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Awarding Awareness

Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer

The green-eyed monster of producing sustainable television.

Sidebar
Julia Louis-Dreyfus on The New Adventures of Old Christine

When we last covered the Environmental Media Association, Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's film, An Inconvenient Truth had just been released. Since then, the film has won an Oscar, and Gore has won a Nobel Peace Prize. Now, environmentalism is on the minds of many in media and business. Even General Motors, after killing its electric car, is trying to get on the green bandwagon. However, it's not as easy as wishful thinking or advertising.

Hollywood has long had a number of high-profile, dedicated environmentalists in its community. This is not to say that the film industry itself is anywhere near sustainable. However, almost all of the major studios now have recycling programs that extend beyond office paper to sets and craft service. In November, the Environmental Media Association (EMA) presented its 17th Annual Awards ceremony honoring green pioneers, and it saw its profile begin to rise along with consciousness.

“I would venture to say that 10 years ago, I don't think that there were very many sets at all that were aware they could be environmentally active, eco-friendly sets,” says actor Julia Louis-Dreyfus, whose show, The New Adventures of Old Christine, was nominated for an EMA Award for its environmental messaging content. “That awareness hadn't permeated the Hollywood culture. Now it has, and I think a lot of that can be attributed to EMA.”

This year, the association gave out EMAs in the categories of feature film, documentary, TV episodic drama, TV episodic comedy, reality, and children's live action, as well as its Lifetime Achievement Award (to Trudie Styler), Outstanding Achievement Award (Al Gore and Kevin Wall), Corporate Responsibility Award (event sponsor Toyota Motor Sales, USA), and its Futures Award (Sienna Miller). A half-dozen films and television shows were given Green Seals, which are now the industry standard to acknowledge low-impact and sustainable production practices.

An EMA-nominated show has to contain strong environmental messages (as opposed to being a green production, for which you receive a Green Seal). This year's TV Episodic Comedy winner was My Name is Earl for its “Robbed a Stoner Blind” episode. “I think My Name is Earl is interesting because I actually pitched the show runner, Greg Garcia, about a year and a half ago trying to get him to do more environmental messaging in the show, and during our meeting, he got this idea to do a whole green show,” says EMA President Debbie Levin.

Levin says that this was the year that the EMA show finally graduated to a bona fide television presentation (airing on E! last month). EMA enlisted the services of Done and Dusted (D&D), which is based in the United Kingdom, with satellite offices in New York and Los Angeles. D&D brought in Andrea Purcigliotti of Damage Studios in New York to design the set, which was built primarily of recycled materials. “The hard part, initially, was trying to come up with a design that didn't appear hokey, tree-huggerish, hippy, obvious,” Purcigliotti says. “There's definitely a certain aesthetic that the director was interested in portraying. I think I did the most revisions on a set that I've ever done in terms of having to make a model to drive the point home to the people involved about what we were trying to do and how it was going to look.”

But that was only the beginning of trying to produce a professional-looking show with recycled materials.

“I had sold the clients on these water-bottle curtains,” Purcigliotti says, “which were basically Christmas lights with the bottom of soda bottles; when cut, they look like a flower. … We were able to get some of them, and I did a lot of garbage-picking through the film and movie studios out in Los Angeles because a lot of them recycle, and there are tons of water bottles — it's a staple on set. … [However,] it was next to impossible to get any participation from any of the private recycling companies. LA subcontracts out all of their recycling to private entities. It's a cash cow, and nobody was interested in donating, helping. It was like beating your head against the wall. I couldn't believe the bureaucracy involved in trying to acquire materials.”

In the end, even the EMA's own recycling subcontractor wouldn't help, and Purcigliotti had to have new plastic bottles donated by one of the show's main sponsors, PepsiCo. “Which is quite ironic — that we had to make some trash in order to make the project,” Purcigliotti says.

Another challenge proved to be the chaser lights outlining the entire set, originally planned as compact fluorescent bulbs. “The problem with that is you can't control them,” Purcigliotti says. “It's a gas. It's not a filament, so you can't dim them, and you can't chase them because they need a little warming time. So last minute, we had to switch out to a lower-watt standard Edison light bulb.” (Editor's note: There is a limited but growing selection of dimmable fluorescent lighting available that dims on standard dimmers; there are also dimmable LEDs, which consume virtually no energy and are more appropriate for theatrical and on-set applications.)

Purcigliotti did manage to use all recycled Plexiglas on the set, and she was impressed by the efficient use of materials by the set shops. Still, Los Angeles has a ways to go in her book. “At least in New York we have a wonderful program called Materials for the Arts, which is a partnership between the Department of Sanitation and the New York StateDepartment of Cultural Affairs.” The giant industry garbage clearinghouse is open to non- and not-for-profits and schools, which can take anything they need: bolts of fabric, fittings, paints, lumber, glass, lighting. In turn, when Purcigliotti is making her own garbage, she sets up metal recycling to come in and collect it, or she turns to craigslist: “‘At 8 on Monday night, there is going to be a large amount of gently used lumber’ — that kind of curb alert,” she says.

The EMA Awards show was shot on Sony HDC-1000 and HDC-1500 cameras, and it relied on bio-diesel generators. “That's fairly new,” Levin says, and adds that the production was also entirely offset with the purchase of carbon credits (effectively a donation to an environmental project). “We were offset by a wonderful project,” Levin says. “It's called savingspecies.org. It purchases properties to connect rainforests in order to make it larger and preserve habitat.”

Just two weeks before the EMA awards presentation, green Hollywood got another small boost. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced the formation of the California Film Commission Green Resource Guide, available at www.film.ca.gov/greenproject.

It's a modest start, but still it is another place to glean tips for green production offices and sets. There's also a small directory of caterers, food donation outlets, generators, on-set recycling, and green lumber services.

© 2009 Penton Media, Inc.