More about the film

Detroit’s story has encapsulated the iconic narrative of America over the last century — the Great Migration of African-Americans escaping Jim Crow, the rise of manufacturing and the middle class, the love affair with automobiles, the flowering of the American dream, and now the collapse of the economy and the fading American mythos.

With its vivid, painterly palette and haunting score, “Detropia” sculpts a dreamlike collage of a grand city teetering on the brink of dissolution. As houses are demolished by the thousands, automobile-company wages plummet, institutions crumble, and tourists gawk at the “charming decay,” the film’s vibrant, gutsy characters glow and erupt like flames from the ashes. These soulful pragmatists and stalwart philosophers strive to make ends meet and make sense of it all, refusing to abandon hope or resistance. Their grit and pluck embody the spirit of the Motor City as it struggles to survive postindustrial America and begins to envision a radically different future. (Caroline Libresco, 2012 Sundance Film Festival)

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Loki Films

From Business Week November 28, 1959

My relationship with the Edsel started in 1968 when my dad made a film called, “Because That’s Why.” In this short film, there’s a sequence where two men stalk and hunt a pink 1959 Edsel. They end up “killing” the automobile and triumphantly pose with it strung up like one would with a Great White Shark. At 12 years old, I think I felt sorry for the beast, and it became a dream of mine to someday own an Edsel of my own. That never happened, but I was able to gather a lot of material on the car and actually used it in as a basis for papers I wrote in high school and college…

Shot from Joe Sedelmaier's short film "Because That's Why" 1968

In the annals of automobile history there are few sagas so fraught with failure as the Edsel. Ford spent $250 million to develop the car and lost another $200 million during the three-year existence of the car. Soon after its launch, unflattering nicknames like “Oldsmobile sucking a lemon” followed. Developed over a period of almost 10 years, the Edsel was Ford Motor Company’s answer to the mid-priced slot. In the 1950s, the closest that Ford came to a medium-priced car was its Mercury. Problem was, when it came time for Ford owners to upgrade, they sidestepped the Mercury and hopped up to a GM car like an Oldsmobile, Pontiac or Buick, and to a lesser extent a Chrysler product. Ford’s strategy was to develop a new line that would inspire loyalty to the parent company. A “Special Products Division” was developed by Ford to research what would be the perfect automobile to effectively fill this void. The “E-Car” (for experimental) program grew out of this.

Roy Brown, Edsel's designer (p18 "Edsel - The Motor Industry's Titanic" Robert Daines)

One of the approaches the Ford Motor Company took when preparing for the Edsel’s launch was an extensive campaign to recruit and hire dealerships that would sell the Edsel exclusively – NOT in tandem with other Ford, Mercury, or Lincoln models. This ultimately involved training schools for sales and service personnel – even the most experienced journeymen found themselves required to participate and learn how Ford wanted their new line sold and serviced.

Announcement's opening with picture of Edsel Ford and a letter to stockholders from Henry Ford II.

Edsel dealer sales agreement 1957

First issue of the Edsel “Service Beacon” provided to service departments to keep them updated on product issues and how to deal with them.

Pre-launch "Edsel Marketeer" dealership magazine, with select pages included below.

First post-launch "Edsel Marketeer" with entire issue below.

Leave behind 1957 residential door-hanger card.

1957 scale model offer - these don't go for cheap on eBay !

1957 Edsel paint color chip wheel.

The Edsel’s pre-launch promotional campaign was so extensive that the eventual unveiling couldn’t possibly live up to the hype. The following are some examples of what was produced, and demonstrates how extensive the project really was. Viewmaster even issued a set of 3-D slide discs featuring the Edsel line of cars. It’s also a reminder of how much of a role illustration used to play in automobile advertising. Hardly the case now  … For those of you interested in the advertising end of the story, Foote Cone & Belding (now part of DraftFCB) was contracted to handle the Edsel advertising campaign for Ford. (First Edsel Ad, Edsel Demo Ad)

Pre-launch Edsel ad showing shrouded car. (www.oldcaradvertising.com)

Official FoMoCo press release shots. Ford was nice enough to send these to me for free in 1970.

