Hollywood goes green

Thompson on Hollywood

By ANNE THOMPSON

Paramount Vantage has vowed to make all its production carbon-neutral, such as recent release 'Year of the Dog.'

The $175 million-budgeted 'Evan Almighty' aims to zero out its carbon emissions.

These days, Shrek isn't the only thing in Hollywood that's green.

In a business where star power is often measured by the scale of one's mansion, charter jet or on-set Airstream, many of the most entitled -- from Leonardo DiCaprio, who will unveil his eco-tract "Eleventh Hour" at Cannes, to George Clooney and Angelina Jolie -- have figured out that doing good not only feels great but plays well with fans.

Now that the global havoc wreaked in 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow" no longer seems outrageously fantastical, it's no shock that some of the same people who voted an Oscar to Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim's global warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth" are doing what they can to save the planet, one movie at a time.

This year's Tribeca Film Festival opened with a Gore-hosted screening of global warming shorts. "We are close to a tipping point where the climate crisis is concerned," Gore told the crowd, "where people in every profession will say, 'Let's solve this.' "

In an inherently wasteful business where "bigger is better" is the mantra, few directors can resist the urge to build a more elaborate set, add another helicopter or detonate a bigger explosion.

But some in Hollywood are increasingly looking to diminish and even reverse the negative impact of film production on the planet, via carbon-offset initiatives such as the Conservation Fund's Go Zero corporate program, Carbonfund.org, Climate Clean, Native Energy and the Environmental Media Association, which awards its Green Seal to productions that meet its list of eco-standards (see chart).

Warners, NBC Universal, Disney and Paramount Vantage, along with stars like Will Ferrell, are among those determined to prove they can make a difference.

It's easy to mock the privileged talent floating these ideas -- surely scripts printed on hemp and using fewer Evian bottles will not stop global warming -- but addressing larger-scale problems like truck emissions and private airplane flights could certainly have a positive impact.

There's no question that moviemaking is a dirty, polluting and eco-unfriendly enterprise. Massive gasoline-fueled generators run long hours to provide power to cameras and lights. Oversize motor homes belch fumes. Big cars and trucks transport sets, props, and actors to and from location. Hardwoods used to create sets are often thrown away. Script pages are churned out by the thousands every day.

While the MPAA discounts the methodology behind November's much-quoted UCLA study estimating that the entertainment industry annually generates some 140,000 tons of ozone and diesel pollutants from trucks, generators and special effects, Hollywood movies definitely gobble up energy resources.

But there's a big difference between making token eco-friendly gestures that play well in a press release -- General Electric topper Jeffrey Immelt's trip to Universal Studios in May to hawk his "ecoimagination" campaign comes to mind -- and the environmental missionaries who are looking to reform studio moviemaking practices one geo-therm at a time.

It was Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich's 2004 "The Day After Tomorrow" that got the ball rolling as the first-ever carbon-neutral movie. Twentieth Century Fox paid $200,000 for a reforestation project to offset some 10,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Now the other Hollywood majors are stepping up, led by Environmental Media Assn. (EMA) co-founder Alan Horn, president of Warner Bros.

"We are stewards of some extremely limited resources. We need to do everything in our power, in every area of our lives, to preserve those resources so those that come after us can live in a better world," he told Variety last year.

Time Warner actually boasts an Environmental Initiatives VP on its payroll: 14-year TW veteran Shelley Billik. She's moved far beyond studio recycling efforts to areas of greater influence such as environmental compliance issues and policy.

"More and more producers and talent are driving the idea of making films carbon-neutral. That provides us with an opportunity to raise awareness, invest in clean energy and communicate that we all have a part to play in making a difference," she says.

Billik works with such filmmakers as "The Nativity" director Catherine Hardwicke, the "Dukes of Hazzard's" Billy Gerber and the "Ocean's" series' Steven Soderbergh during production on choosing construction materials, lighting and air-conditioning and motors, looking to minimize greenhouse gasses.

The studio's first carbon-neutral production was Participant Prods.' "Syriana."

"That was the first time we invested in renewable energy to offset our carbon footprint," says Billik. Because they didn't plan on it from the start, they worked backward to pay back the film's carbon footprint arrears with renewable energy credits, which were significant. The tons used by the production exceeded 2,000. (An average American uses about 12 tons a year.) It cost "Syriana" about $50,000, a mere fraction of the pic's $60 million budget.

Producer Lauren Shuler Donner asked Horn if she could "go zero" with her 2006 family comedy "Unaccompanied Minors." "It is good for the environment and it is good press," Donner says.

After Native Energy worked with Participant Prods. and Paramount Vantage on offsetting the carbon footprint for "An Inconvenient Truth," Vantage president John Lesher vowed to go carbon neutral on all its projects. "You can't work on 'An Inconvenient Truth' and not be deeply affected," says Lesher.

Universal Pictures and the Conservation Fund are pushing an iniatitive to plant a forest of trees -- and simultaneously promote Tom Shadyac's $175 million comedy "Evan Almighty," which they claim is the first comedy to "go zero" and "zero out" the film's carbon emissions.

Producer Shauna Robinson, who works with Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, has tried hard to reduce the carbon footprint left behind on the sets of films including "Anchorman," "40-Year-Old Virgin" and "Knocked Up." Robinson sends Eco and Evo limo services to pick up stars from airports. "Someday I hope it will be a budgeted expense that when we fly people to locations," she says, "the zeroing out of the carbon load will be in people's contracts."

"Above-the-line people have to take money out of their pockets," says EMA executive director Debbie Levin, who is working with California's now-famously green governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to put together a green standard for all the studios. "It's nothing when you look at their salaries. They have to say, 'I want this to happen.'"

Levin foresees a growing movement for people to write carbon neutrality into their contracts. Cameron Diaz, for example, insisted on obtaining a green seal for the film "In Her Shoes" and always flies commercial. "First class isn't so bad," says Levin. "Studios listen to stars."

And Participant and Baldwin Entertainment Corp. won the rights to make the movie adaptation of notorious tree-hugger Julia Butterfly's book "The Legacy of Luna," because Butterfly demanded that the movie "be the greenest motion picture ever made," says Native Energy's Billy Connelly.

What's even greener than Shrek? If producer Gale Ann Hurd has her way, whether or not Ed Norton's version of Marvel Comics' Incredible Hulk is green, the movie, which starts filming in July, will be.

Anthony D'Alessandro and Dade Hayes contributed to this report.