so when Ed tries to defend her, her rage basically gets the better of her. One of the things they tell you on the witness stand is be calm, just answer the question, state the facts, and she just can’t do that. She just goes off. And basically as we’ll find in Ed Masry’s perspective, the case was a winnable case, but they lost it because she couldn’t control the temper. Now she may not see it that way, but passion is good, but sometimes Erin Brockovich’s anger and rage, it can get the better of her and it can lead it to problem. So in this particular case, it did not help a cause.

Gary Schneeberger:
No, it did not, and it caused some more crucibles in her life. She’s furious with Masry after the verdict. She’s twice divorced, we find out, raising her kids on her own and she is $17,000 in debt. Folks, this is 1993. So that’s a lot. I mean, it’s a lot of money anyway to us now, but it’s really a lot of money back in 1993. And she doesn’t take it well when the lawyer refuses to take her phone calls. So Masry, she wants to talk to him again because she wasn’t happy with that experience. She keeps calling the office and he’s not taking her phone calls. So she applies for more jobs that she isn’t qualified for and doesn’t get them, and then finally she shows up at Ed Masry’s law firm and she just starts working. That’s the first bold move, Warwick, that we see from Erin here, isn’t it? She’s a woman with strong opinions and feelings who is not afraid to act on them. It’s a bit of foreshadowing for what’s to come in the story of Erin Brockovich, isn’t it?

Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. Erin may be full of anger and frustration and maybe simmering or not so simmering rage, she does tend to wear her heart on her sleeve, but she also has guts and persistence. So Erin is desperate and just turns up at Masry’s office figuring that he owes her. Now, while objectively it may be, quote, unquote, “Her” fault that they lost that case with the Jaguar running into her, she doesn’t feel it. She doesn’t feel that at all. She feels like, “Hey, I just got a bad lawyer and I should have won the case,” and she basically thinks that, “He owes me.” That’s her attitude. And so she also doesn’t like the fact that Masry didn’t call her back. So she kind of storms into his office basically and says there are two things that annoy her, being ignored and being lied to, and she says that he said things would be fine, she trusted him, things are not fine. She says she needs a paycheck.
She says, “When you’ve spent six years raising babies, it is hard to convince someone to give you a job that pays,” as she puts it, “Worth a damn.” So she says she’s smart and hardworking and she’s not leaving there without a job. Now, all of the people in the office, mainly women, they could all hear her. It’s just glass, I guess, petitions and Ed Masry’s office, I mean, you can hear everything. And so they stare at each other, but as they stare at each other, there’s some level of common sense that comes to Erin, and she’s smart, and so she whispers to Ed so that other people can’t hear, “Don’t make me beg. If it doesn’t work out, fire me.” So she’s giving him an off-ramp after all of the ranting and raving. It’s a very funny scene.

Gary Schneeberger:
And I think that you just mentioned the kind of car that the doctor who hit her was driving, so you could say Jaguar the way that you do in your beautiful accent. I always just say Jaguar. So that was awesome. Thank you for that. Erin gets hired by Ed Masry, but he says no benefits is one of the things he tells her, and she does a little bit of everything when she starts, mostly clerical work. At the end of one of her first weeks, she asked Masry if she can get an advance on her pay. He says the office manager’s off that day, but he then reaches in his pocket, gives her a couple hundred dollars bills, and she says, “Whoa. I don’t want your money,” and he says something kind of funny. He’s like, “Who do you think pays your salary anyway? I mean, whether it comes out of my pocket or it comes through a check from the law firm, it’s still my money.”
But all of this work adds up to kind of a sad life really so far that Erin lives. She’s struggling to get by, she has no real purpose beyond her kids, and that’s an important purpose, but we’ll discover that she longs for something bigger outside of herself and her immediate family that she can do and devote herself to. She seems to have no real joy at this juncture of the film. She’s got passion and pluck, but nothing beyond her family to apply it to, as I said. There’s no broader cause, to use a phrase we say often, that she is off-the-charts passionate about, is there?

