Water on the Brain

Yasha Levine’s new documentary Pistachio Wars, codirected by Rowan Wernham, feels like a consolidation of the Russian American journalist’s long body of work examining unholy communions between technology, power, and American capitalism. Much of Levine’s writing has focused on how those relationships play out in California. Pistachio Wars is no different, opening as an interrogation of Beverly Hills-based billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick, who own the Wonderful Company (with its attendant sub-fiefdoms such as Wonderful Pistachios, POM Wonderful and Fiji Water, among others.)

After the Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025, the Resnicks began to take serious criticism on social media over impassioned yet misleading claims that they owned the majority of California’s usable water. (In fact, the Resnicks only own a 57 percent majority stake in the Kern Water Bank, one of the state’s massive underground reservoirs, capable of holding five hundred billion gallons.) Pistachio Wars digs into the Resnick success story without losing appreciation for the more bizarre and idiosyncratic details, such as the fact Lynda’s father was legendary B-movie producer Jack Harris (The Blob, 4D Man) or that the Resnicks managed to dominate the pistachio market after the Iranian Revolution put a stop to the Pahlavi dictatorship’s firm control of pistachio imports into the United States. But the film’s scope dutifully expands beyond the Resnicks, who are technically the wealthiest farmers in America (and who otherwise vamp as liberal patrons of the arts), into a broader survey of water privatization vis-à-vis climate change, stopping along the way to contextualize Levine’s own perspective as someone who came to California from the Soviet Union in 1989.

I spoke with Levine via Zoom about his first foray into documentary filmmaking, navigating the uneasy political documentary marketplace in a time of mass-media peonage under Trump, non-American perspectives on extractive capitalism, and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

—Steve Macfarlane

Steve Macfarlane: Fully aware you have, at this point, decades of experience as a journalist, I’m wondering how jarring it was to step in front of the camera as interlocutor, almost like a TV anchor, and the protagonist of the film.

Yasha Levine: Journalism has always been personal for me, even though it’s something I got into by accident. My work has to spring from my life, something personal. I don’t hide behind the page or the pretense of objectivity. I find documentaries tend to be very conservative, because the filmmaker is unseen, and they don’t always disclose their subjectivities to the viewer. Everything is constructed; the filmmaker controls what you see and how you see it, but in a way that—hopefully, for them—feels authoritative, objective. I prefer cinéma vérité, the kind of documentaries you see from the 1970s, or even earlier, Soviet newsreels, experimental stuff, where you’re aware of how the camera changes things, how people interact with the camera, how things are edited together.

Neither Rowan nor I had ever made a documentary before, so the whole thing was a learning process; we started out just filming what interested us without a particular vision of how it would all fit together. I started appearing on camera more and more, and inevitably ended up doing a voiceover. Initially we wanted our interviews to speak for themselves and naturally narrate, or structure, the film. It just didn’t work. We were covering too much ground, it was all too disparate. I even mean disparate physically. We’re trying to tell the history of California in this compressed way. For me to become the tour guide became natural.

The film was inspired by an article I wrote in 2013 for the Not Safe For Work Corporation, a mostly online magazine that only existed for two years. It was funded with seed money from Tony Hsieh, the Zappos guy who died in 2020—

SM: Tony Hsieh, the guy who died from injuries he suffered from a fire while he was locked in the shed behind his family’s house. It’s not clear if he was high at the time, but his considerable ketamine problem was addressed in all the news stories.

YL: Right. He was basically the founding editor, or if you like, the publisher, of NSFW Corp. Tony said, “Alright, I’ll fund your literary journalism magazine, but you have the make the headquarters in Las Vegas.” Because that’s where Zappos was, and a lot of his employees lived there. Tony Hsieh was trying to single-handedly revitalize downtown Las Vegas, to make it more attractive for prospective employees. “The Downtown Project.” Part of the reason we went out of business is because we were criticizing Tony Hsieh’s redevelopment project and, unsurprisingly, he stopped funding us. By that point I had been researching the story for a good three years, it was a hundred thousand words, some ungodly number like that. I rented a car and did this long road trip through the Central Valley, stopping at various points of interest, structured as a road trip: A Journey Through Oligarch Valley. Like one of those travel books from before the internet . . . What are those called?

SM: Fodor’s? Lonely Planet?

YL: Exactly. Except rather than what’s nice or cool or noteworthy, where’s good to eat, etc., I wanted to present the dark side of California and how everything works here. That structure carried over to the film pretty naturally.

SM: As your film lays it out, part of the paradox of the Resnicks is that they operate in liberal spaces. Lynda is very proud of the fact she helped Daniel Ellsberg xerox the documents that would become the Pentagon Papers back in the 1970s; the pair donates extensively to arts organizations, universities, and political campaigns on both sides of the aisle. Beyond that, who could have a problem with Wonderful Pistachios? The inclusion of a 2014 Super Bowl ad for Wonderful Pistachios, starring Stephen Colbert, really seals the deal.

