An Awards Show With a Social Conscience

If our polar caps weren’t melting and our landfills weren’t choking up, someone could get a few cheap-shot laughs out of Hollywood’s most recent effort to save the planet.

We’re referring to Monday night’s first (and possibly annual) Environmental Media Assn.’s awards program at the Sony Pictures Entertainment studio, the oft-recycled and retitled MGM lot in Culver City.

First, there’s Hollywood’s symbol of power, affluence and fossil-fuel waste: the stretch limo. This show, a tribute to the rescue of our endangered ecosystems, would prefer something else. Energy saving. Limo and car pools are the order of the night. If you have to come in a limo, bring friends, plenty of friends. Pack them in, shoulder to shoulder.

Then there are the decorations, the glitz of so many Hollywood nights. Monday evening will see only recyclable paper, thank you.

Environmental sensitivity never had it so green.

Here is an awards show, the product of some of Hollywood’s biggest spenders and highest budgeteers, designed solely to deliver the messages of save and conserve, save and conserve. To that end, the show is a salute to Hollywood’s environmentally correct messengers. Here no one kills the messenger, so long as the message is correct.

One measure of the influence of this newest of Hollywood award shows is its ability to capture heavyweight names not just on its board but on its rostrum. Robert Redford will be the keynote speaker, television’s Diane Sawyer will be the host and presenters range from Ted Danson to Jane Fonda to Sting to Bette Midler to Sally Field to Ted Turner.

Award shows that heap praise on performers, producers or writers are almost as old as show business. Most modern versions have a single purpose: to raise money to put on next year’s award show. Some exist with secondary purposes, such as social issues and causes.

To some extent the Environmental Media Awards are also about money. By the time the last limo pool guest arrives Monday, the sponsoring group hopes to have $400,000 in its account. The 75 banquet tables were priced at $10,000 to $25,000 a pop. The final sum will be enough to carry on the organization’s work for another year and to avoid the almost daily tapping of sources for operating funds.

But more importantly, it’s an example of how organizations with a cause are winning the hearts and minds of Hollywood by getting their messages into the shows we watch and the music we hear. The folks from Environmental Media Awards are a good example of how influence works. It’s only a 2-year-old group but already it may have something to show for its germinal years--there were more movies, videos and television shows out there last year with environmental messages than there are awards to hand out in this the first year of its awards program. How many can be directly attributed to the environmental persuaders is probably speculative.

The idea of directly influencing Hollywood’s messengers on current social issues began four years ago when Jay Winsten of the Harvard Alcohol Project began to urge television writers not to celebrate drunkenness but to at least provide designated drivers in their stories.

Next to try the idea: a group of well-connected Hollywood people who thought show business could deliver the message of environmental dangers. That was just two years ago. Most of EMA’s founders were wives of Hollywood executives. Its board of directors is a virtual roll call of Hollywood first families: Eisner, Ovitz, Tartikoff, Mancuso, Lear, Field, Daly, Valenti, Field, Horn.

The founders drafted a plan--Item No. 5 was an annual awards show. They recruited as their president Jeff Spahn, whose closest fling with Hollywood came when he worked political fields for State Controller Gray Davis and one-time presidential hopeful Gary Hart. They formed an organization of four staff members and found a Culver City office.

Here’s how they planned to win friends and influence Hollywood. The key was briefing sessions, particularly for television writers, directors and executive producers. All they wanted was an hour of their time: in groups or in single sessions. They never hoped to suggest story lines or plots. What they hoped to do was to bring along an expert to talk about, for example, toxic waste or polluted oceans, and then offer themselves as sources should they ever want to take on an environmental theme. The group put together a library of environmental materials and offered their service. They would become fact-checkers to the stars.

Almost all of the production people contacted heard them out. There was, of course, some resistance to the idea of television shows being influenced by social propagandists. But as it turned out, the toughest job Spahn had was scheduling meetings, and this in a town that lives on meetings.

The briefings varied. Sometimes the environmentalists met with agents who represented major actors, writers and producers. Sometimes they met with entire writing staffs or groups from the Writers Guild. Other times it was a one-on-one question-answer session in an executive’s office. By June, they had met with representatives of 42 television programs.

The briefings have paid off. Environmental Media announced earlier this year that it would do what everyone else in Hollywood does--give out awards, in their case 10 for television, childrens programming, movies and music videos. It expected maybe a handful, at most 50 entries. Instead it received an unexpected 110 volunteered entries.

Maybe Environmental Media Awards should not have been surprised. The group does have the support of four television network presidents and several other major executives are on its board. But the results are there, at least in television. To get their messages into feature movies takes more time because of the longer window in filmmaking. But in the next few months several films with environmental messages will be coming from Disney, Fox and some independent producers. In cable, HBO and the Turner Network have included messages about waste and recycling in several projects following meetings with Environmental Media Awards.

Once Monday’s awards program is behind him, Spahn plans on actively returning to the new television prime-time season. His small staff of four has been devoted almost exclusively to the awards show--judging was a complicated, time-consuming project with large committees of entertainment people and environmentalists going over tapes and related material.

A second major new target for the group will be another area of television: daytime programs. And right up there: the music video industry where messages haven’t always been sensitive, let alone environmentally sensitive.

What the Harvard Alcohol Project set off and which Environmental Media Awards seemed to have developed to an impressive degree, has stimulated other attempts to get social-issue messages into programming and into the media. Briefing sessions may become Hollywood’s next boom industry. Other groups have been active in similar efforts: the End Hunger Network, the Childrens Action Network and Education 1st! are some of these organizations.

The Environmental Media Awards has practiced conservation in another form. It refuses to coin a nickname. For this group, there is no Oscar, no Emmy, no Grammy.

But it does have a trophy, one designed by Venice sculptor Robert Graham, an abstract globe with raised and incised figures.

It’s made of bronze.

Reclaimed bronze, naturally.