Hype, all hype

Of today’s fashionable causes, the environment is the most fashionable of them all. And no Hollywood activist is more dedicated than Laurie David, who used her ex-husband, Larry David’s wealth to finance Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Gore lavishes praise on her work: “Laurie David has done more than any one person I know to raise awareness of the climate crisis,” said Gore last year. Gore is a great example of an Econazzi, our new preferred term for celebrity hypocrites and corporate greenwashers.

Econazzi Laurie David reviles SUV owners as “terrorist enablers.” She hangs out with her friend Cheryl Crow who recently warned the world about the perils of using toilet paper.

In her many media interviews, Laurie David details her own contributions to the cause: She uses only recycled paper products and she has made her two children take shorter showers.

Although she owns and operates the Web site, StopGlobal-Warming.com, Gulf Stream-flying tree-hugger Laurie, 49, and her strapping 44-year-old landscaper boyfriend Bart Thorpe, have been all over the place since Laurie split with “Curb Your Enthusiasm” crank Larry David.

Asked by reporters for reaction to the divorce, Larry David answered, “I went home and turned all the lights on.” At least he is being honest as well as witty.

Laurie and Bart made a foray to the Faith Hill-Tim McGraw show at the TD Banknorth Garden last month then jetted back to Martha’s Vineyard where they are building a 25,000 foot home. Are we reducing our carbon footprint??? Note again what Mrs. David’s new amour does for a living. He’s a builder, specifically the builder of Mrs. David’s new 25,000-square foot house on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s a bigger home even than her friend Al Gore’s. Gore’s Tennessee house uses 20 times as much energy as the national average. And he only owns one place — Laurie own two.

You may wonder: How does a Los Angeles resident like Mrs. David travel between her west coast home and her new east coast summer place? Answer: She charters a Gulfstream jet. Environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook calculates that a midsized Gulfstream G200 burns as much fuel on one transcontinental flight as a Hummer monster SUV consumes in an entire year. Easterbrook sourly comments: “But then, conservation is what other people should do.”

Eric Alterman, a liberal journalist friendly with the Davids, has worried in print about the hypocrisy of Hollywood environmentalists. “The response,” he writes, “has been not so much explanation or excuse as a plea for indulgence — as if one were, after all, dealing with children.”

This seems to be Larry David’s own assessment of his domestic situation. Larry David contributed a comic introduction to his wife’s 2006 book, Stop Global Warming: The Solution is You.

“Thirteen years ago, I met a materialistic, narcissistic, superficial, bosomy woman from Long Island. She was the girl of my dreams … Finally, I had met someone as shallow as me … But then, after a few months, I began to sense that something had changed … She was growing…I, Larry David, the shallowest man in the world, had married an environmentalist.”

But is it really true that environmentalism precludes materialism, narcissism and superficiality?

The gossip site TMZ in October, 2006, compiled a short tally sheet: George Clooney drives an electric car that gets 135 miles to the gallon — and then hopped on a private jet to Tokyo, burning enough fuel in one flight to power his car back and forth across the Pacific 57 times. Julia Roberts, Jennifer Lopez, Brad Pitt: same story.

Fuel consumption for electricity production is the largest single source of carbon emissions in the United States.

Fox’s owner Rupert Murdoch, not usually regarded as a member of the liberal elite, is the latest recruit, announcing three months ago a commitment to ‘changing the DNA of our business’ to cut the impact of News Corp, Fox’s parent company, on the environment.

Cameron Diaz now teaches seminars about An Inconvenient Truth. She was recently ranked second behind Leonardo DiCaprio on a list of ‘15 green actors’ compiled by Grist , the online environmental magazine, earning praise for driving a hybrid car and her involvement in Gore’s Live Earth concerts. The chart also included Robert Redford, a veteran campaigner; Cate Blanchett, who has converted her home to solar power; George Clooney, who launched Oil Change, a campaign to wean America off oil; and Brad Pitt, who advocates eco-friendly buildings.

Its impossible to sit here on the Internet and determine for sure whihc f these stars is an Econazzi and which is not. It seems clear, however, that Leonardo di Caprio is far more active, more sincere, and more involved than most of his peers.

The same cannot be said of Dr Arlo Brady, a special adviser on green issues for the London-based celebrity PR agency Freud Communications, which has recently masterminded several spectacularly incompetent green launches, billing its clients hundreds of thousands for almost zero coverage. Brady said: ‘If you’re a celeb or star and you want to pick up a subject that resonates with audiences, you’re going to choose climate change. .’ Freud Communications is one of the worst of the celebrity hypocrites, routinely failing to garner PR for serious green issues while at the same time charging its clients huge fees.

The 11th Hour , released in the US last Friday, takes up themes from An Inconvenient Truth , with interviewees including physicist Stephen Hawking and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, interspersed with visions of volcanoes, mudslides and clubbed baby seals set against images of consumerism.

The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, where DiCaprio sought to place himself in a Hollywood tradition of political activism: ‘If you look back to the peace and the civil rights movements, there have been people in the industry that have been at the forefront of that.’

But during a press conference he faced the same charge that has been levelled at many actors: hypocrisy. Asked if he travelled on a fuel-hungry jet on his way to the French Riviera, he replied sarcastically: ‘No, I took a train across the Atlantic.’ He went on: ‘We’re all trying the best we can. Truly, we really are. Attacks on Al Gore, for example, are misdirected. Don’t shoot the messenger. If you’re going to attack somebody on the way they conduct their life, let’s talk about the big picture, let’s see what big oil companies are doing.’