YL: Anyone who has been following my journalism work knows I operate from a position that’s very critical of the society we live in, in which everything is commodified entertainment. That position isn’t ideological in the traditional left-versus-right sense. It’s a larger ideology that transcends party politics, in part because the Resnicks give money to both Republicans and Democrats—I guess you could argue that makes them more lowercase-D democratic, but really it means they’ll give money to whoever promotes their business interests. Now, there’s something very poetic about Lynda’s father Jack Harris being one of the producers of The Blob. You couldn’t make that up if you wanted to. Our Blob is the American consumerism, commodity culture, that eats up everything that it touches. Politics themselves become a commodity.

SM: Including left politics.

YL: You’re seeing it with “left” streamers and podcasters, people who can critique the system and are massively rewarded for it. Some of them become multimillionaires. If YouTube is hosting your content, you can critique capitalism without really giving people anything. You’re creating a spectacle for your viewers. There’s something really insidious about it, the subsumption of everything else—of any kind of politics—into the Blob. Because of the need for growth, for constant expansion, that underpins this version of capitalism. It can make you rich and it doesn’t matter if you’re ideologically opposed to it. You’ve been swallowed up by the Blob as well.

SM: Yet there’s also kind of formal conservatism built into the format of the digestible, single-issue documentary. It could be Michael Moore, it could be Dinesh D’Souza. While one could argue Pistachio Wars also fits that format, you also forego a lot of the typical things: talking head interviews, infographics, linear montages encapsulating big chunks of history.

YL: I’m cognizant of that and tried to get away from it as much as possible. As we met and interviewed people on the spot, we realized we wanted something more natural, maybe even more intimate, than the format that has completely taken over the industry, the aesthetic, of nonfiction film.

SM: The film critic Mark Asch told me once that documentaries are the new glossy magazine features.

YL: This is what people have come to expect from documentaries: a condensed version that tells you what you need to know, almost like a Wikipedia article or something. I honestly do hope people come away from Pistachio Wars feeling depressed and unsatisfied, because there is no resolution to this issue, or immediate step you can take to fix it. There’s no feel-good takeaway, no clean Hollywood ending, short of a full-on revolution or whatever—something that changes the way society operates. There are multiple versions of “reality,” people have different points of view. You go into a documentary thinking you’re making one thing and you come out of it realizing reality just isn’t so easy to digest.

SM: Also intriguing is the way this film maps out the history of this specific kind of privatization of California natural resources. You and Wernham take pains to detail how California became the breadbasket of American agriculture, and the role New Deal policies played in that. But again, there’s a jaundiced eye. I was reminded of Kamala Harris’s recent insistence that the “titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions.” Your film basically says that this preferential treatment goes back over a hundred years.

YL: Talk about making America great again. On the left I see the New Deal as something to emulate or return to, right? From fifty thousand feet up in the air, it looks great. When you get up close, you see that prosperity came at a pretty serious cost to the environment because today there are barely any undammed rivers in California. Dams curtail the flow of natural rivers, creating environmental catastrophe. Several generations have grown up in a denuded environment where mass die-offs have already happened, and they don’t even realize it. The New Deal was the engine of that. The beneficiaries of these state-centralized processes were big landowners. Next, they’re booming, either as farmland, or because they’ve been able to attract development, or both. The families who benefited from that, almost a hundred years ago, they remain very powerful and they own vast swaths of land that they’re selling off to investors, bit by bit.

SM: So we’re really talking about the growth of the bottom line, for its own sake I guess.

YL: It’s simply a fact: this was not a democratic process. Even when the government was actively engaged in making society more prosperous, making massive investments in infrastructure, the costs were not necessarily fairly redistributed. In his book Cadillac Desert, Mark Reisner points out that a lot of these dams and New Deal projects were essentially done to bail out the farmers who had depleted the underground water supply. They exhausted their land so quickly they were going to go bankrupt. If the infrastructure projects rescued America from the Depression, it’s hard to complain about that.

SM: One of my favorite moments in the film is this oil guy at Panorama Park, Bakersfield, who confronts some anti-fracking activists who are drawing attention to water pollution. One of the activists says, “You don’t have to get so upset!” His reply is, “When anybody like you wants to run my life, I get upset.” It’s language I typically associate with conservatives: people complaining about liberal elites coming to tell someone how to live their lives. Except it’s a rich guy responding to a handful of protesters.

YL: Exploitation doesn’t just mean mineral or natural resources; there’s also exploitation of the general public, its lack of interest in how extraction happens, where food comes from, how food is produced. These families are hugely powerful but also operate under the radar. They run their fiefdoms like little banana republics, states within a state. The external state fully supports their enterprises, and they are not used to being criticized.

SM: Indeed, your film does not end in a manifesto, or a call to arms.

YL: It’s not just a couple of billionaires controlling the water supply. It’s also the kind of society, the suburban sprawl, the car culture, the aqueduct systems—the problem becomes industrial civilization at its core.