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it’s so true. I mean, Erin is indeed leading a paycheck-to-paycheck life and her vision is limited to keeping a roof over their heads and keeping a family fed and all that, and that’s an important mission, but yet there is this sense with all of Erin Brockovich’s drive, passion, intelligence, she feels like she was born to do more and that she’s never lived up to her potential. Now, she might feel like it’s not her fault because she got married young, had kids, life isn’t fair, and I think obviously she has a point, but there is this simmering frustration that maybe there’s a broader mission that I could apply my life to.
I don’t know if she thinks that way, but certainly at the moment, she’s living paycheck-to-paycheck, she’s trying to keep some place to live for her kids and have them be well-fed. But is there more to life than this? It just feels she can’t get a decent job anywhere. She doesn’t have a college degree. I mean, she’s very frustrated. Where the movie, it’s a very sad point for Erin Brockovich, somebody with so much talent and so much ability and drive that really doesn’t seem to be using all of that as much as she could for some broader mission than just the important mission of caring for a kids. But it feels like Erin Brockovich was made to do a whole lot more than she’s doing, I guess, would be the summary.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and there’s one little bit too that’s kind of sad that we didn’t talk about as we were preparing for this, that it just popped in my head. There’s a scene where she’s at her desk eating alone and Ed Masry walks by and says, “What are you doing here?” And she says, “Well, all the girls went out to lunch,” and he says, “Well, you’re a girl, why didn’t you go with them?” And she says, “Maybe I’m not the right kind.” And one thing to know about Erin Brockovich folks is that she dresses somewhat flashily. She wears tight clothing and she makes no apologies for that, but it’s something that causes people sometimes to suspect that she’s not quite as talented as she is, and that’s another part of the sadness a little bit of as she goes to work here, she’s not taken seriously by the women she works with.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it’s such a good point. In a sense, Erin is a loner. She doesn’t fit in. It’s not just like, oh, she doesn’t fit in with corporate lawyers. I get it. She doesn’t have a law degree, a college degree. But the women in Ed Masry’s office, which is… It’s not Downtown LA, it’s somewhere in California in some small town, but it’s not a particularly fancy office. So I doubt that all of the women in the office have college degrees and all that. So it’s not like economically they’re that different than her, to be honest, but yet she doesn’t fit in with them. So it’s almost like she doesn’t fit in with anybody. I mean, her kids love her, but she’s been divorced and doesn’t even seem like there are other women friends that she hangs out. She is a loner. She’s just isolated. And so when she says, “I guess I’m not the right kind,” I wonder if she’s thinking, “Is there any kind of person, man or woman, that wants to be around me?” That’s almost the broader subtext to that comment that she makes.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, but here’s the good news, folks: The sadness of Erin’s life begins to change in the next scene and continues throughout the film. What ends up happening is she first meets a new neighbor, a kindly biker named George. Now, she initially tries to deter him because she hasn’t had, as we’ll find out, the greatest luck with men. So she tries to deter him, but those efforts fail when she gets home late from work one night because she goes to where she has the kids at their babysitter and the kids aren’t there, no one’s there, and she gets kind of panicked as any parent would get, goes home to see if the kids are home somehow.
And she races home, and indeed, finds them in the backyard laughing and joking and playing games with George, eating burgers that he made for them. And she and George talk after the kids are in bed and we see Erin smile. This was very moving to me. It’s the first time we see Erin… To your points about her lonely life. It’s the first time we see her smile in the film. Talk about that scene with George, Warwick.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, so true. Erin has a hard time trusting anyone, certainly any potential man in her life, and obviously as you said, she’s not had good luck with men. And it’s sort of interesting, when she first meets George, it’s kind of interesting, it’s late at night and he’s revving his motorbike. He has a Harley Davidson, which he loves, and she goes out and says, “What is all this racket?” At this point, she hasn’t really met him and some of the backstory, and she’s kind of mad at him for waking the kids up, and he by way of apology, says, “Look, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to do this. Can I have your number? I’ll take you out to dinner just as an apology.” And it’s really a good indication of Erin’s intelligence and very quick wit. She’s very quick on her feet.
And so she says, “So you want my number? I’ll give you 10 numbers.” She says 10 is the number of months of a baby girl. Six is how old her other daughter is. Eight is the age of her son. Two is how many times she’s been married and divorced. 16 is the number she has on a bank account. And then she gives George her phone number and then she says, “There is zero chance that you were going to call me. “I mean, after she gives all that rant and her life, and George, after she leaves says to himself under his breath, “You were dead wrong about that zero thing, baby,” he says.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, he doesn’t like the last number. He doesn’t like the zero.

Warwick Fairfax:
No, no, no. So we see two things. We see Erin’s natural brilliance and quick wit, but we also see from George’s perspective, challenge made, challenge accepted. So George is not the easiest guy to push away. This was intended to get rid of George. In this particular case, and it will happen very few times in this movie, Erin was not successful in what she was trying to accomplish. She ends up failing in this one endeavor, probably the only one in the whole movie.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, for sure. And the big change in her life that comes up where she will find her greater, her grander passion and her purpose comes when Masry asks her… And it’s almost he’s sort of distractedly asks her to take a look at a real estate case. The Pacific Gas & Electric Company, PG&E is offering to purchase the home of a woman named Donna Jensen, a resident of the small town of Hinkley, California. And Erin has found the beginnings of her life of significance, she doesn’t know it yet, as she takes that file. Warwick, what does Erin learn as she begins to look into what’s inside that file and the people who are living the lives talked about in that file?

Warwick Fairfax:
She’s intrigued because in this file there’s a toxicology report. So normally you don’t see a toxicology report in a real estate file, they’re kind of separate matters. And so there are some abnormalities in this toxicology report. So again, you’ve got Erin Brockovich, which is no lawyer, but she’s smart, it just doesn’t quite seem to add up. So she goes to Ed Masry and asks, “Can I investigate this pro bono case? You told me it’s a pro bono real estate case. I’d like to investigate it a bit further,” and Masry says, “Sure,” he’s probably pretty distracted, “And off you go.”
So then Erin goes to visit the family in the report and the family is the Jensen family. She talks to Donna Jensen, the mother, and Erin learns that PG&E wants to buy her house, but the weird thing is she’s not trying to sell it. So utility companies don’t just come up to you typically and say, “Hey, can I buy your house?” That’s just not a normal thing. And then Donna has been sick, as has her husband, Pete. And Erin wonders why the medical reports are in the file. Well, Donna says, “Well, PG&E, they pay for the doctor’s visits for the whole family.” Again, your local utility company typically doesn’t pay your medical bills. That’s not normal. So Erin asks, “Why?” Well, Donna says, “Because of the chromium.” And so then Erin sees this big PG&E plant across the way.