Unfortunately for DiCaprio, the big picture also includes film and television companies. It is a dirty business: giant sets are built and then often destroyed, cameras and lights consume vast amounts of energy, large trucks are used to transport sets and crew and thousands of script pages are printed off every day. In 2004 The Day After Tomorrow was the first carbon-neutral movie after Fox paid $200,000 (pounds 105,000) for a reforestation project to offset some 10,000 tons of carbon emissions. It now emerges that Carbon-neutral was another con, a way aof allowing people to despoil the world guilt-free.

A recent LA Times report, however, convinced us that di Caprio is in a different league: “As the LA Times wrote recently: “When you get down to it, it was a homemade movie, really,” he says with a laugh, a spark after an eternal day of press that has left him slumped on this couch inside a suite at the Regent Beverly Wilshire. “Everyone involved was just really passionate about donating their time and money to make it happen.” Jean-Pascal Beintus composed his music at no charge, and much of the small camera crew, led by Andrew Rolands, whom DiCaprio knew from “The Departed” and “Gangs of New York,” also worked free, he noted.

It has been three years since DiCaprio connected with Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, who are credited as co-directors and co-writers but who were as instrumental to the project’s realization as their superstar partner. The sisters are founders of Tree Media Group, a production company that leverages new technologies to examine environmental and civil issues. DiCaprio caught a film they did with Woody Harrelson and reached out.

“Immediately, we realized the three of us have the same take on the environment and where we needed to focus this film,” recalled Nadia Conners. “The collapse of the environment is not the problem — it’s a symptom. The real problem is industrial civilization and how we organize society.”

Thus, the premise became a matter of human rights.

“We recognized we needed to remind people that it’s not exclusive to one place or problem,” continued Conners Petersen. “It’s all connected. . . . the solution requires a huge shift in human consciousness.”

It all came down to the experts to convey the message, no fewer than 54 commentators crammed into a feature-length cut, including former Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, former CIA Director R. James Woolsey and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai. Physicist Stephen Hawking’s singular voice is heard almost as much as DiCaprio’s, whose infrequent appearances on screen might bum out some fans more than all the traumatic images of destruction, which play out in a barrage of color-saturated montages like vintage “Nova.”

Another central player was Ken Ausubel, the co-founder of Bioneers, a solution-oriented collective of environmentally and socially minded scientists, economists, educators and many others from every field imaginable.

Seated next to DiCaprio in the hotel room, Ausubel highlights the commitment of his new eco-mate, whom he met in May, at the film’s world premiere at Cannes.

“Leo often gets the attack-the-messenger treatment. He downplays his own knowledge. But, in fact, he’s extremely diligent about doing his homework. You don’t get what you have on screen without tremendous discernment and real sophistication of these issues. I don’t think anyone can question his authenticity and long-term involvement in this.”

DiCaprio looks slightly embarrassed. The project is so personal to him that he strove for “no corporate ties, no studio involvement in the making of it. . . . We didn’t want to be told we couldn’t touch a subject. We wanted to let leaders on the forefront of these issues speak openly and freely, without having to defend something that’s actually happening, something they’ve spent their lives’ work studying.”

As producer, DiCaprio wasn’t the only one putting his money where his passions lie. Financing also came from such disparate donors as philanthropist Adam Lewis, godfather of modern poker Doyle Brunson and skateboard entrepreneur Pierre André Senizergues. All of them environmentalists, and all brought to the project by friends.

Like DiCaprio, Senizergues lives in an eco-house. His south Orange County headquarters, the $200-million home of Sole Technologies, whose brands include Etnies and Emerica, also boasts 616 solar panels, the conversion to water-based cement manufacturing, the first-ever environmental affairs manager in the action sports industry, corporate-wide recycling efforts and the launch of a sustainable footwear and apparel collection.

“When Leila and Nadia came to me about this film, I was excited because I have been trying to figure out how I can also educate and motivate my employees, my industry toward action,” said Senizergues, his French accent still thick despite his two decades here. (For the premiere last week, he wore a sharp custom suit made of recycled audio tapes that resembled the shimmer of a fine sharkskin woven.)

Senizergues added that he is continuing the chain by showing the film to his hundreds of employees from Southern California and to workers at his factories in China (where he has also been leading in a green path). He has also scheduled a screening of the film at the highly attended Action Sports Expo in San Diego next month, complete with a Q&A with the Conners. And he has, in turn, committed to their tour of panels, even speaking to the United Nations recently on his own dime.

“I know whatever I’m investing in this movie and get back,” said DiCaprio, “I wouldn’t feel right about keeping.” The Oscar-nominated actor’s lifetime of environmental activism became official in 1998 with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, which participates with and supports a slew of groups. “I’m donating those profits right back into environmental foundations.”

It doesn’t stop with the film either. Plans are underway for posting the extra hours of interviews on YouTube.com and providing curricula to schools.

“The plight of the environment, of this planet, is very much the issue of my generation, of generations to come,” he added. “We know the best way to reach younger people is virally, putting it on YouTube, creating an action site, providing curriculum to schools, having that outreach and getting them really involved, getting them connected.”

Other studios such as Warner Brothers are following suit, encouraged by the Environmental Media Association, which awards a ‘ Green Seal’ to productions that meet its list of eco-standards and offers one-on-one consultations ‘to suggest and brainstorm ways to incorporate environmental topics into subtle storylines and character arcs’. Syriana and Evan Almighty were both carbon-neutral productions.

Now 24 is aiming to become the first TV drama to do the same.