Premium 1957 Edsel Sales Brochure with complete scans below.

1st Edsel Owner's Manual.

1957 Edsel Features booklet with complete scans below.

A 1959 Edsel.

1960 Edsel sales booklet.

In terms of its distinctive front-grille styling, it’s interesting to see the centered “horse-collar” grille element reduce in size and prominence during the three-year genesis. By the time its last model year arrived in 1960 all that was left was a small inches-high logo shield. It would take another decade with the introduction of the 1968 Pontiac Bonneville, before an American car resurrected this vertical design treatment.

1959 Edsel

1968 Pontiac

Magazines featuring Edsel launch stories 1957. (That's the Sept 1957 issue of Fortune Magazine at the top)

A big event associated with the Edsel’s unveiling was “The Edsel Show” on CBS. Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney starred in a special live broadcast celebrating the car’s arrival.

Another televised reference to the car’s “distinctive” styling was a 1961 episode (Season 3/Episode 12) of “The Dick Van Dyke Show. ““The Sound of the Trumpets of Conscience Falls Deafly on a Brain That Holds Its Ears … Or Something Like That!” Rob Petrie witnesses a jewel robbery but can’t seem to remember any details about the crime. He later lets it slip  that the crooks were driving a fire-engine red Edsel – needless to say, it breaks the case. http://www.hulu.com/watch/113989/the-dick-van-dyke-show-the-sound-of-the-trumpets-of-conscience-falls-deafly-on-a-brain-that-holds-its-earsor-something-like-that#s-p17-so-i0

For a VERY brief time it was cool to be seen in an Edsel. From a late 1950's magazine on driving behavior for high school students.

Richard Nixon riding through Peru in an Edsel. (Intro page from "Edsel - The Motor Industry's Titanic" Robert Daines)

To learn more of the details behind the Edsel’s “colorful” history, here are several books I’ve found helpful and interesting:

“The Edsel Affair” – C. Gayle Warnock (1980)

“The Fate Of The Edsel & Other Business Adventures” – John Brooks (1963)

“Disaster In Dearborn” – Thomas E. Bonsall (2002)

“Selling The People’s Cadillac” – Jan G. Deutsch (1976)

“Edsel-The Motor Industry’s Titanic” Robert Daines (1994)

My Edsel Owners Club membership card circa 1971.

Thanks as usual go to Corrie Lebens here at JJSP for compiling all this material !

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

Salon is proud to feature content from Imprint, the fastest-growing design community on the web. Brought to you by Print magazine, America’s oldest and most trusted design voice, Imprint features some of the biggest names in the industry covering visual culture from every angle. Imprint advances and expands the design conversation, providing fresh daily content to the community (and now to salon.com!), sparking conversation, competition, criticism, and passion among its members.

Even in writing about Paine’s first film for Salon five years ago, I got several angry letters from impassioned defenders of the internal combustion engine, who assured me that electric motors were for golf carts, and that the automotive future, like the past, belonged to petroleum. As we now know, the death of the EV1 was hardly the end of the story. Within a few months of releasing “Who Killed the Electric Car?,” Paine found himself watching legendary auto executive Bob Lutz, then G.M.’s vice chairman, drive a prototype of the Chevrolet Volt onto the floor of Detroit’s annual auto show. The widespread electrification of the passenger car, Lutz told him, was “a foregone conclusion.”

