Taglines: She brought a small town to its feet and a huge corporation to its knees.
Erin Brockovich movie storyline. Erin Brockovich-Ellis is an unemployed single mother, desperate to find a job, but is having no luck. This losing streak even extends to a failed lawsuit against a doctor in a car accident she was in. With no alternative, she successfully browbeats her lawyer to give her a job in compensation for the loss.
While no one takes her seriously, with her trashy clothes and earthy manners, that soon changes when she begins to investigate a suspicious real estate case involving the Pacific Gas & Electric Company. What she discovers is that the company is trying quietly to buy land that was contaminated by hexavalent chromium, a deadly toxic waste that the company is improperly and illegally dumping and, in turn, poisoning the residents in the area. As she digs deeper, Erin finds herself leading point in a series of events that would involve her law firm in one of the biggest class action lawsuits in American history against a multi-billion dollar corporation.
Erin Brockovich is a 2000 American biographical film directed by Steven Soderbergh and written by Susannah Grant. It stars Julia Roberts, Albert Finney, Aaron Eckhart, David Brisbin, Dawn Didawick, Conchata Ferrell, Irene Olga López, Emily Marks, Gemmenne de la Peña and Erin Brockovich-Ellis.
The film was a box office success, and critical reaction was positive. Julia Roberts won the Academy Award, BAFTA, Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, and various critics awards for Best Actress. The film itself was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director for Steven Soderbergh at the 73rd Academy Awards. He won that year, but for directing the film Traffic. Early in the film the real Erin Brockovich has a cameo appearance as a waitress named Julia.
About the Story
In 1993, Erin Brockovich is an unemployed single mother of three children, who has recently been injured in a traffic accident with a doctor and is suing him. Her lawyer, Ed Masry, expects to win, but Erin’s explosive courtroom behavior under cross-examination loses her the case, and Ed will not return her phone calls afterwards. One day, he arrives at work to find her in the office, apparently working. She says that he told her things would work out and they did not, and that she needed a job. Ed takes pity on Erin, and she gets a paid job at the office.
Erin is given files for a real estate case where the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) is offering to purchase the home of Donna Jensen, a resident of Hinkley, California. Erin is surprised to see medical records in the file and visits Donna, who explains that she had simply kept all her PG&E correspondence together. Donna appreciates PG&E’s help: she has had several tumors and her husband has Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but PG&E has always supplied a doctor at their own expense.
Erin asks why they would do that, and Donna replies, “because of the chromium”. Erin begins digging into the case and finds evidence that the groundwater in Hinkley is seriously contaminated with carcinogenic hexavalent chromium, but PG&E has been telling Hinkley residents that they use a safer form of chromium. After several days away from the office doing this research, she is fired by Ed until he realizes that she was working all the time, and sees what she has found out.
Rehired, she continues her research, and over time, visits many Hinkley residents and wins their trust. She finds many cases of tumors and other medical problems in Hinkley. Everyone has been treated by PG&E’s doctors and thinks the cluster of cases is just a coincidence, unrelated to the “safe” chromium. The Jensens’ claim for compensation grows into a major class action lawsuit, but the direct evidence only relates to PG&E’s Hinkley plant, not to the senior management.
Knowing that PG&E could slow any settlement for years through delays and appeals, Ed takes the opportunity to arrange for disposition by binding arbitration, but a large majority of the plaintiffs must agree to this. Erin returns to Hinkley and persuades all 634 plaintiffs to go along. While she is there, a man named Charles Embry approaches her to say that he and his cousin were PG&E employees, but his cousin recently died from the poison. The man says he was tasked with destroying documents at PG&E, but, “as it turns out,” he “wasn’t a very good employee”.
Embry gives Erin the documents, which include a 1966 memo proving corporate headquarters knew the water was contaminated with hexavalent chromium, did nothing about it, and advised the Hinkley operation to keep this secret. The judge orders PG&E to pay a settlement amount of $333 million to be distributed among the plaintiffs.
Erin Brockovich (2000)
Directed by: Steven Soderbergh
Starring: Julia Roberts, Albert Finney, Aaron Eckhart, David Brisbin, Dawn Didawick, Conchata Ferrell, Irene Olga López, Emily Marks, Gemmenne de la Peña, Erin Brockovich-Ellis
Screenplay by: Susannah Grant
Production Design by: Philip Messina
Cinematography by: Edward Lachman
Film Editing by: Anne V. Coates
Costume Design by: Jeffrey Kurland
Set Decoration by: Kristen Toscano Messina
Art Direction by: Christa Munro
Music by: Thomas Newman
MPAA Rating: R for language.
Distributed by: Universal Pictures (USA & Canada), Columbia Pictures (International)
Release Date: March 17, 2000
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