LOS ANGELES, APRIL 20 (US): Hollywood’s response to climate change includes donations, protests and other activities. But he seems to miss the opportunity to get close to home.
Only a small slice of screen fiction, 2.8%, refers to words related to climate change, according to a new study of 37,453 film and television scenarios from 2016 to 20. A chart of ways to change that was released Tuesday, Reuters reports.
“Good Energy: A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change,” said Anna Jane Joyner, editor-in-chief of The Playbook and Good Energy Foundation, a nonprofit consulting firm. .
“The big hurdle we had was that writers were connecting climate stories with apocalyptic stories,” she said in an interview. “The main purpose of the game guide is to expand this list of possibilities…. into a larger variety of how they would appear in our real life.”
Among those who have provided funding for the Playbook project are Bloomberg Philanthropies, Sierra Club, and the Walton Family Foundation.
Waves of celebrities have raised the alarm about the climate, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda, Don Cheadle and Shailene Woodley. DiCaprio also starred in the Oscar-nominated 2021 “Don’t Look Up,” in which a comet rushing toward indifferent Earth is a metaphor for the threat of climate change indifference.
Joyner said the guide asks writers and industry executives to consider a variety of less risky approaches, including examples and resources.
“We describe it as a spectrum, everything from showing the effect with solutions in the background,” she said, “like including solar panels in an exterior shot of a building.” Occasional cues of climate change in scenes can also be effective.
“If you’re really connected to a character in a story and it appears authentically in a conversation for the character, that proves to the audience that it’s okay to talk about it in your everyday life,” Joyner said.
Dorothy Fortenberry, television writer (The Handmaid’s Tale) and playwright, said the industry needs to broaden its view of who it’s writing about, not just what.
“Climate change is something that at the moment affects people who are not necessarily the people that Hollywood tends to write stories about. It affects farmers in Bangladesh, farmers in Peru, farmers in Kentucky.” “If we tell stories about different types of people, there will be opportunities to seamlessly weave the climate.”
The failure of the entertainment industry to use its storytelling capabilities more effectively on this issue seems unsurprising to Joyner, who has been working on climate change communications across sectors and societies for 15 years.
Joyner said that for the first decade, she felt “screaming into the void” due to the lack of response. She said there was evidence of growing concern among Americans about climate change, including those in Hollywood.
“We’ve all gone through some kind of awakening,” she said. There are a number of documentaries and news programs on climate change, she said, expressing optimism that fiction creators will make steady progress.
Good Energy has funded scenario analysis through the Media Impact Project of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.
As part of the not-yet-fully released study, the 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 US market.