Gary Schneeberger:
And that really jumpstarts the legal sort of thriller… Not thriller. The legal drama, which also is laced with comedy plot of this film. And Erin, to your point earlier, Warwick, she’s smart, she’s savvy. When she hears that because of the chromium, she’s like, “Huh, what is that?” And she doesn’t let that just stick. And she then hearing that, that just kickstarts her into digging deeper, doesn’t it?

Warwick Fairfax:
Absolutely. I mean, there’s already a few breadcrumbs of data that she’s learned, that somehow this utility company, PG&E, wants to buy the Jensen’s house, which is just a small house in the desert somewhere in California, and they’re sick and PG&E wants to pay their medical bills. I mean, this just… Figures the chromium. It seems very fishy. So Erin then goes to a college professor. He might indeed be like a doctor of medicine at a college that looks like it’s in the Los Angeles area, and she asked this guy, this professor, about chromium, and the professor says, “There are different kinds of chromium. Some are more harmful than others. Now, the most harmful kind that can lead to heart failure, organ failure, one deterioration after another. It can cause kinds of cancer and it’s so bad it can get into your DNA and it can be passed down to your kids.”
So then the professor says that… Because she obviously explains, I’m sure, that it’s connected with the PG&E plant out in Hinkley. The professor says that utility plants use pistons to compress the gas, which gets hot. All part of, I’m sure, generating electricity. And you run the water through them, through those pistons, to keep them cool and to prevent corrosion in the pistons, you put chromium in the water. So Erin asks this professor, “How do you find out what kind of chromium they use at the Hinkley PG&E plant?” So this professor says, “You’ve got to go to the county water board and look up their records because the county water board keeps records with everything related to water.” So Erin goes, “Okay.” And so then off she goes to the local water board, the Lahontan Regional Water Board, and she starts digging for water records. Now, Erin is smart, she’s savvy, and there’s this shy, awkward guy there who-

Gary Schneeberger:
Who is not smart and savvy.

Warwick Fairfax:
No, he is not. And he’s a bit reluctant to have her pore over the records, but she uses her charms that he can’t really say no to her, he doesn’t really ever find a way to say no, and she’s not somebody that takes no easily. So it’s really an unfair contest, to be honest.

Gary Schneeberger:
Absolutely. Unfair fight.

Warwick Fairfax:
Erin’s going to win that battle any day. She spends hours and hours, it gets late into the night, and not only is she looking at records, she copies a whole bunch of documents that refer to chromium. So Erin is taking the bull by the horns. She has spoken to the Jensen’s, she has gone to this college professor, this doctor, at what looks like a prominent university in the Los Angeles area. She’s looking at water records. I mean, she is on the case.

Gary Schneeberger:
And yet what happens next while she’s doing all this stuff… And remember, as Warwick said earlier, she asked Ed Masry if it was okay if she investigated a little more of this file that he gave her, and she does that, but she gets back to the office after this week away doing an investigation, she gets back to the office and all of her stuff’s packed up. She’s been fired, she finds out. Because Ed just thought as well as the ladies in the office, just thought that she just stopped showing up, she quit working. It’s implied by their reactions that it’s sort of a judgment they make on who they think the kind of person she is based on the way she dresses and the way she talks and all that. So she’s fired and the firing work hits her harder than just the loss of a job, doesn’t it?

Warwick Fairfax:
It sure does. I mean, it says a lot what Ed Masry and the other women in the office assume. They just assume that Erin Brockovich is somebody that’s made poor choices, she doesn’t dress, she has this attitude that just snaps at everybody. They have zero respect for Erin. And so if she’s away for a few days, they just assume she’s goofing off and doing nothing. That’s fully what they expect her to be and to do, and Ed Masry basically has the same assumption as everybody else in his office. Erin on the other hand feels that for the first time in her life, she is part of something that’s important. She has maybe the possibility of making a difference, maybe a significant difference, and at this point in the story in the life of the Jensen family, maybe to somehow make PG&E pay for what they may have done to this family and she wants to get at the bottom of this for this family and to see if PG&E did something with the chromium in the water that might have caused that family’s illnesses, and now she gets fired.
She feels it’s so unfair, so unjust. Masry doesn’t know what’s been going on and assume she’s not been doing much. She is just irate, and she doesn’t even try and debate it about, “Why are you firing me?” It’s like, well, of course they assume I’m doing nothing. They have no idea what I’m doing. What’s the point? She just storms out of the office, furious and enraged. And so then Erin goes home and she finds George, the biker, he’s there fixing the sink. I mean, George is a kind guy that’s really trying to help out her family and she blows off some steam about getting fired with George, and then she just really starts talking a bit about her backstory. She says she just doesn’t know what happened to her life. She was Miss Wichita, a beauty queen, and she still has her tiara in fact. And she thought that this tiara meant that she was going to do something important in her life, that she was meant to be someone.
And George, the kind person that he is, consoles her and says that she is someone to him. And so she asks him, is he going to be something that she has to survive? She’s not somebody to open up her heart very easily. And she says she’s not up to kind of giving her heart away and having it being trampled upon, basically. They both kiss and he hugs her, and then she reenacts her pageant speech in which she says… And people in pageants or other young people, you say all sorts of things, and this is somewhat normal I think for these sorts of things. People are young and have good hearts. And so she said in her pageant speech that she was going to devote her reign as beauty pageant winner to ending world hunger and creating a peaceful world.
And so she’s obviously probably just thinking, “Well, yeah, look where I am now.” She’s probably almost mocking herself in some strange way, but George says that she is a very special lady, and it’s sort of ironic that Erin can’t seem to handle this level of tenderness and kindness from George. Tenderness and kindness is not something she is often experienced. These are just foreign concepts, foreign values to her. It’s just not something that she has really experienced. It’s very sad.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and the scene kicks off of him fixing the sink… The scene kicks off, there’s like a rat or something that scurries by in the kitchen and she screams out, “What kind of mother lets her kids be involved in this?” I mean, she is experiencing a lot of self-loathing and I think where she’s at when she talks about Miss Wichita and what she thought about her future was going to hold… I’m going to use a phrase we haven’t used in a while, but we’ve talked before about, an Is This All There Is Moment, and I think Erin Brockovich as we’ve seen her so far, she’s definitely deep into an Is This All There Is Moment, isn’t she?

