Yet another sign of the apocalypse... appropriately enough

Thanks to Knoxville blog Cup of Joe Powell I found this story on the movie news site Cinematical about--and I'm not kidding about this (see other sources below)--Al Gore's award-winning 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth being made into an opera!

Yep! I was skeptical, too... until I ran it through Google and found numerous--and more august sources than a Hollywood movie fansite--references to it:

• Yesterday's edition of UK's Guardian
• The Associated Press (via Yahoo)
  
• And, for you whacked-out, right-wing, gun-toting, Creationist Republicans out there, Fox News... although, I wouldn't exactly go as far as to call Fox News "august."

"OK," I can hear you saying, "it's probably some obscure opera professor/composer at Indiana U. trying to make a name for him/herself. It will be performed by the opera theater there with an audience of a couple of local newspaper reviewers and parents of the performers." Don't we wish?! Nope. It is being composed by Italian Giorgio Battistelli, who has composed a list of operas for various European opera houses (e.g., Strasbourg, Rome, Munich, and London) running all the way back to 1981; his scores are even published by Ricordi. (From what I've seen, Brian uses Ricordi editions an awful lot for our operas.) I just have to note just for the humor of it alone, his opera Frau Frankenstein was performed by Berlin Opera in 1993.

But Berlin did not commission An Inconvenient Truth (that's Una verità inopportuna in Italian.) No, no! It was commissioned by and is slated for its premier in 2011 at La Scala, no less!

The Guardian article goes on to say that Battistelli was recently composer-in-residence at Deutsche Opera in Rhein, Germany. Since the commission so new, there's no idea (from anyone, including composer) as to how Truth will play out, whether it will be directly about global warming or a biographical treatment of Al Gore's life or something entirely different.

Regardless, it's going to be an odd book-to-movie operatic adaptation, I'm sure. But, then again, when Jerry Springer: The Opera has attracted rave reviews and famous stars like Harvey Keitel, you should pretty much be prepared for anything in this business. As Cinematical points out, this story has all the makings of a Saturday Night Live sketch.

So, I'm looking forward to the Knoxville Opera's premier of Iron Man or Sex in the City in the mid 2010s, let's say. Or, if we want to stick with the docu-drama genre, we could go with some of Michael Moore's stuff, like Bowling for Columbine or Sicko. Surely we could get some serious financial consideration from Regal Theaters for any of these!