Go for it, Hollywood! Slap all sorts of ‘climate change’ in your movies. Just because most of them tend to tank is no concern, right? You don’t worry about losing money, right?
Hollywood missing the drama in climate change, group says
Hollywood’s response to climate change includes donations, protests and other activism. but it’s apparently missing out on an approach close to home.
Only a sliver of screen fiction, 2.8%, refers to climate change-related words, according to a new study of 37,453 film and TV scripts from 2016-20. A blueprint for ways to turn that around was released Tuesday.
“Good Energy: A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change” was created with feedback from more than 100 film and TV writers, said Anna Jane Joyner, editor-in-chief of the playbook and founder of Good Energy, a nonprofit consultancy.
“A big hurdle that we encountered was that writers were associating climate stories with apocalypse stories,” she said in an interview. “The main purpose of the playbook is to expand that menu of possibilities….to a larger array of how it would be showing up in our real life.”
Hey, I’m just wondering: is this group and its members bankrolling films and TV shows? No? Huh. Why don’t they spend their own money to do this?
Among those who provided funding for the playbook project are Bloomberg Philanthropies, Sierra Club and the Walton Family Foundation.
So, this astroturfed group has big money donors, who could bankroll the “entertainment.” Have at it, Sparkys
But the playbook is asking writers and industry executives to consider a variety of less-dire approaches, Joyner said, with examples and resources included.
“We describe it as a spectrum, everything from showing the impact with solutions in the background,” such as including solar panels in an exterior shot of a building, she said. Casual mentions of climate change in scenes also can be effective.
“If you’re already attached to a character in a story and it authentically comes up in conversation for the character, it validates for the audience that it’s OK to talk about in your day-to-day lives,” Joyner said.
The thing is, people do not want to be preached at in entertainment, and mentioning certain things takes people out of the flow. I love the movie Avatar, but, there are a few comments negatively aimed at the military that just take you out of the flow. Unnecessary stuff.
Dorothy Fortenberry, a TV writer (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) and playwright, said the industry needs to broaden its view of who it writes about, not just what.
“Climate change is something that right now is affecting people who aren’t necessarily the people that Hollywood tends to write stories about. It’s affecting farmers in Bangladesh, farmers in Peru, farmers in Kentucky,” Fortenberry said. “If we told stories about different kinds of people, there would be opportunities to seamlessly weave climate in.”
You want it, pay for it. What’s stopping you?
As part of the study that’s yet to be released in full, researchers checked for references to 36 key words and phrases including “climate change,” “fracking” and “global warming” in TV episodes and movies released in the U.S. market.
Don’t these people have anything better to do than be cult nags?
Not many blockbusters on physics are there?