Warwick Fairfax:
It’s such a good point. Is this still there? I mean, in this sort of rat-infested house out somewhere in the desert, I’m having trouble feeding my kids and housing them. I mean, it’s a whole backstory in which she finds it almost impossible to find a decent babysitter and she’s just had a poor run of luck there, and along comes George, but after being fired, it’s like I guess she was almost thinking to herself, “Was the high watermark of my life being Miss Wichita? Is that it? It’s not nothing, but it feels like everything is downhill.” It’s like, “Look at me.” She is just angry at the world, probably angry at herself, just angry at everyone and everybody.

Gary Schneeberger:
Well, she’s going to get a little less angry at Ed Masry because what happens next is that he visits her to tell her that she got a call at the office from the professor she talked to earlier about the chromium, and he said, the professor did, that the legal limit of bad chromium… Because there’s several different types. The legal limit of the bad chromium, which is called hexavalent chromium, is 0.05 parts per million. The water in Hinkley, the small town that is having these health problems where there’s PG&E plant, in Hinkley, the water has a 0.58 parts per million concentration, and Ed’s wondering… Erin wonders when Ed tells her could the reason for the cancers and other illnesses among the residents be because of that?
Erin explains to Ed that in the real estate case he gave her, PG&E wants to buy the Jensen’s house because they have been telling them they’re using chromium-3, one of those chromiums that we talked about. But that’s a version, that’s a quote, unquote, “Safe” version that doesn’t have the terrible side effects. She says to Ed she’ll share all the documents she has, all the copies she made, to Warwick’s point earlier, she’ll share all that with him from her research for a 10% raise… Well, okay, first for her job back, then a 10% raise and benefits. And guess what? Ed Masry agrees because he can see that she’s onto something. Warwick, a pretty emotional scene occurs when Erin goes back to visit the Jensen’s and tells them what she’s discovered. She’s back at work, she’s back on the job, she’s back investigating, and she goes to visit the Jensen’s. Describe that scene and why it’s so powerful when she goes back to the Jensen’s house.

Warwick Fairfax:
Goes back to the Jensen’s and she speaks with Donna Jensen and she tells her that the chromium in the water is indeed poisonous. Donna cannot believe this. She says, “The guys from PG&E, they said that their water was okay.” Erin says, “That the toxicologists and everything you have in terms of illnesses is on the list of problems that hexavalent chromium causes.” Donna says that’s not what their doctors, in other words, basically the PG&E paid for doctors said. And they, again, the PG&E doctors, said the chromium has nothing to do with their illnesses. Again, Erin reminds her, “But remember PG&E paid for that doctor.”
At that moment, the light bulb goes on. Donna understands exactly what’s happening now, and she races in a panic to tell her kids to get out of the above ground pool. She gets it. “My kids are swimming in chromium-filled water,” and she gets it. It’s like before she didn’t know what’s happening, “Why are we getting sick?” She trusted her doctors, most people obviously do, and she assumed that PG&E had the best motives, but now she realizes, “My family, we’ve got sick because of what PG&E is doing.” It just hits it like a thunderbolt.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and we mentioned Hinkley is a small town. What happens in small towns? Everybody knows everybody else and they talk, and soon other residents seek out Erin to tell her stories of illnesses and their interactions with PG&E. Very sad moment. One woman says she had five miscarriages and she says, “I thought it was something I did, like smoking marijuana.” It becomes clear though that what’s happening to the whole town of Hinkley that it’s affected by poisonous chromium. More families continue to come forward to talk about the health challenges that they face, and Erin dives deeper in to help them. And that causes some trouble, Warwick, doesn’t it, with Erin’s children?

