"All the Difference": A Kodak short documentary about America from 1970

"All the Difference" is a 20-minute educational film from Kodak featuring the unique comedy stylings of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, an influential improv duo of the era. Shot in 16mm, it's a tragicomic documentary about America's natural beauty and its environmental deterioration. Oh, how things have changed, right?

From "Enviro-Films," a 1973 survey of environmental education movies:

From many distinguished American poets comes the connecting narrative for this, gorgeously photographed treatise on America the Beautiful and America the Increasingly Ugly. The ugliness is off-set by the tragicomic patter of Mike Nicholsand Elaine May, but juxtaposed against Emerson and Whitman, the viewer initially feels very much like stifling a laugh dufing a worship service. The point-in-time of the narrative switches from what our country is in our literature to what our country is someplaces in the present and will be in the future. Whether or not acceptance of increasing air and water pollution becomes so thoroughly a part of our way of life in the future depends on which road America takes now -- the common path or the one less traveled by; that will make all the difference."'. This film requires at least high school or older audiences to appreciate the long sections of poetry and the sharp wit of Nichols and May.

(via r/ObscureMedia)