Exterior. Day. [Electric] Car Chase.

Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer

The Environmental Media Association Says Hollywood Can Be Green(er).

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Al Gore in an An Inconvenient Truth, which won the best documentary award from the Environmental Media Association (EMA) in early November for its powerful incorporation of environmental messaging. The EMA encourages environmental practices in both content and production in the film and television industries.

This year, the UCLA Institute of the Environment focused its ninth annual report on the film and television industry (FTI), comparing it to five other major California industries. The report's conclusion is that the FTI is “responsible for a significant amount of both air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.” The group measured “primary criteria air pollutants” and greenhouse gases (GHGs) in metric tons per $1 million annual output in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, California, and the United States. Comparing the FTI to the aerospace, petroleum refining, apparel, hotel, and semiconductor industries, the group found that the film and television industry topped every other industry for criteria pollutant emissions in the Los Angeles region. (The petroleum refining industry is by far the largest polluter, but data is unavailable for Los Angeles.) More significantly, film and television is the smallest of the six sectors studied, yet its greenhouse gas emissions are close to the same order of magnitude as four of the other sectors. The FTI accounts for an estimated 140,000 metric tons of criteria pollutants and 8,400,000 metric tons of CO₂ equivalents annually.

This sobering report comes at a time when — from a storytelling standpoint — audiences are more receptive than ever to considering the huge problems of environmental degradation. Documentaries on climate change and pollution played in movie theaters, making waves and making money. This year alone saw the release of Al Gore's sobering call to action, An Inconvenient Truth; the murder mystery of corporate skullduggery, Who Killed the Electric Car?; as well as HBO's Too Hot Not to Handle. This year, a significant number of environmentalist Hollywood professionals have helped focus national attention on man's relationship with our environment. At the same time, they are beginning to steer the huge ship of film and TV production on a new, environmentally friendly track.

“Our documentary category is the best we've ever had,” says Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Association (EMA), a group that encourages environmental practices in both content and production in the film and television industries. “Our award ceremony has eight different categories: feature film, hour drama, half-hour drama, documentary, reality … . It's a full awards show with celebrity presenters, the whole deal. We give EMA Awards to the programs that best incorporate environmental messaging woven in their stories.” An Inconvenient Truth won the best documentary award at the ceremony in early November.

“The best way to motivate show-business people is to give them an award,” jests Brad Hall, a TV and film writer and producer who serves as an EMA board member. “Debbie Levin … turned that awards show into an important thing, because it's a real event now. It's primarily an event for very young Hollywood — like Lance Bass, Nicole Ritchie — the kinds of people you wouldn't normally think of as environmentalists. She's tapped in Amy Smart and Wendie Malick, and people like that who are serious environmentalists.”

Slides of Patagonia, Argentina, from An Inconvenient Truth, showing the scene in 1928 (top) and present day (bottom).

Starting the Conversation

Started by legendary television producer Norman Lear and the president of Warner Bros., Alan F. Horn, the Environmental Media Association was actually the brain-child of their wives, Lyn Lear and Cindy Horn, who were both pregnant at the same time and came up with the idea of instilling environmental messages into film and television the way Lear did with social issues on All in the Family. Hall recalls that when an issue came up on All in the Family, it went up on the national radar. “I can't remember what the disease was,” Hall says, “but [Lear] got 10,000 letters in a week about this disease. And it was just a joke, or a b-story — it wasn't the primary focus of the show — and he realized, if you just mention these things, people are really paying attention. As a guy who was already hugely issue-oriented, he realized we've got a real weapon here to wield for the good guys. He started to put messages into his shows about things he strongly believed in, and Cindy Horn and Norman's wife said, ‘Well, let's start an organization that actually concentrates on doing that.'”

At the time, executive producer Bill Gerber, now chairman of the EMA board, was also eager to take on the issue. “Around 1988, I was working at Warner Bros. and joined an ad hoc committee on environmental practices at the studio with Gary Credle and some other people,” Gerber says. “We started talking about everything from woodchips to Styrofoam cups. Even though I didn't have much of an idea of what I was talking about, I knew there had to be some better ways of doing things. We did some feasibility studies. A lot of it had to do with Styrofoam in those days.”

“Paramount a decade ago (and that's not very long) had no recycling — paper recycling, even,” Hall says. “Talk about the Stone Age; they had nothing. I couldn't believe it, because on a TV show, the amount of paper you go through is just stunning. It's horrible. And the paper industry is the second- or third-biggest contributor to global warming. Using recycled paper is not just a goofy thing; it's actually unbelievably important for global warming, because of the energy used to make paper. It's not just the cutting down of trees. There are water problems, a huge amount of problems with paper — huge. I just felt horrible throwing out all this paper. … I knew, in fact, when they first got recycling bins in, they then took the recycling bins and just emptied them in garbage trucks.”

