Shearer of ‘Simpsons’ visits D.C. to screen post-Katrina New Orleans film

The bar at the Willard is too noisy for Harry Shearer, who doesn’t want to talk over the bourbon-swishing belly laughs of happy hour.

Gotta watch the voice. “It’s my meal ticket,” he says, ducking into the mirrored elevator off the gilded lobby.

And, anyway, Shearer doesn’t look like he belongs ensconced in dark-green leather and spit-shined oak, surrounded by navy jackets. The humorist and prodigious voice actor — his meals (and millions) come from Ned Flanders, misters Burns and Smithers, and other characters on “The Simpsons” — sports a Cosby sweater, black corduroy pants, dingy sneakers and a brambly scruff on his bloodhound face. He looks like a college professor lulled into a kind of zen complacency by the anesthetic of tenure: 22 seasons of “The Simpsons,” 28 years of hosting his sociopolitical radio program “Le Show” on KCRW in Los Angeles. He boasts that he can fall asleep anywhere at anytime during anything.

But he will not be falling asleep in Washington. Harry Shearer is in Washington because he’s angry.

Harry, everyone’s angry. Especially at Washington. Take a number.

Yes, he says, but just watch these 97 minutes of footage.

“They just can’t [bleeping] fathom that this was allowed to happen,” he says — “they” being the audiences for his new documentary, “The Big Uneasy” (which will screen Tuesday at the AFI Silver Theatre), and “this” being the post-Katrina flooding of New Orleans, where he lives part time in the French Quarter.

Shearer narrated, directed and financed the film himself. It cost just under $500,000 to produce — not much more than a paycheck from one episode’s work on Fox’s “The Simpsons.”

“I basically funneled some money from Rupert Murdoch,” he quips, settled into an armchair by the window of his hotel suite, looking down on the rush-hour traffic on F Street NW.

“I didn’t formulate the project in my head until the president visited New Orleans in October 2009 and called it a ‘natural disaster’ and said it right to the face of New Orleanians, who were applauding him,” Shearer says. “When I scraped myself off the ceiling I thought, ‘Okay, radio shows and blogging and my Huffington Post articles are clearly are not impinging on either his or his country’s understanding of this event.’ ”

The country’s Katrina complex comes from fixating on human distress, on the people on rooftops, Shearer says. Emotions obscure the truth of the matter: The disaster in New Orleans was caused by an avoidable engineering failure that is being repeated in the rebuilding of the city. “The Big Uneasy” is a movie about plumbing, about underseepage and pounds per square inch, narrated by scientists and whistleblowers.

The villain in his movie? The Army Corps of Engineers. Which comes off as sniveling as Smithers and as brash as Burns.

“If you go around the country and start paying attention to what the corps does in areas where they’ve built levees in other cities, you find a common thread to the way they go about their work,” Shearer says. “You have Sacramento, a river delta city, really in the bull’s-eye right now — the corps said publicly that that system is in big trouble. You have river levees in Dallas that the corps is now acknowledging are built on sand. One of the ingredients in the mix is hubris. Just, ‘We’re the corps, we know what we’re doing.’ There’s no grown-up supervising. There’s no congressional supervision because Congress is so well-served by pork-barrel projects through the corps.”