Hollywood missing the drama in climate change

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 percent, 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 on April 19.

"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."

Among those who provided funding for the playbook project are Bloomberg Philanthropies, Sierra Club and the Walton Family Foundation.

Waves of celebrities have been sounding the climate alarm, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jane Fonda, Don Cheadle and Shailene Woodley. DiCaprio also starred in "Don't Look Up," the 2021 Oscar-nominated film in which a comet hurtling toward an indifferent Earth is a metaphor for the peril of climate-change apathy.

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...