Warwick Fairfax:
It indeed does. Erin is working very long days as she gathers evidence on what has happened with all his families at Hinkley. I mean, she’s on a mission. She feels like this is a just cause, “I want to fight for these families in Hinkley,” and she begins to meet many of them. They really see somebody like Erin as one of the first few people that’ve come across that really cares, is willing to fight for them, and that does something to you when you’ve got people that believe in you. So she’s on a mission, but she travels and the days are very long. She goes to visit these families in Hinkley, but her kids don’t understand. I mean, they’re kids. How could they? And they’re upset about how much she’s working.
And there’s a really touching scene when she asked the son… I think it’s later at night and asks the son what’s going on, how he’s doing, and he says in a little kid kind of fashion, “I’m fine. Things are fine.” It’s just almost in a frustrated, defiant tone. It’s kind like, “Leave me alone, mom, because I don’t think you really care.” It was almost a bit of that tone in his voice, which obviously for any mother is absolutely devastating when you feel like your kid feels like you don’t care. I mean, that’s a dagger to the heart of any parent, certainly any mother. So Erin feels torn. She feels completely committed to getting justice for the families in Hinkley, but now she feels like she is abandoning her kids and they don’t get it. So it’s just a terrible situation to be in.

Gary Schneeberger:
But in addition to her passion and pluck, I’ll throw another P word in there. Erin Brockovich has perseverance, and she keeps moving forward to get to the bottom of this case to help the people of Hinkley. So she and Masry meet with several families and explain their legal strategy moving forward. They aren’t going to sue PG&E, they’re going to ask for more money for the houses the company wants to buy so that the residents can get money rather quickly with higher prices for their houses than being low-balled by PG&E. And then Erin gets a threatening phone call and she brushes it off. That’s her personality, right? That’s her… She’s got a mission. She doesn’t care about that, she brushes it off. Ed gives her a new vehicle and a cell phone. But she argues here with George, Warwick, who wants her to quit because of the threat. George doesn’t understand, at least not yet, the importance of this cause that Erin is fighting for, does he?

Warwick Fairfax:
No, he really doesn’t. Again, here’s Erin. She and Ed Masry are fighting for these families, and in a Masry strategy, it’s a tough sell to these families. Now, he knows that suing, Ed Masry is going to require massive sums of money that he doesn’t have, because basically, he doesn’t get paid unless they win. So he’s out all these court costs. Basically, it’s going to be a percentage-based case and it’s a big risk for him. So going 15 years against some billion-dollar corporation and the chances of success aren’t big, whereas just saying to PG&E, “Hey.” It’s not like a clear payoff, but by buying real estate, they’re not admitting any fault or guilt, they’re just buying real estate. So they can just say, “Hey, we’re just trying to be good citizens and be nice,” and it’s an easy way out for PG&E, a way to give money without admitting any fault.

Gary Schneeberger:
And there’s also, as Ed Masry says, at some point in the film, there’s also a one-year statute of limitations, in other words… So if they sell the houses, they can’t figure out… PG&E is banking on the fact that they’re not going to figure out that their illnesses are caused by the chromium and then after a year they can’t sue. So that’s an important bit that we haven’t talked about as we prep, but I think that’s important to lay out there.

Warwick Fairfax:
Great point, Gary. PG&E is smart. They’re very smart lawyers. So what they did is they tell them about the chromium in the water at town seminars and informational meetings, “Hey, there’s chromium in the water, but it’s fine.” So they can’t say, “Oh, we didn’t know there was chromium in the water.” Oh, they didn’t know that. The one-year limitation is expired, the one-year statute of limitations. But obviously what they weren’t told is that it was poisonous. Somehow I’m sure PG&E has some strategy that it’s not poisonous, it’s fine, and they’ll probably have a bunch of paid experts and professors to say, “No, the chromium’s good,” and they’ll find somebody to say that for a fee. That’s what big corporations can do, at least the bad ones. So yeah, you’re right. I mean, they’re smart, they’re covering their legal bases.
But the families want justice. So Erin is really 100% locked into this. She works late at night, and so she tells George about this phone call, “Look, I’m not going to quit because of some creepy phone call,” and so George kind of snaps back, “Don’t you think you’re a little out of your league?” So this begins just a bit of a confrontation. So George is supportive to a point. George may like and value Erin in a sense and appreciate her, but he really does not at all understand or fully appreciate the importance of the mission that Erin is on, and why is it important in general and why in particular for her. Now, truth be told, I don’t know how much detail that Erin has shared with George about what she’s doing or why it’s so important, because probably not on her relational radar screen. She’s focused on the job, not explaining to everybody and her family what’s going on and why it’s important. It’s just not really how Erin thinks.
She’s just, I guess, thinks they should somehow understand. So I’m sure that Erin feels that George just doesn’t get it, doesn’t appreciate me, doesn’t value me, and it really reduces a lot of tension because Erin’s away a lot, and George has to pick up the slack with the kids, and she’s not even her husband, not even some formal boyfriend. She’s just the guy next door. So it’s a pretty sad scene. He doesn’t really get it, and she doesn’t really appreciate the fact that she believes he doesn’t fully value the importance of her mission.

Gary Schneeberger:
Right. The film then jumps ahead nine months, we see on the screen nine months later, Erin and Masry have clearly built relationships with more potential plaintiffs in the city of Hinkley. They host a community event, but Masry privately worries their case is missing something. He says this, “Nobody’s going to get rich unless we can pin this on PG&E corporate.” They go to court to get cleared to bring the case forward. The judge sides with Masry, but Erin faces another crucible, George leaves, telling her, “You’ve got to get another job or another guy.” She doesn’t want him to go, but explains this, she says this, “For the first time in my life, I’ve got people respecting me.” For the first time in her life, Warwick, she’s living a life of significance at a broader scale, isn’t she?

