Denver Magazine / July 2010 / Project GREENLIT

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Project GREENLIT

Inside a Colorado native’s eye-opening documentary about Green Filmmaking.

As Kermit the Frog famously said, “It’s not easy being green.” This can be especially true in Hollywood, where stars give lip service — and sometimes actual service — to the green movement, yet excess, overconsumption, and indulgence are the norm. Rated one of the most wasteful businesses according to the UCLA Institute of the Environment, the film industry exhausts vast amounts of energy; lays waste to tons of paper, props, and plastics; and emits volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Hollywood producer and Colorado native Miranda Bailey wants to change this. In an effort to spread environmental awareness to the filmmaking community and beyond, Bailey — who runs the production company Ambush Entertainment — assembled a documentary about green filmmaking.

Greenlit, which debuted at the SXSW film festival in March, is a movie about a movie: It follows The River Why — a coming-of-age story directed by Matthew Leutwyler, Bailey’s partner in Ambush — as the flick attempts to green its production. When Ambush signed on to produce The River Why, one of the chief financiers insisted on making it eco-friendly. “I had no idea what ‘greening’ a film meant,” says Bailey, who grew up in Vail and skied with the USSA Ski Racing team for nearly a decade. “When I found out, I thought the idea was absurd given we didn’t have enough money in the budget for post-production, much less to make it environmentally friendly. But I thought, ‘Hey, this might be fun to see what develops.’”

Going Green

Originally intended as a 15-minute DVD extra, Greenlit became an insightful 50-minute movie about the challenges of environmentalism, both in the film community, and the world at large. It even had a green score — Bailey enlisted composer Craig Richey to make instruments out of recycled water bottles and egg cartons. “I ended up learning so much that I had to let other filmmakers know how much we were wasting,” says Bailey, whose composting and waste management efforts were boosted by coproducer Lauren Selman, who heads up an environmental consulting firm called Reel Green Media. “We shot in a rural part of Oregon where there was no access to green technology, so we had to be creative,” says Selman. “Instead of using water bottles on set, we lugged our own water jugs.”

Greenlit covers lots of ground: it explores the concept of environmental filmmaking from recycling to carpooling and examines environmental horrors committed by blockbusters such as The Beach and Titanic (which, Bailey asserts, damaged the natural environments in which they were filmed). It even pokes fun at Al Gore — one scene shows Bailey’s husband getting up and leaving just minutes into watching An Inconvenient Truth. Meanwhile, on the Greenlit set, initial enthusiasm about the project devolves into chaos as recycling efforts are sabotaged in an act of eco-terrorism and Selman is nearly brought to tears. “Someone mixed Styrofoam into my composting bin,” she says. “I ended up knee-high in the nasty dumpster, picking out the Styrofoam bits.”

A Changing Industry

While shooting the film, Bailey kept a goal in mind: convey an important message in a humorous way. “I wanted to make it entertaining so that when people watch it they will change the way they do things,” says Bailey, whose production credits include the 2005 Oscar-nominated drama The Squid and the Whale and Every Day, a new movie starring Liev Schreiber. “My hope is that film students and the next generation of filmmakers have fun watching this movie,” she adds. “And I hope it will make them more conscious about the waste
we produce.”

Slowly, but surely, the industry is changing as well. Major studios such as Warner Brothers and NBC Universal have created green divisions, and filmmakers are experimenting with techniques to dramatically reduce their carbon footprint, such as using biodiesel fuel and solar panels, employing hybrid vehicles, and directing compost to local farming communities.

Today, all of Ambush’s projects employ green filmmaking techniques, and the company’s headquarters also practice green measures. “It’s hard, and sometimes impossible, to be green all the time,” says Bailey. “But you have to start somewhere. It’s just the right thing to do.”

Mark Sells is a nationally syndicated film journalist. He co-owns a production company, HFMedia, and is currently developing a handful of scripts for the large and small screens.