(Left picture) Debbie Levin, Environmental Media Association (EMA) president, and Bill Gerber, now chairman of the EMA board, at the 15th Annual EMA Awards in Hollywood, Calif., in 2005.(Right picture) Brad Hall, a TV and film writer and producer who serves as an EMA board member, with wife Julia Louis-Dreyfus at the 16th Annual EMA Awards in 2006.

How to Be an Activist in Hollywood

Over the past 15 years, EMA has worked on several fronts to get the industry to both champion environmental practices in their content and practice conservation on the set and in the office. “Our mission is, we work with the entertainment industry to get environmental messages into TV and film,” Levin says. “What that means is I literally pitch storylines — environmental storylines — to show runners, TV producers, feature film directors, and producers all year round to try to get them to incorporate some of these beats, and sometimes an entire story, into their existing projects.

“We also work very closely with celebrities, using them to role-model behaviors. Because of the onslaught in the last five, six years of crappy tabloids and magazines that are all about celebrity lifestyle, every move that these celebrities make is documented. We found, let's spin it to our advantage. We like to have our celebrities ‘captured' driving hybrids, carrying canvas bags out of the market — doing things that are environmentally beneficial for the planet. Our mission is green lifestyle. I joke around that we want to change the world through shopping.”

EMA also recently put together a corporate advisory board to encourage “synergistic marketing relationships” between companies that produce green products, such as Toyota, BP Solar Division, Whole Foods Markets, Silk Soy Milk, and Horizon Organics. “We have a really nice program with BP,” Levin says. “Edward Norton and I get celebrities to purchase solar for their homes, and we've had a great success. We have Willie Nelson, Brad Pitt, Alicia Silverstone, Ed Begley, of course, Danny DeVito — they purchase solar for their homes, and for every celebrity that purchases solar for their homes, BP donates a system to a low-income house in South Los Angeles. It's a win-win. We're promoting it with the celebrities, and at the same time a [low-income] family will have no electric bills.”

These positive initiatives perhaps sound obvious from an industry that hugs the beautiful coastline of Malibu and is known for the healthy lifestyle of many of its prominent members, but the movie industry as a business has been notoriously wasteful and polluting for years.

“One of the first things that EMA did was to try get people to build sets that are not the same hard, Luaun wood,” Hall says of the endangered rainforest hardwood. “And when you strike a set, you don't have to destroy it. These things are just kind of ingrained. To me, it's shocking how little the movie business has changed since the '30s. Really, it's the same except that nobody wears ties. The crews are the same size; it looks exactly the same. And it's not right. There are things that can be changed from a waste point of view that are huge — sets being one of the main things.

“For a long time, the industry didn't take responsibility,” Hall says, “even when they had great people in charge. Alan Horn, who runs Warner Bros., has instituted all sorts of fabulous things because he's a really serious environmentalist. It's a really demanding job, but he makes that a priority.” The entire Warner lot uses re-refined oil, collected and recycled from vehicles, for its fleet of trucks and cars.

Cynics might wonder why Hollywood is taking such a big interest in environmental issues; some might be suspicious of where their motivation comes from. Bill Gerber has an answer for that. “I think people who create films and television are perhaps reading more about what's going on in the world because you have to be pretty current,” he says. “The final film or television show has to reflect what's going on, so you're a little more up on current events. I think it's very scary, and a lot of us are really scared, and want to (a) try to set examples of what can be done to try to turn back the tide a little bit, and (b) walk the walk to the extent that we can.”

In Who Killed the Electric Car?, Executive Producer Dean Devlin and Director Chris Paine shed light on the rise and fall of GM’s EV1 electric car, a car both men were hooked on as soon as they drove it, but was destroyed when California turned away from its air-quality initiative.

The Problem of the Electric Car

When Dean Devlin, a successful, savvy producer with executive producing credits on such movies as Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Patriot, converted to an electric car-driving environmentalist, it sounded like a scripted plot point for a Hollywood player. “Before my involvement with electric cars, I had an Alpha Romeo 'cause I thought that was really cool,” Devlin says. “And I had a BMW, and then I got a Mercedes, and I thought those were really great, cool cars. In fact, when I first got the electric car, I thought I would just drive it once in a while for fun. Literally, within a week of having it, it became my only car, and I just sold my other cars.”