Warwick Fairfax:
She really is. Erin is making a huge impact in the case. She actually at this point meets a guy that has worked at PG&E, at Hinkley, at the plant there and says the chromium got in ponds, which would then seep into the ground. So okay, another bit of information. And by now there are 411 plaintiffs who are willing to move forward. So Erin’s making incredible headway, but yet at this point, George decides to leave. He says he’s had it. He feels that Erin is never around and he is having to take care of the kids. In one of the most poignant and sad moments in the movie, George tells Erin that he has some earrings, and he said to himself that the next time she’d said something nice to him, she, Erin, he would basically surprise her with the earrings. Well, that was six months ago. What he’s saying is, “Erin, you haven’t said anything nice to me in six months. That’s why you don’t have the earrings. That’s why I didn’t give it to you.”
And so basically, George does not feel appreciated or valued by Erin, and Erin says she’s sorry, and as you said, George says to Erin, “You need to find a different job or a different guy.” Basically, he’s saying he does not like being treated the way he is and getting nothing in return, and Erin says she can’t quit. For the first time in her life, people are respecting her. She says, “In Hinkley, everyone shuts up to see if I’ve something to say. I’ve never had that before, ever.” She tells George, “Don’t ask me to give this up. All I’ve ever done is bend my life around what other men need. Well, not now.” She feels like she has this cause, people are respecting her and appreciating her.
So George says, “What more do I need to prove that I’m not them, like these other guys?” Like her two husbands that have abandoned her. He leaves but leaves behind the earrings. She asked him to stay and he says, “Well, what for? You’ve got a raise. You can afford daycare. You don’t need me.” It’s just so sad because George feels unappreciated and not valued, that she really doesn’t care about him, and those are the exact same things Erin feels from pretty much the rest of the world.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. Well, Ed brings in a new partner who has experience, in his words, not mine, folks, toxic tort cases, and it’s interesting, he tells Erin when he explains who the partner is, it’s some guy that beat the tar out of him in the case earlier that he had talked to her about. So this is a lawyer who got the best of Ed in court. He’s the best one who can do this in these toxic tort cases. PG&E wants to handle the case through what they call binding arbitration and Masry agrees it’s a right strategy. The case will resolve more quickly, not in the 15 years it could take if a trial drags on, and PG&E, big corporation, their trial could drag on a long time.
The new partners take a leading role in getting the case prepped for arbitration. One of them, a woman, is dismissive of Erin, saying the files she created are missing valuable information, like phone numbers. Basic, valuable information. Erin says she has them in her head. That leads to a powerful scene that showcases Erin’s confidence and conviction. She has found a vision about which she is off the charts passionate. Let’s take a look and listen to that scene.

Audio:
Those are my files.
Yeah, we had them couriered over. And listen, good work. They’re a great start. We’re just going to have to spend a little time filling in the holes in your research.
Excuse me. Teresa, is it? There are no holes in my research.
No offense. There’re just some things we need that you probably didn’t know to ask.
Don’t talk to me like I’m an idiot, okay? I may not have a law degree, but I’ve spent 18 months on this case and I know more about these plaintiffs than you ever will.
Erin, you don’t even have phone numbers for some of them.
Whose number do you need?
Everyone’s. This is a lawsuit. We need to be able to contact the plaintiffs.
I said, whose number do you need?
You don’t know 600 plaintiff’s numbers by heart. Annabelle Daniels.
Annabelle Daniels, 714-454-9346. 10 years old, 11 in May. Lived on the plume since birth. Wanted to be a synchronized swimmer, so she spent every minute she could in the PG&E pool. She had a tumor in her brain stem detected last November, an operation on Thanksgiving shrunk it with radiation after that. Her parents are Ted and Rita. Ted’s got Crohn’s disease. Rita has chronic headaches and nausea and underwent a hysterectomy last fall. Ted grew up in Hinkley. His brother Robbie and his wife May and their five children, Robbie Jr., Martha, Ed, Rose and Peter also lived on the plume. Their number is 454-9554. You want their diseases?
Okay, look, I think we got off on the wrong foot here.
That’s all you got, lady.

Gary Schneeberger:
That, Warwick, is a completely different Erin Brockovich than we met at the movie’s outset, isn’t it? How and why has she changed?

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it really is such a powerful scene. The reason the scene is so powerful is that Erin by now feels that she is capable, intelligent, driven, and has made a huge contribution to the case, and she knows they wouldn’t in any way be where they were without her, and yet she feels disrespected by these big city corporate lawyers. She feels like they look at her, these two lawyers, and see her as some down and out woman without a college degree who does not know how to dress professionally, and again, probably feels like she has just very low-grade intelligence and really nothing to contribute. How could a woman like Erin Brockovich contribute anything to this case?

