Before Michael Pollan became a food-supply-reform-movement guru, the result of best-sellers such as "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food," he wrote "The Botany of Desire."
But it wasn't Pollan's growing prominence that got "The Botany of Desire," an idiosyncratic examination of plant history and evolutionary science published in 2001, turned into a PBS documentary. It just took that long to raise the production money. The nearly decade-long lag resulted from an unhappy reality of the business: Film underwriters are skittish about topics such as marijuana, widely used but still mostly illegal, which is one of the program's four topics.
"The Botany of Desire" is Pollan's first book to be adapted for television. It's his favorite of all his works. The two-hour documentary, to be broadcast Wednesday on UNC-TV, follows the book's conceit: It takes the plants' point of view in exploring whether they control humans to ensure their survival.
To illustrate, Pollan, a constant on-screen presence in the program, examines how people's desire for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control of nature have been exploited by apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes to lure humans into spreading them far and wide. Many of the ideas he developed in the book became the "seeds," he said, for his writing on the food supply in The New York Times Magazine, where he is a regular contributor, and then in his books. (He examines corn "from its own point of view," for example, and looks at the perils of planting crops with uniform genetic traits.)
The documentary's producer and director, Michael Schwarz of Kikim Media, said he immediately saw the TV potential when Pollan sent him the manuscript for "The Botany of Desire" in October 2000. The two have long been collaborators, first working together in New York in the late 1970s on a short-lived magazine, Politicks & Other Human Interests.
Close-ups of multicolored tulips and panoramic vistas from mountaintop Andean potato fields would provide visual interest, Schwarz said, and "the whole idea of looking at our relationship with plants from the plants' point of view is very provocative." Plants, he said, are "not simply working for us, but we may also be working for them."
Although the budget for the film, about $1.2 million, was relatively small by commercial standards, Pollan said 'the incredibly long and laborious" financing process, included presentations to several National Science Foundation panels. The proposals, he said, were landing on the desks of corporate underwriters and foundation grant makers at the height of the drug war. And the film's marijuana section would examine how the humble cannabis weed benefited dramatically from the war on drugs to become a more potent, pampered and prolific species, as growers, whom Pollan calls "the best gardeners of my generation," brought it indoors and crossbred it for hardiness.
At one point a potential financer suggested substituting grapes for cannabis. "This seemed to me to be a really bad idea," Pollan said, "in part because the marijuana section is really interesting, and also because, what kind of message would that send? That we changed for television for political reasons; you just can't go there. We stuck to our guns."
Schwarz said he eventually found National Science Foundation grant money to make a portion of the marijuana section in advance. He used it to emphasize to other potential underwriters that he was not making a pro-drug film but a natural history story about "this co-evolutionary relationship and brain science."
In the end PBS contributed to the budget, as did the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Columbia Foundation in San Francisco.
Once he had the money, Schwarz had the challenge of staying true to the book. Special lenses allowed close-up photography of the plants. Schwarz's crew found people -- including medical-marijuana growers and a strapping Dutch grower shown lovingly cradling a tulip he developed -- who were "mad about these plants, who were completely obsessed about them and had devoted their lives to them."