A cigar-smoking climate-change denier who’s long been seen as the car enthusiast’s car enthusiast, Lutz was about the last person in the world you expected to start shilling for electric vehicles. Then again, you wouldn’t have expected Chris Paine to make an insider documentary about auto industry competition. His fascinating and highly entertaining new movie, “Revenge of the Electric Car,” is almost like his first one turned upside down, with unprecedented access to the inner workings of G.M., Nissan and Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors as they battle to get new electric cars into production. His irresistible cast of characters range from Lutz, the crusty Detroit veteran, to Carlos Ghosn, the globetrotting, ultra-smooth Renault-Nissan CEO, to Tesla co-founder Elon Musk, who burned through his entire PayPal fortune launching his company, to Greg “Gadget” Abbott, a DIY Los Angeles engineer who has rebuilt vintage Porsches and Triumphs as all-electric vehicles.

Visionary entrepreneurs like Musk and Abbott, although they operate on vastly different scales, have been pursuing the electric-car dream for years. But as Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Neil explains in the film, guys like Ghosn and Lutz saw the light very suddenly in the late 2000s, when gas prices began to rise and the global economy slid into the crapper. The business case for building electric cars went from intriguing to compelling to irresistible, and the question rapidly became who was going to get it right and reap the eventual worldwide windfall. Paine seems delighted to root for all three companies and essentially declares a three-way tie, which may be fine for the moment: Both the Chevy Volt — a plug-in hybrid rather than a true electric car — and the all-electric Nissan Leaf have sold encouragingly, although both are very new to the market, and against all odds Musk has kept Tesla alive and hopes to start mass production of his $60,000 Model S sedan next year.

Those who are legitimately concerned about the environmental costs and potential drawbacks of electric vehicles — from the (so far) prohibitive pricing to the dirty electric grid to the limited battery range — will notice that Paine continues to skirt those issues. He’s a crusading journalist when he wants to be, but when it comes to large-scale questions about whether electric cars can really replace the ones we drive today, he’s more like a cheerleader. In “Who Killed the Electric Car?” he suggested that hydrogen-fuel technology, which is also being explored by the auto manufacturers and oil companies, is essentially a scam designed to ensure their long-term supremacy, but he does not revisit any of that here. (My 7-year-old son, who knows more about this issue than I do, forcefully disagrees with Paine on that one.) For whatever it’s worth, Dan Neil, the Journal’s astute (and always entertaining) auto columnist, is on board; he’s been “saying farewell” to a long career of owning and driving gasoline cars over the last few years, he says, and will never buy one again.

“Revenge of the Electric Car” is now playing at the Sunshine Cinema in New York, the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, N.Y., and the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles. It opens Oct. 28 in Nashville; Nov. 4 in Boston, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., San Francisco and Santa Fe, N.M; Nov. 11 in Ann Arbor, Mich., Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Minneapolis, Sacramento, Calif., San Diego, Santa Rosa, Calif., and Seattle; Nov. 18 in Philadelphia; Nov. 23 in St. Louis; Nov. 25 in Denver and Washington; and Dec. 2 in Atlanta, with more cities to follow.

The second type of commercial will be full of hip, attractive people extoling the sleek virtues of the fast, sexy automobile. Since young people aren’t really the demographic for purchasing automobiles, these ads market to those suffering from too much money and Peter Pan syndrome.

The fact that these narratives are the two standards for car marketing is what makes the new Toyota Venza ads so appealing. Conceived by creative agency Saatchi & Saatchi LA, the spots feature aimless twenty-somethings snarking on their parents’ lame, boring lives. These monologues are juxtoposed with shots of older people (presumably the parents) driving around, mountain-biking, and generally partying it up while their progeny stay inside, checking their Facebook stats and rolling their eyes.

The message is shockingly subversive: young is no longer cool. Cool is no longer cool. “You know what’s cool?” says these ads, “Being a grownup.” “The Venza campaign goes directly against how marketers usually talk to boomers,” said Margaret Keene, Executive Creative Director, Saatchi & Saatchi LA.” We wanted to talk to them in a way that was relevant and honest.”

Considering the average age of a new car buyer is 43, the most interesting fact about this “revolutionary” campaign is how long it came for someone to come up with that concept.

