Hollywood Goes Green

Is today's environmental consciousness a trend that will continue?

by Dave Roos | Published July 24, 2006

For those who doubt the awesome power of celebrity, we give you the Toyota Prius hybrid. When the Prius debuted in the U.S. in 2000, it was a curiosity--an undeniably geeky car with Matchbox-sized wheels, questionable horsepower (zero to 60 in 13 seconds) and a driving style of “lurch[ing] and buck[ing] down the road,” in the words of Car and Driver Magazine. Toyota sold a few thousand models in 2000 and sales projections for the upcoming years were modest.

Then Leo bought one.

When DiCaprio drove his Prius off a Los Angeles lot in 2001, Hollywood’s “green” berets saw their golden opportunity. “We’ve made it the cool car,” says Debbie Levin, president of the Environmental Media Association (EMA), an organization dedicated to promoting a low-impact lifestyle through “environmental product placement” in TV and film. Levin estimates that the EMA has helped get the Prius into 200 celebrity homes. It’s become a must-have car in Hollywood.”

As the old saying goes, what’s good for Cameron Diaz is good for America. Total hybrid sales leapt to more than 200,000 units in 2005, and even in a market where upscale SUVs and sleek sedans have gone “green” the humble Prius is still king. In May 2006, the Prius sold 8,103 units; its closest competitor was the Honda Civic hybrid with 2,890.

“Clooney wanted a Prius,” says Levin referring to one of the 25 celebs who pulled up to the 2006 Academy Awards in a hybrid. “They had a choice: It could be a Lexus, a Highlander or a Prius,” says Levin, “and he said, ‘I’ll make a bigger statement in a Prius,’ which was lovely.”

Celebrities have never been shy about making statements about their personal crusades, be they political or, well, political. The American public has been equally un-shy about resenting them for it. There’s just something inherently grating about celebs on a soapbox, even when you agree with them. Yes, you’re rich and beautiful and you can cry on cue, but unless you also have a PhD in international relations, I’ll look elsewhere for information on genocide in Darfur.

Moviemakers understand this, and that’s why they’ve traditionally avoided direct preaching from the big screen and instead used fictional storylines to address real-life issues. “Disney’s attitude toward animals has had a big effect on the environmental movement,” says David Ingram, author of Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema. “It’s not direct,” he says, “but it’s a conditioning of people’s attitudes toward nature.”

When a kid walks out of Free Willy, he knows he just saw a heartwarming tale of a boy and a big mammal. But he also understands the importance of preserving natural habitats for whales. Don’t say Bambi didn’t set the NRA back 100 years.

Ingram says the 1990s saw a spate of films addressing topical environmental issues, from rainforest depletion (FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Medicine Man) to corporate polluters (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action). Even Steven Seagal, an environmentally-sensitive actor with a weakness for kicking people in the face, used his directorial debut, 1994’s On Deadly Ground, to crack some skulls at a corrupt Alaskan oil company.

There comes a time, though, when Hollywood’s indirect approach to environmental influence just won’t cut it anymore. Director Roland Emmerich learned this the hard way when he tried to bring global warming center stage with his 2004 eco-disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, in which melting polar ice caps cause a catastrophic flip-flop in ocean temperatures, creating massive storm systems that drop killer tornados in L.A. and send the entire northern hemisphere back to the Ice Age.

While the film generated solid box office and plenty of press coverage on the global warming debate, its over-the-top special effects and loose scientific standards made it an easy target for climate change skeptics who claim the whole global warming-asend-of-the-world scenario is equally fictional.

As part of the public relations campaign surrounding The Day After Tomorrow, former vice president Al Gore traveled to New York to give a 10-minute PowerPoint presentation on the potential impact of carbon emissions on the planet and on the future of mankind. Laurie David, one of Hollywood’s most ardent environmental activists (whose husband, Larry David, not coincidentally drives a Prius on his show “Curb Your Enthusiasm"), was also on the panel that day.

When Gore finished his presentation, David was floored. “My jaw dropped,” she remembers. “I couldn’t believe it. This was the best tool that we ever had to explain this problem to the American people.” What David realized is that the time was ripe for the public to get the real facts about global warming straight from the source, unfiltered and unencumbered by a romantic sub-plot or a good car chase. Less than two years later, An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, a feature-length expansion of Gore’s original presentation produced in part by David, directed by Davis Guggenheim and distributed by Paramount Classics.

“This movie had to be made because millions of people need this information,” says David. “The American public has been grossly misinformed on this issue and Al Gore had the most concise, clear explanation of what’s happening and what we need to do.”

Following on the heels of An Inconvenient Truth is this summer’s Who Killed the Electric Car? by first-time director Chris Paine. Paine frames the film as a “whodunit?” murder-mystery to solve the unexplained disappearance of the EV1, General Motors’ first commercial electric car that debuted in 1997 and was pulled from the roads (and literally destroyed) by GM in 2003.

These two feature-length, studio-backed documentaries mark an important shift in Hollywood’s approach to environmental moviemaking, says Ingram. “A movie like The Day After Tomorrow is obviously extremely exaggerated,” he says, “but this new crop of documentaries can’t be accused of being purely fictionalized accounts of these issues.”

Also, Ingram says, studios are less reluctant to pick up longform documentaries due to the recent resurgence of the theatrical documentary as box-office success. Beginning with Michael Moore’s 2002 Oscar-winner Bowling for Columbine, audiences have made surprise hits out of small-budget docs like Super Size Me and Spellbound. Who can deny (or explain, for that matter) the monumental success of 2005’s March of the Penguins?

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COMMENTS | POST A COMMENT

Comment by Joe on 2/28/08 at 10:45 am

I don’t care if Hollywood goes green, nature can be save until USA join Tokio protocol!!

Comment by harry fuckin' blogger on 2/28/08 at 10:48 am

Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema - crappy movie, I wonder if anybody likes it (only mother could)....

Comment by Cool Blog on 2/28/08 at 11:03 am

Thanks for the great post! Green Peace!! :D

Comment by Old Lady Killer on 3/01/08 at 5:10 am

“Is today’s environmental consciousness a trend that will continue?” It is 2008 now, the trend is still going…

Comment by ALL IN ONE FORUM on 3/24/08 at 2:47 pm

this concept has transfered to other industries now like the music industry not just movies.

Movies

Comment by car leasing on 3/26/08 at 4:59 am

I am happy that Hollywood has taken the step to being “green-conscious”. We all need to be environmentally conscious to preserve the environment we are enjoying now so our children and our children’s children can also enjoy it. It is a good move for Hollywood to use the faces and popularity to encourage people to be environment conscious as they hold more convincing power than most people.

Cheers and thanks for posting this article.

Sincerely,
Michelle

Comment by Articles on 4/05/08 at 5:01 am

Hello, nobody REALLY cares about environment, they only pretend to!!!

Comment by New car quotes on 4/18/08 at 5:41 pm

If we don’t do it now, when are we going to do it.  The car industry started to make some changes with the Hybrid technology. Hybrid Cars Are Environment Friendly,
they emit lower toxic emissions compared to conventional gasoline-powered cars due to less gasoline being burned. It is environmentally friendly, causes less pollution and releases less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Comment by Jermaine N Wieland on 5/01/08 at 5:19 pm

Sorry for a dumb question, but I really can’t get, what NPR is?…

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