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and one of the delightful parts for me in this clip is… Watch it again if you miss it the first time, folks, the way Masry kind of looks like, “Oh, geez.” I mean, he’s really impressed with her, but also a little like, “Oh, you’re upset.” It’s great reaction shots from Ed Masry during that scene. So the residents of Hinkley aren’t sure about this binding arbitration thing that Ed Masry’s talking about versus a lawsuit which they understand. Masry and Erin call a meeting to explain the strategy to them. Quicker resolution, but to make it happen, they have to get 90% of their plaintiffs, more than 500 people, to agree. George comes back briefly, but there’s no reconciliation. Then Ed and Erin go door to door to get the rest of the signatures they didn’t get at the town hall meeting. There’s a moving scene, Warwick, as the case moves toward resolution. Erin’s son, Matthew, comes to see the importance of his mom’s work, which before his mom’s work was the thing that he resented because it took his mom away from him, now he sees the importance of it. What happens in that scene?

Warwick Fairfax:
The scene that you’re mentioning, Gary, is you see that Erin’s son is reading one of the documents about the case, and he sees that this document talks about a girl that is the same age as he is, and this clearly makes an impression because this girl is ill, and Erin’s son is thinking, “Gosh, maybe that could be me.” I mean, somehow it just touches a chord in his heart. And just as an indication that he’s moved and is beginning to get that what his mom is involved in is important, George is taking the kids to breakfast, and so his son says that he’ll bring her back some breakfast. In fact, he asked, “Do you want eggs?” And he wouldn’t say that if there wasn’t something shifting within him. And he didn’t begin to realize that what my mom is doing is important and that’s why she’s away so much. I’m sure it meant a lot to Erin, my son finally gets it that what I’m doing is important. At least to get some of it. It definitely had a big impact with her.

Gary Schneeberger:
It’s the coalescence of both of her lives of significance. The one that we’ve talked about all along, that she’s had even from the outset is her family, her children who she takes care of, but now the children and this work on the lawsuit, they’re dovetailing and one gets the other, which just has to bring her, as you said, great feelings of reward. There’s one more major scene tied to the case. A man named Charles Embry approaches Erin in a bar, and it’s interesting because at first it’s like, ooh, is this ominous? Could this be the guy that called her and threatened her on the phone? Erin wonders about that. She wonders is he just some guy who’s hitting on her? But that’s not why he wants to talk to her. Neither one of those scenarios is why he wants to talk to her, right? There’s another reason that Embry, Charles Embry, wants to speak to Erin Brockovich.

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, so here’s Erin. She’s running all over the town of Hinkley trying to sign people up for this lawsuit, and she’s in the bar and there’s a guy at the counter at the bar just looking at her and he says, “I’ve had my eye on you.” I think earlier at the get together that they had to try and sign people up, I think this guy was there. And so Erin feels like, “Okay, this is kind of creepy,” but the conversation that she has with this guy, Charles Embry, it is a game changer in the whole case because he tells her that his cousin passed away the day before, the day before they’re speaking. His cousin used to clean the cooling towers at the PG&E plant at Hinkley, and he’d wear a mask and that would be soaked in red from all the nosebleeds. And he had all sorts of illnesses, which obviously Charles think has got to have something to do with being in those cleaning towers.
So this guy, Charles Embry, he then tells Erin that a supervisor told him to go to the warehouse and to destroy some documents. He said there were a few memos about the holding ponds and the water in them as well as readings from the test wells. Obviously at this point, Erin’s antenna is probably going up, “This sounds interesting.” So again, this guy, Charles was told to destroy the documents, but then he smiles and he says he wasn’t a very good employee. Then they both smile. Erin is more than smart enough to understand what he’s saying. He’s basically saying he didn’t destroy all those documents. So here we have Erin and Ed Masry at the back of these fancy corporate offices of this partner in the case, and Erin jokingly says they have forgotten this partner’s birthday. And they show both of these lawyers that they have, all of the 634 plaintiffs signed up, every single one. The lawyers are amazed. This is no easy task.
So Erin then looks at Teresa. This is the woman in the clip that we played that she had a bit of a spat with, a bit of a run in. And she says to her, to Teresa, that she’s got a present for her as well. And she shows Teresa a March 1966 internal memo that says PG&E headquarters knew that the water at Hinkley was poisonous, but that Hinkley station should not tell the local people about this. This is indeed the smoking gun that they have long been looking for to tie everything to PG&E corporate. Ed Masry from early on in the movie says, “Unless PG&E corporate knew about it, unless we have evidence that they knew about the poisonous chromium in the water at Hinkley, we’ve got nothing, nothing big.” This is a smoking gun that they’ve long been looking for. This is a complete game changer in the whole case.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah, and just one interesting point about Charles Embry. The actor who plays Charles Embry, it was beautiful casting because that actor, you see him a lot and he’s almost always a bad guy or a squirrely guy that you can’t trust. So when you see him hanging around here and you’re like, “Oh, he is a bad guy.” So very good casting that he turns out to be the guy with the smoking gun that helps them win the case. And they do indeed, folks, win the case. The judge orders PG&E to pay a settlement of 333 million to be distributed among all the plaintiffs in the case. Erin takes George with her to give the good news to Donna Jensen. Warwick, it’s a very moving scene, so talk a little bit about that scene with Donna Jensen and how Erin’s life of significance is complete with this decision. Her Miss Wichita wishes that we talked about earlier, she was going to be somebody, they have come true, haven’t they?