An hour’s drive north of Warren, in Flint, is an abandoned GM auto plant called Buick City. In the 1970s, Buick City employed 28,000 autoworkers. Today, it’s America’s biggest brownfield, anchoring a neighborhood that also features a boarded-up tavern, a defunct United Auto Workers hall and an out-of-business party store. The land around Buick City is so worthless that a patriotic couple bought several corner lots, for $200 apiece, and built a memorial to American soldiers killed on 9/11.

Buick City and so many other factories are industrial waste sites because General Motors hasn’t had an original idea since it put a V-8 engine in the Oldsmobile. In the 1970s, when the Arab Oil Embargo began a small-car craze, Honda was already building the Civic. Toyota was building the Corolla. GM responded with — the Chevette. Named one of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time by Time magazine, the Chevette turned an entire generation of Americans onto Japanese cars. It was the first car I ever owned. My mechanic diagnosed the hole under the pedals as “Chevette Floor Cancer.” He pounded a sheet of tin over the opening, but my shoes still got wet whenever I drove through a puddle.

And then, in the 2000s, there was GM Chairman Robert Lutz’s reaction to the Prius: “Hybrids are an interesting curiosity and we will do some, but do they make sense at $1.50 a gallon? No, they do not.” They do make sense at $4 a gallon, but Toyota dominates the market now.

That’s why I was so excited about the Volt. Like any Michigander who grew up seeing “Assholes Buy Jap Cars” spray-painted on overpasses, I’ve been conditioned to root for the home team. Now, for once in my life, stodgy old Papa Jimmy was going to be first at something. As Toyota was the hybrid company, Chevy would be the electric company.

“I want that brand right here on top of my forehead,” Farah said, pointing at the space above his safety glasses.

Farah worked on GM’s first, failed attempt: the EV1, subject of the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” Its problem: the battery weighed 1,200 pounds. To wring 40 miles out of a single charge, the EV1 was a two-seater, with no trunk.

“You had to build the car around the battery,” he said.

The lithium-ion battery pack weighs a third of that. The Volt is an “extended-range” vehicle. Once the charge runs down, a gasoline engine takes over. But it doesn’t power a drive train, as on a traditional vehicle. It powers the electrical system that runs the car.

The energy required to drive 40 miles on battery power is equivalent to “well under a gallon” of gasoline, Farah told me, because running an electrical system is 50 percent more efficient than running a drive train. Fueling the Volt costs 2 cents a mile. At $4 a gallon, a gasoline-powered car costs 13 cents a mile.

On electric power, the Volt emits no exhaust. Drawing electricity from a coal-powered grid may produce more greenhouse gases than a gasoline-powered car. But coal produces only half America’s energy, and that percentage is declining as utilities switch to cleaner fuels. The Volt can draw power “from the wind, from the sun,” Farah said. “You don’t have to burn fossil fuels.” As a plug-in hybrid, the Volt would be a compromise between the Prius, which has a 4-cylinder gasoline engine, and the all-electric Nissan Leaf.

The Volt is finally out this year. It was named 2011 Motor Trend Car of the Year. When I heard that the Volt rides were the No. 1 attraction at last month’s Chicago Auto Show, I was more excited than the moment I first laid eyes on the Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point. I’d been waiting years to sit inside the salvation of the American auto industry.

When I got to the Auto Show, little pod-shaped cars were circling a go-kart-sized track, landscaped with real grass and real shrubs. The foliage would die indoors, but from lack of sunlight, not air pollution. When a Volt finally stopped, I climbed into the passenger seat. My first reaction?

“Wow, this is even more cramped than my old Dodge Neon.” The engine was silent, but I couldn’t tell whether that was because we were only going five miles an hour.

“How much is this going to cost?” I asked the driver.

“They start at $41,000,” he said, “although there is a $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car.”

I looked at the back seat. Two American-sized people could squeeze in there. The driver tried to focus my attention on a computer screen displaying the remaining charge.

