Hollywood Goes Green

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

by Dave Roos | Published July 24, 2006

(Page 2)

An Inconvenient Truth and Who Killed the Electric Car? also capitalize on the anti-corporate and particularly anti-Bush strain that runs through many recent feature-length documentaries (Fahrenheit 9/11, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Why We Fight, etc.). Gore has obvious bones to pick with Bush and has been a sharp critic of the President’s foreign and domestic policies, particularly his refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.

Paine’s movie makes the obvious connections between the Bush administration and big oil, but the director says Who Killed the Electric Car? is far from a political attack. “Going after Bush is just way too easy,” says Paine, referring to the President’s clear disinterest in environmental causes. “That stuff, everyone’s tired of it, me especially.” Most importantly, Paine says, his film is about “why America is having such a tough time getting out of the 20th century--why we’re having such a hard time getting out of oil.”

Paine drove the EV1 when it became available for lease in California in 1997. When GM refused to extend his lease or allow him to buy the car, he suspected that they had never planned to sell it in the first place. It was just a way to temporarily appease California lawmakers. To draw attention to GM’s trashing of the electric car program, Paine and others organized an “only-in-Hollywood” funeral in 2003, where they eulogized and symbolically buried the EV1. When no major media outlets decided to dig deeper into the electric car story, Paine, who has produced two other documentaries, took matters into his own hands.

“The only way the story’s going to be told is in a long-form documentary,” Paine says. “Documentary is serving this role more as media gets co-opted.” To make sure his journalism was airtight, Paine hired “Frontline” reporter Jessie Deeter and a team of fact-checkers and lawyers.

That doesn’t mean that Who Killed the Electric Car? plays like a “200-page New Yorker essay,” Paine promises. Analyzing the success of recent documentaries, Paine knew that he had to entertain the audience as well as inform them. “I don’t want people to go into the theater and spend $12 to be depressed and bored to death,” he says. So Paine created what he calls “a real crowd-pleaser” using a lot of celebrity perspectives (Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks) and playing up its Murder on the Orient Express tone.

Even though documentaries have meant box office winners for studios as of late, David promises that An Inconvenient Truth isn’t out to make an easy buck. “There is not one person who was involved in this that thought for one second about the money it would make. Not one second.” Instead, she says, there are people in the movie industry, as there are in many other businesses around the world, who are realizing that they can make changes to their products and internal policies that will affect positive change in the environment. “Paramount Classics took such a risk taking this film on and is donating five percent of the gross back to the cause,” David says. “Show me a movie studio that has done that.”

Once a studio executive is informed of the clear and present dangers posed to the environment from our over-reliance on fossil fuels, David says, “they want to do something.” For her, numbers are important, not dollars. “It’s all about how many bodies have been in the seats. It’s not about the box office,” she says. “That’s 1,000 more people who now have the truth.”

As for people who criticize celebrities for using their public visibility to promote personal causes, David calls it “ridiculous. I think it’s very easy to marginalize people in Hollywood… because celebrities do influence popular culture and people,” she says. “The opposition wants to marginalize them because they have an effect.”

Levin is banking on it. “Our whole mission is to make it cool to be environmentally-conscious,” she says. “We like to use all these young actors who are in magazines all the time to do things like walk out of a Whole Foods Market with a canvas bag or get out of their hybrid cars--[we like] catching them in the act of their normal lives.”

According to the moviemakers, these two documentaries couldn’t have come at a better time. With gas prices soaring and another hurricane season right around the corner, regular people, not just celebrities, are asking, “What’s going on?” says Paine. Asked if she thinks these documentaries constitute a “green” Hollywood trend, David has a better explanation: “I don’t think it’s a trend,” she says, “I think it’s a light bulb going on. MM

SHARE THIS STORY Digg StumbleUpon Facebook Del.icio.us Reddit Yahoo

TAGS

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?…

POST A COMMENT

OUR PRIVACY POLICY | We will not publish or sell or share your email address or other personal information. Read more.

Name:
Email:
URL:

Type the word you see below:

Comment:

Remember my personal information

Notify me of follow-up comments?

SITE DELIVERY OPTIONS