Warwick Fairfax:
Yeah, it truly is. This is a very moving scene. So here Erin takes George to give the good news to Donna Jensen. Erin is growing as a person. I think she realizes subconsciously that she could have been better and nicer to George, so she does something very smart. What is the best way for George to get it? To be part of this meeting. Seeing is believing. He’ll hear with his own ears, he’ll see with his own eyes. So she goes into the house, she finds Donna and tells that the good news that the judge came back with the number, but the whole group as well as for the Jensen’s. So Erin tells Donna that the judge is going to make PG&E pay $330 million, a massive sum, and he’s going to make them pay that, but the judge is also going to give the Jensen’s specifically $5 million out of that large sum. Donna is absolutely stunned. She’s flabbergasted. Erin says, “This is enough for what your girls need, and in fact, maybe even their kids, your girls’ kids one day.”
Donna gives Erin a huge hug. Donna weeps with joy saying, “Thank you so much.” George smiles broadly. He finally gets… He gets what Erin is involved with, and Donna says to Erin, “I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Erin says, “It’s a good day,” and Donna laughs. So Erin’s life is completely turned around. She always had passion, energy, intelligence, and perseverance, but she had nowhere to channel her energy and abilities. Finally, she has a cause that she believes in that could really help people. Erin Brockovich truly now has a massive life of significance. She’s helping all of these families in Hinkley.
It’s kind of interesting. It doesn’t really say it in the movie, but after all of this resolved, this whole lawsuit, she actually moved to Hinkley pretty much right after the case is over. So that tells you that she feels one with these people, which is pretty amazing. Erin is respected and valued by Ed Masry, I think maybe grudgingly by those fancy lawyers, certainly by the families in Hinkley, and now by her family, her kids and George. She indeed is gone from trial to triumph. And there is this funny scene at the end of the movie where Ed Masry now has fancy offices in Los Angeles that’s in some higher floor, and Ed is looking over Los Angeles Lawyer Magazine and he’s on the front cover, and he has truly made it a lot different than his small, somewhat dilapidated office somewhere in the desert of California.
And he receives a certified letter with a check, and he walks over to Erin’s new fancy office. She didn’t really have a fancy office before. She just didn’t have an office, like a cubicle somewhere. And so Ed Masry, a bit of a comedian himself, starts this comic discussion with Erin. He just sets her up brilliantly and she falls for hook, line, and sinker. So Ed says that he has her bonus check, but that the figure is not exactly what they discussed. He’s deliberately trying to pull her chain. Erin, of course is thinking, “Here we go again. I’m never valued. I’m never appreciated,” and so she gets angry and frustrated. It’s just another example, right? People really don’t value or appreciate me. Erin finally looks at the number on the check. It is a check for $2 million, a massive sum of money for anybody, a massive sum of money certainly for Erin Brockovich. And she is stunned.
Ed smiles as he leaves, and he says that the figure proposed was inappropriate. For about the first time in Erin’s life, her mouth is open, but she is speechless. She does not know what to say. And so he asks her somewhat sarcastically if they teach beauty queens, as she once was, how to apologize. Then he says, “Because,” quote, “You suck at it.” Yanks that he cannot resist. The other interesting thing is often in these movies, as we saw last week with the Pursuit of Happiness, there are fascinating things in the end credits.
And so in the end credits, it says the settlement awarded to the plaintiffs in the case of Hinkley v. PG&E, was the largest direct action lawsuit in the United States history, certainly at the time that this movie was made. And of course, PG&E claimed they no longer have hexavalent chromium at any of their compressor plants and all their holding ponds are lined to prevent groundwater contamination, which we indeed hope is true. And there are a whole bunch of other cases pending, including another one against PG&E for their plant in Kettleman Hills, California. So this shows the size of the impact, at least at the time. This was the largest direct action lawsuit in the United States history. I mean, talk about a life of significance and a massive impact. I mean, it’s incredible.

Gary Schneeberger:
Yeah. As we’ve wrapped up the discussion of the film, how does Erin Brockovich the movie offer hope and inspiration? Let’s pull it back out now from a movie to the application to our listeners and viewers. How does it offer hope and inspiration to move beyond our own crucibles? What would you say is the greatest point about the movie?

Warwick Fairfax:
Many of us can feel underappreciated, undervalued, and not seen. That is certainly how Erin Brockovich felt. She was highly intelligent, driven, and passionate, but having kids at a young age, it felt like it derailed the possibility of fully utilizing a gift and abilities, that had to have gnawed away at Erin Brockovich’s soul. But in this particular case that came up as she was trying to find any kind of job with Ed Masry, she seized the opportunity that this case against PG&E presented. She was so gifted, talented and driven that she forced away onto the case, and her sheer ability and results could not be ignored. For all of us who may feel that we may never use our talents and passion for a course beyond ourselves, a life of significance, Erin Brockovich shows that we can indeed achieve a life that is more than we ever possibly could imagine.

Gary Schneeberger:
Folks, the house lights are up. They’re on. So please clean up around your seating area as you leave the theater, and don’t miss next week’s episode of our summer series, Big Screen, Big Crucibles. We will be discussing next week… Scott, get ready. Give me a drum roll. We will be discussing Invictus. So we will see you next week and save you a seat.

Audio:
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