Movies, including documentaries, can infantilize people by reducing complicated problems to simple, even miraculous solutions. Do A, B, or C. Give to this nonprofit. Vote for this candidate. Things will be miraculously better. I feel it can be disrespectful to people’s intelligence, or capacity for thinking about complex issues. So it was: How can we make a documentary that mirrors reality, instead of packaging it as a sales pitch, or an ad for a political campaign? “Watch this movie to the end and you’ll know how to fix the water crisis.” It’s cheap.

SM: Are there any fiction films you like that address any of this stuff? Chinatown seems the obvious one, but there are a ton of movies that dig into the sprawling, dark-sided, eternal California. Funny enough, I saw your film the same week as One Battle After Another, a lot of which was filmed in Sacramento and the Central Valley. But Pistachio Wars would align better with There Will Be Blood.

YL: Chinatown was definitely a looming thing for us when we were making the film, it’s kind of the only big movie that addresses the base of what California is built on—the Department of Water and Power, right? [Roman] Polanski couldn’t have come up with a better slogan for the film if he tried. And the screenwriter Robert Towne, who died last year, was a native Angeleno if I’m not mistaken. Most of his scripts are about LA.

SM: Including his adaptation of John Fante’s Ask the Dust, starring Colin Farrell as an Italian.

YL: I missed that. But I do think there’s something about water in California that attracts a foreigner such as Polanski, or such as myself making this movie, because you’re like: “How does this all work? How do they build these lush jungles in the middle of the desert?” It’s so mundane, it almost requires an outsider to be interested in it, because it’s so easy to overlook otherwise. To me the most interesting, honest, realistic films about California were made by foreigners. I’m thinking of [Paul] Verhoeven, specifically, and the happy fascism of Santa Monica or Pacific Palisades, except it’s Buenos Aires in Starship Troopers. People think terraforming is only for other planets, like Mars in Total Recall. But industrialism has been terraforming the Earth to make it suitable for extraction of profits. This is also what [John] Carpenter was talking about in They Live!

SM: Pistachio Wars also drives at your own immigrant journey, as an escapee from the USSR who, slowly but surely, begins to feel, or realize, you’ve migrated from one oligarchy to another. I’m curious if your left sympathies ever got you in hot water with other Russian emigres, and/or if you had more conservative politics starting out . . .

YL: Among Soviet immigrants, I think I’m in the minority as far as my political sensibility. Let’s say the majority of them are against anything that even slightly resembles socialism, liable to claim it’s going to end in totalitarianism, gulags, catastrophic failure. There might be some Democrats there, but it’s a pretty natural antipathy, right? The country they came from was dysfunctional in a lot of ways, and then it collapsed. The immigrant community I grew up in, I parted ways from, but I would stress we were pretty apolitical growing up.

SM: I should add, you don’t just present yourself as a Russian immigrant but also as a Jew. And the film addresses the Resnicks’ support for Israel over the last two years.

YL: The Resnicks have a lot of sway; they are among the biggest backers of arts and culture in the LA region. They donate massive amounts to universities and museums. I suspect that the film put some people off from the get-go because of what it is. We needed to strike at the intersection of Zionism and American business, how the former can benefit from and enable America’s imperial ambitions. Since October 7 there’s been a little bit more room to critique these kinds of connections. But even before then, and the horrors of the last two years’ worth of genocide, in Gaza, this was a pretty toxic topic. If you’re putting a movie up on Vimeo or YouTube for free then sure, you can say whatever you want. But if you want the movie to play in theaters, it’s not that easy.

SM: Pistachio Wars is being distributed by Watermelon Pictures, which is one of the only companies I’m seeing that will acquire and circulate unabashedly pro-Palestinian films.

YL: We were planning on self-distributing before they approached us. I think it had something to do with the wildfires in January. Interest in California, and water scarcity, went viral in early 2025. Before then, it seemed like distributing it ourselves was the only option we had.

SM: I came of age at the time when liberal documentaries were big business—An Inconvenient Truth, Bowling for Columbine, Waiting for Superman, etc. I guess that infrastructure has collapsed, so you’re operating in a vacuum, and it’s scarier, but maybe also means you can do more interesting things? More room for alternate perspectives, as initially promised by the “digital revolution”?

YL: I find myself talking to, like, Academy Award-winning filmmakers, some of the most famous documentarians in America, and they’re like, “Political docs are dead. Nobody wants to touch them. Nobody is buying them.” It’s a 180-degree turn from where things used to be.

People want to watch political documentaries, I think, maybe now more than ever. The distribution and the financing side is where it’s getting weird. Norms are changing, potentially. Some kind of window for free expression is closing, to the extent it ever existed. Maybe a distributor is owned by, or tied to, one of these larger conglomerates which are now paying settlements to Trump, kissing the ring. If you distributed a totally fair-game documentary ten years ago, that can reflect badly on you now, in the eyes of this administration. Criticizing the government is being met with greater resistance. I mean, Steve Bannon is out here talking about Trump’s third term . . .

SM: Yeah, his divine provenance.

YL: Exactly, like he’s the son of God. Sure, man, whatever!