Devlin had been looking to make a documentary on the electric car because the story he was experiencing with his leased GM EV1 electric car was not being reported in the media. “Michael Moore was [later] introducing the film to some people, because he is a big fan of the film,” Devlin says, “and he said, ‘Democracies rely on information to function. If you have a voting public that doesn't have the information, they can't make the decisions.' And this is a story that just simply wasn't told. Most Americans don't know that electric cars ever existed, and the ones who did know they existed didn't know that they were any good.”

The only problem was he had never made a documentary before. “I had it running on my agenda,” Devlin says. “Every week I'd say, ‘So, what are we doing about the electric car documentary?' My staff would say, ‘We don't know what to do about it; you come up with something.'” Then, director Chris Paine walked into Devlin's office.

“I had written GM a letter saying, ‘I hear you are designing an electric car,'” Paine says, “and when it finally came to market — and only because California forced them to do it — I was one of the early leasers of the car. I thought it was going to be a novelty. The first moment you step on the accelerator, you pretty much leave any other car in the dust. … I quickly realized that GM had manufactured perhaps the most advanced car it had ever created. I was hooked. You could charge it off your house, if you had solar panels; or [in] Santa Monica, being a green city, you had public chargers. The car never needed repairs or maintenance. It was tail lights or wipers. … It's just batteries and a motor, and a motor is much simpler than an engine is. ”

Many thought that GM, California, and the American people had finally found a tool to set the country on the right track. But then, California turned away from its air-quality initiative, and GM pulled all its cars from the roadways, claiming the car had been a dud. Then, the company destroyed them all. Even the model on display at the Smithsonian was taken away.

Paine says he is still confounded. “If you think about it, all the car companies were involved. Billions of dollars were spent putting chargers in electric cars — then they all got taken off the road and destroyed,” he says. “Where are 60 Minutes and 20/20? I think that we realized, in retrospect, that nobody had put the whole story together before, so that's where documentaries can do the job.”

The production of Electric Car was not significantly green, however. Although it was nominated for EMA's best documentary, it probably wouldn't have qualified for an EMA Green Seal, which honors environmentally friendly productions. First of all, the production was very small. Paine had begun by shooting the mock burial of the car and the crushing of the cars on a series of prosumer DV cameras. When Devlin came in, the directive was to shoot HD for theatrical release, and they brought in two Sony HDW-F900s. Although the modest cast and crew all drove EV1s and hybrids, the nuts and bolts were handled as always.

“When you make a documentary you're dealing with hundreds of hours of people talking,” Paine says. “That's where your story is. You've got to transcribe everything. So, our transcriptions were all done electronically. But in the end, I have to admit, there were portions where you had to print everything out, cause sometimes, looking at that screen, it's just too much. There's no substitute for paper and a pen.”

The Green Seal of Approval

Perhaps the biggest effect that EMA is having on the industry is through awarding its Green Seal. The EMA Green Seal was created two years ago to help environmentally minded producers meet criteria for green production, both in the office and on the set and to begin with the fact that Hollywood — while it has many technology standards and union regulations — has no standards of practice for pollution control. The EMA website (www.ema-online.org) has three checklists: “Standards for Production Offices and Around the Set,” “Basic Standards for TV Characters,” and “How to Make a Production Green.” Most of the recommendations are fairly obvious: recycle everything; only purchase recyclable materials; copy on both sides of the paper; use energy-saving products and turn them off when not in use; make sure vendors conserve as well; and exhibit this behavior on screen. Checklist suggestions run from having vendors provide natural gas or solar power for generators and refrigeration systems instead of diesel power to recycling sets to using paints and chemicals that are relatively low-emission and non-toxic. But some of these initiative cost money.

“[EMA] knows that the film industry is a notoriously tight industry as far as expense — with the exception of giant stars' salaries,” Devlin says. “You know, we travel across the world to save money on production, so they are working very hard to find ways that don't affect the film financially, but do affect how much carbon is emitted throughout the process and how to reduce waste and increase recycling, etc.”

“You go to a movie set, and everything happens so quickly,” Hall says, “and the bottom line is so important and everybody is under so much intense pressure that a lot of opportunity just gets missed — really obvious things. There are trucks running all day at every movie set. When you make electricity with a diesel engine and run it all day, the amount of pollution is incredible.”

