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?
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
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