Jane Fonda, Quinta Brunson and Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, were among the stars who took part in the 2023 Hollywood Climate Summit on Thursday, leading conversations about environmentalism in their projects and the culture at large.
Held at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills, the two-day conference kicked off with keynote conversation “We’re All In: Why You Should Be Excited About the Hollywood Climate Movement,” with Brunson, Kwan and Scheinert. Everything Everywhere All at Once producer Jonathan Wang started things off with an opening statement, noting that on their Oscar-winning film, the team “did some good, we made some baby steps. We hired an eco-coordinator, we made sure that our food went to farms or to homeless shelters, we made sure that we could do the best we could. But these were all very, very small, teeny, tiny steps. As we finished the movie and we started thinking about the next film, we want to think about our industry at large, and thinking about how to scale up, I was kind of naively optimistic.”
“As we go through the summit, I challenge us to recognize these red flags that we have, that we’re seeing we can’t just swap bad fuels for good fuels because right now we are insatiable,” he continued. “As soon as we get a little more appetite, we just stuffed it with more energy and energy and energy. And that’s the problem. What is that problem? It is our egos. It’s this belief that we can endlessly consume at an infinite pace on a finite planet.”
Brunson and Daniels then sat down for the conversation, moderated by Earth Angel CEO Emellie O’Brien, as Kwan reflected on how he and Scheinert started their careers in the digital space chasing viral moments before realizing they wanted to do work that was actually meaningful. Brunson had a similar start in the industry, noting, “I also wanted to implement messages without trying, and when I was making shorter content, you couldn’t do medicine in the applesauce. It had to be about that. I wanted to make television where I could slowly feed the message in over time.”
“A lot of people actually have race super fucking handled right now and that’s tight. Something that I feel like no one is focusing on, especially as it pertains to minorities, is the climate crisis in conjunction with race,” she said, pointing to Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” as inspiration as well as Pixar’s Wall-E, which she joked was “not my favorite Pixar movie by mile — it’s just not, I just don’t think it’s that good. But I was like, ‘This children’s movie has changed the way I think about what we’re doing.’ At the end of the day, that was a movie about a robot and another robot falling in love, but the whole backdrop was this message of what are we going to do about the planet. That changed how I thought about how we could talk about trying to do something about the climate crisis.”
Scheinert commented how on their sets, he and Kwan look for environmental measures that are going to make the movie better and people’s jobs easier as well as be good for the planet, saying, “There is always a bit of a conversation with our department heads about like, ‘Please tell us if what we’re asking is going to suck.’ I’m so happy when we find these ways for it to just make everybody happier to be there and prouder of what we’re doing.”
Brunson said she’s had those same conversations on Abbott Elementary when wanting to cut plastic water bottles from the set, but acknowledged, “I know who probably uses plastic bottles the most and it’s our below-the-line crewmembers. These are the people who are carrying things, doing the hard jobs. And I was like, ‘How do you guys feel if we switch to like these really fucking fancy water bottles, you can refill them, I’ll buy them,’ and then that was a change that got to happen from our below-the-line up. And I think that just really makes a huge difference.”
Brunson also explained her approach to integrating environmental storylines into Abbott Elementary, noting she does research with her own family to see that “being beat over the head with the message will make them turn the TV off.”
“The second episode of the last season of Abbott starts with ‘Look how hot it is. We don’t even have the infrastructure in the school to support how hot it is outside.’ In the pilot of Abbott, it’s Ava who says, ‘Why is it January and hotter than a devil’s booty hole?’” she continued. “That’s the fun in it though, to have Ava point it out so that my mom has a nice chuckle, but then goes, ‘Why is it February, January and hotter than the devil’s booty hole? Let me look that up.’ I know it seems so stupid but I think that’s really necessary for people who otherwise would not really be interested in looking into the climate.”
Added Kwan, “We are not here to make what I call fast entertainment — there’s fast fashion, there’s fast food, fast entertainment. How much stuff can we pump out? How much attention can we suck and extract from our audiences? We have to be really precise with what we’re doing.”
Later in the day, Fonda led a “Hollywood’s Time to Take on Big Oil and Gas” conversation with climate activists Nalleli Cobo, YoNasDa Lonewolf and Sylvia Arredondo, as well as environmental reporter Emily Atkin. The discussion focused on the fight to end the use of fossil fuels, as Fonda told the crowd, “I think it’s helpful for us all to realize that there’d be no climate crisis if there was no racism.”
Referencing the oil companies, she noted, “They choose communities of color, they choose indigenous communities, they choose communities of poor people who don’t have the political power to fight back. You don’t see these in Bel Air — maybe one at the high school used to exist, and now it’s gone — because white people run Bel Air, and so they don’t put their wells here.”
“All of L.A. is built on what used to be huge oil reserves, but they cite the drilling and the fracking in poor communities. They’re called sacrifice zones, that’s what they’re called out in public by Big Oil and Big Gas, sacrifice zones,” she continued. “‘Who cares about those people,’ as far as they’re concerned. It kind of helps the one percent to have a climate crisis, because the people they want to get rid of will get sick and die all over the world. I mean, frankly, that’s how I think their minds work.”
The discussion also touched on Senate Bill 1137 — a California law that passed in 2022 banning new oil and gas wells near homes, schools and other community sites — which is currently on hold and will be put to a referendum vote in 2024.
“If this attempt on the part of Big Oil to overturn 1137 succeeds, in a state like California, a blue state, a so-called environmental state; if it passes here, this is going to become a precedent for undermining democracy around the rest of the country,” Fonda said. “It’s another reason why it’s so important that we not allow this to happen.”