“Are they ever going to make a bigger version?” I asked.

“There’s going to be a family-sized SUV, eventually.”

Eventually. I stepped outside and watched the silent rodeo of cars. The Volt is a $20,000 car, for twice the money. Even if I could afford to replace my Ford Focus hatchback with a Volt, I wouldn’t do it. It’s too small for my cross-country skis and my camping equipment.

Then I got an e-mail from a retired Chevy dealer named Chuck Frank. He forwarded me an article from Automotive & Assembly Practice, which predicted that “plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and battery-only electric vehicles could account for 16 percent of overall new-car sales in New York, 9 percent in Paris and 5 percent in Shanghai by 2015.”

“Are you buying a Volt?” I e-mailed back.

“I have one on order and a Leaf as well,” he wrote. “I drove one recently and liked it.”

Frank is the Volt’s target customer: a well-to-do environmentalist. As a boy, Frank wanted to be a forest ranger. Instead, he inherited the world’s largest Chevrolet dealership from his father. But Frank’s love of the outdoors and his wife’s struggles with asthma led him to join the Sierra Club, and he became the group’s inside connection to the auto industry. As a Chevy dealer, he could talk to executives who wouldn’t take an environmentalist’s phone calls. For years, Frank lobbied GM to build an electric car. In 2005, frustrated that he couldn’t offer his customers an alternative to the Prius, he approached Chairman Rick Wagoner at a cocktail reception.

“Why isn’t GM doing anything about a hybrid?” Frank inquired.

“Hybrids don’t make sense to the public,” Wagoner told him. “Economically, they don’t make sense.”

Three months later, GM announced plans for the Volt.

Frank doesn’t care that the Volt is cramped and overpriced. He has bigger Chevys in his garage, and he sold enough Corvettes to understand that when it comes to choosing a car, practicality is less important than looking badass. Otherwise, everyone would be driving an Aveo.

“I want to be one of the early adapters,” Frank said. “I’m trying to get the first one that comes into Chicago, because I want to reinforce my environmental credentials.”

But there aren’t enough Sierra Club members to make the Volt a mass-market car yet. My other problem with the Volt: I live in an apartment building, so I have no place to plug it in at night.

“They’re not going to make money on the Volt right away,” Frank said. “One of the things I said to Wagoner was the value of what they’re doing was what Toyota did with the Prius. It’s not about profitability per se. It’s about image. What I’m hearing is that it’s bringing people into the showrooms. They need to do this to re-establish themselves as a high-tech company.”

Consumer Reports dismissed the Volt as “an expensive way to be green.” NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. called the Volt a “good product,” but said the “technology isn’t there yet really to provide the consumer with something that can go a little further [in mileage] … But as the technology gets better, batteries and such things like that get safer to where they can be more heavily charged and the mileage can be a little bit longer.”

But Volt owner Matt Stehouwer wanted an electric car so badly he ordered one from a dealership in New York, one of seven states where the Volt is currently sold, and drove it home to DeWitt, Mich. After three weeks, he reports on his blog, voltfansite.com, he’s driven 627 miles on 4.2 gallons of gas. Stehouwer’s only complaint: His employer told him he was “stealing electricity” by charging the car at work.

General Motors just announced it earned $4.7 billion last year, its first profit since 2004. It’s not because of the Volt, obviously, but the Volt is another sign that GM has finally learned to do business like a 21st century auto company. It’s too late to save Flint, but the Volt is coming off the assembly line in the Detroit suburb of Hamtramck.

Even though the Volt is a tiny, expensive toy, GM did the right thing by rushing it into showrooms before guys like me are ready to buy one. Eventually, lithium-ion batteries will be cheaper. Eventually, apartment buildings will install charging stations. Eventually, gas will cost $5 a gallon. When all that happens, a lot us will buy electric cars. I want to own a Volt someday. GM hopes that brand on its forehead is big enough to make you to want one of its electric cars, too.