“Energy efficiency on-set is sort of an oxymoron,” Levin says. “You can't [always] do that. You can't swap it out for compact fluorescents because the lighting has to be exactly what they need to shoot. But you can definitely try to work with the low-sulfur diesel for generators — possibly swap it out for electric generators. We would love to see more solar, which would be on the top of studios. The solar paneling would be an initial cost but an ultimate savings. Obviously, conserving paper — when possible, print on both sides. It definitely makes a difference. I understand when they're doing new pages with scripts sometimes, they can't do that. But, when you can, print on both sides. Just little tiny things like that. Definitely don't use Styrofoam. Encourage people to have a cup which they reuse, which saves you money from constantly buying disposable products. There are little things that people don't think about, but they really add up when you're talking about bulk.”

“It's a little harder for TV because it's ongoing,” Hall says. “The other problem for producers is you've got to fit into the system that your studio is in. A lot of your products are produced at the studio, and you're required by the studio to use them. If that's not green, you're screwed — but again, that's one of the efforts that EMA is trying to turn around.”

Conversely, another problem is that a lot of production is done by small, short-lived production companies that ramp up to tackle a job, but have no large company or studio behind them with stable supply chains or a framework to institutionalize best practices. Much of the green initiative in Hollywood simply comes from individuals.

So what does a production have to do to qualify for the coveted Green Seal?

“We qualified for the Green Seal with this recent prequel for The Dukes of Hazzard,” Gerber says. “We were able to use bio-diesel generators, and recycling and other things that are required for the Green Seal.” Simple.

“It doesn't have to be a hoity-toity production to do it,” Hall says. “Beerfest is a big, popular comedy. Billy Gerber, who is on the board of EMA, a fantastic guy, truly a dedicated environmentalist, produced that movie, and he's a Green Seal winner. It doesn't matter what the content of the show is; it's easy to recycle your scripts; it's easy to get all your diesel to clean diesel; it's easy to get a hybrid or two into the production — at least as a running car, if not in the show. Better to be in the show, if you can, to show it.

“You can't imagine what showing a Prius does — unbelievable! Julia [Louis-Dreyfus, Hall's wife] drives a Prius on her show [The New Adventures of Old Christine]. You can't imagine the amount of mail: ‘What is that?' ‘If she drives one, I want to drive one.' People are so easily swayed.”

What is Carbon-neutral?

Another important concept backed by EMA and environmentalists is “carbon-neutral,” a way of investing in the business of clean energy. “Carbon-neutral is investing in a renewable energy company, and you offset the icky, bad, dirty energy that you are required to use because of where your office, studio, or house is,” Levin explains. “You pay a certain amount to a company who will start a wind farm, solar energy — anything that's green energy. By investing in those companies, the companies will thrive; they will start supplying their customers with green, clean energy, therefore reducing the need overall. If there's more clean energy available, we'll be using less dirty energy. And it doesn't cost very much, comparatively.”

The Day After Tomorrow, 2004's film about apocalyptic global warming, directed and co-written by the dedicated environmentalist Roland Emmerich, was the first carbon-neutral production in Hollywood. The CarbonNeutral Company (then called Future Forests) offset the production's approximate 10,000 tons of CO₂ emissions to the tune of $200,000 by planting trees and investing in climate-friendly technology. The bill was footed by Emmerich and his associates.

The Great Warming, an environmental documentary narrated by Keanu Reeves and Alanis Morissette, offers free home-energy reviews to every audience member, courtesy of Krystal Planet, one of the film's carbon-neutral certifiers.

“Syriana was carbon-neutral,” Levin says. Warner Bros. and Participant Productions split the bill to offset the CO₂ emissions on Syriana through NativeEnergy. “It was something like a $75 million movie, and it was $50,000 to be carbon-neutral. That's nothing. It's nothing! An Inconvenient Truth was carbon-neutral; our awards have been carbon-neutral for five years — it's not that hard. The EMA board, at home, is carbon-neutral.” Indeed, the Gerber, Hall, and Levin families are carbon-neutral at home and work.

Levin explains how it breaks down: “You estimate your use,” she says. “I am a family of four. My house is 3,000 square feet. I go to New York twice a year, and my office is 20 miles away. That's basically my life. There are companies that will then calculate an estimate of what your energy use is per year. Then they'll say, ‘Give us $300 and your life is carbon-neutral.'”

“You know there are a lot of people that fly privately and feel guilty about it, as well they should,” Hall says. “It's a huge burner of gas, obviously, but they feel better about it by carbon neutralizing themselves, just with pure cash. But guess what? That's a real good thing to do. Now, should they be flying private in the first place? That's a different issue.”

Effecting Change

The question everyone wants to ask is, are environmental initiatives cost-efficient for Hollywood? Most say, yes, eventually. Getting producers to implement them is the key. Is the layout substantial right now? “It could potentially be substantial,” Gerber says. “But usually in a movie, there are some people wealthy enough to stand up and do what it takes to get it to be carbon-neutral or to foot the bill for buying bio-diesel as opposed to diesel, or whatever it is. There is usually someone willing to do what it takes to get it done.”

“In the end,” Hall says, “as everybody who's thinking knows, between the environment and jobs, that's a false choice. That's a lie. If you are environmentally sound at a studio, you will create jobs. You will save money. It's just so obvious, and yet, people resist it.”

“Usually, what forces change is somebody involved in the production demanding it,” Devlin says. “I think as long as somebody involved who's important in the production — whether it's the producer, the director, or the star — says, ‘I want this to be a greener production,' … there'll be movement. It won't be successful, though, until there are ways of doing it that do not impact the budget negatively. I am under the impression, from the people that I've talked to that have done this, that it does not have to impact the budget negatively at all. In fact, it could even help the production.”

“The above-the-line people are so wildly, highly compensated that they always should get everyone else to take a minute and think,” Hall says. “It doesn't take long. And it's almost always the assistants that wind up doing it anyway. It's very easy for the executive producer to turn to his assistant and say, ‘Spend an hour a day this week and figure out how we can make this production green.' … You don't even have to think about it. And the truth of the matter is, in the end, ultimately — maybe not right now, but ultimately — it will save you money.”

All of these initiatives are not a uniform or regulated sea change for the industry, but it is the beginning of the end of business as usual. The final scorecard from the UCLA Institute of the Environment on the film and television industry gives the industry a grade of A for ‘environmental best practices' and a grade of C for ‘industry-wide actions.' The direction toward green production for the film and television industry obviously points toward wider consciousness, and, most hope, some sort of industry-wide standard or template.

“The Green Seal is a very small step forward, and very few people have done it — but it's something,” Hall says. “And I think it will grow. The idea is to make it become required, so that you would be humiliated by the community if you don't have a Green Seal on your production.”

The first television show to have a Green Seal credit actually on screen was the NBC miniseries 10.5, about earthquakes. Seals are not appearing on movie credits yet, but it is only a matter of time. And resources for achieving the Green Seal abound.

“We have all sorts of resources to give them of where to get stuff,” Levin says of EMA. “Like low-sulfur diesel for the generators — just go to ARCO. All of their diesel is low-sulfur. It's not so hard. We have all the tips that can make these things a lot easier.”

“The next step for the show-business industry, as a huge user of diesel fuel, is clean diesel fuel, which is available now — and more of the low-sulfur fuel is coming,” Hall says. “But bio-diesel, like on what I run my little VW bug — if you took a big lot like Paramount, if you had someone on the staff working to get bio-diesel, they would save themselves a fortune. I don't know what they're spending on gas, but I guarantee it's a lot. You can make bio-diesel for about 70 cents a gallon. You're saving yourself a gigantic amount of money, and it's easy to do. Just go around and collect cooking oil, add a little methane, and you're done. It puts out zero CO₂, because you're growing stuff to make it, using it as oil, then reusing it as fuel. It's fantastic.”

The advice from these industry environmentalists on what individuals can do is pretty straightforward. “I think a lot of it just has to do with being aware, thinking about it,” Devlin says. “We're a business that tends to not change very often. It took us a hundred years to get off of sprockets and film. A lot of it is just thinking about the way that we do things. That's why it's good that there are these companies that are now advising, because this is an area that is totally fresh to film production.”

“‘Changing the world through shopping' is pretty big,” Levin says of her favorite slogan. “People make choices every day, every minute they're buying stuff, and that's going to be a faster way to effect change than waiting for the laws to change. For everyone to stop fighting in Washington — by the time that happens, all the companies are going to be making more money by doing things green.”

“The most important thing you can do environmentally is join an environmental group,” Hall says, “because as many new light bulbs as you put in your house, as much as you drive your hybrid, the much more important thing is to organize for institutional changes that are going to be massive changes. We realized that at EMA.”

“I think that most things that we ask for in our Green Seal are so logical that they should just be part of what everyone does,” Levin says. “To me, this isn't a big stretch, and it's amazing that we would have to give an award out for these things, but we will, happily. Once these become second nature, then we can stretch and try to do things that are a little more difficult.”