Ed Begley, Jr.

Speech
UCLA - Anderson School of Management
Los Angeles, 2005

Ed Begley Jr.

Thank you all for coming. I’m happy to be here. Thank you, especially Mary Nichols. She and I have been serving on the Clean Air Coalition for years now, talking about the usual suspects and finding ourselves in battles and gains over the years.

It’s important to remind ourselves what we have gained because when you talk about the problem, you can get into a kind of spiral about it and start thinking about how there is no hope and “what’s the point?” You start watching it at home on your big screen TV and see so many big problems such as climate change and how you can’t make an impact. But that is surely not the case.

Mary and I can tell you about the Coalition for Clean Air and the American Lung Association, who is here represented by Andy and many other people. These wonder people banded together a long time ago, some 30-odd years or so, and decided, as I did in 1970, enough already with this horrible smokey-smog.

Anyone else born in LA or been here for many years? I’ve been here since 1949. I was born here, and I remember this horrible choking smog in the Valley and throughout LA. You could not see the Santa Monica Mountain from the middle of the Valley; you could not see the Simi Hills. This is how it was in the mid 50’s and 60’s on most days. It would rain and the winds would blow, and you would see those hills some thirty days a year and the rest was horrible choking smog. And you could not, as a young kid, run without wheezing or breathing hard. I was not then or now an asthmatic, but there are many who are. And people said, “Enough.”

I can report to you now, since the 1970’s, there are four times the amount of cars (which is not good news), yet we have half the ozone. How did we do that? We did that through all of the stuff that people said would drive California to the brink of bankruptcy: clean air regulation, catalytic converters, stationary source reduction, removing VOC’s from paint, all these big and little plays, we came together and made it work. It worked. We have much cleaner air than the 1970s.

But that’s not it. We can’t rest on our laurels. We can’t say, “Wow, good job!” We have to continue to work and that’s what we are doing. We are continuing to work to make it better. That’s what they are doing here at UCLA’s Institute of the Environment: showing the common sense in a solution that makes it work in the business sense where you make money.
It always kills me to hear people complain about the amount of money used to implement a protocol (or any other environmental regulation) – it is the same thing we have been hearing for years about catalytic converters, and stationary source reduction: “We’re going to go broke doing it.” Forgetting that there are jobs created doing these things: jobs making hybrid cars, jobs making electric cars, jobs making natural gases or biodiesel vehicles, jobs making compact fluorescent bulbs, energy-saving thermostats, and double pane windows. These are jobs too.

If you let one industry decide the way things are going to go, that industry will be the oil and coal industry. They want to hold on to what they have, and I understand that. But you have to move into another direction so that other industries will prosper as they have in California.

Having said all that, what does this have to do with motion pictures and entertainment? A great deal. This is about giving an alternative message about eco-home and more simple living. This is about the long history we have with Busby Berkeley movies (and many others) where excess has been celebrated. Excess was the way to go. And most recently, shows where champagne and caviar are wishes and the lifestyles of the rich and famous are drama. They celebrate excess and that message is transmitted around the world with satellite technology. People all over the world want to live like “Dallas” and “Dynasty” because that is the way America lives. We figured out that’s a problem. Not to suggest that it’s wrong. This is a free country. To celebrate success, you should have a big house if you want a big house, but there is a way to have all these things, to have a cold beverage and a warm shower and to do it efficiently. And that’s what we are trying to promote. And that is what this is about.

The motion picture industry has been guilty of great excess on screen and off screen. Paper scripts thrown away, perfectly good 2 x 4’s, 1 x 3’s, large pieces of lumber thrown in dumpsters. But that has changed. We have people to thank like Brett at Disney, and Gretchen from 20th Century Fox for making a change and moving into another direction where material is reused.

The irony did not escape me or the press when we had a big rainforest benefit on a sound stage in the 1990’s, “Save the rainforest!” Finally someone asked, “How many board feet have been used in the history of this particular sound stage where they are holding the benefit tonight?” Silence. The fact is that particular sound stage where we had the rainforest benefit was responsible for destroying 4,000 hectares of rainforest luan. That one sound stage over the years.  Luan is cheap, use it for the sound stage, paint over it, throw it away, and put it in the dumpster. That was the way.

We’ve gone on in a different direction as Mary is showing us. We have tried to demonstrate over the years “a dollar and cents” approach. I’ve been in this since the 1970’s. I started recycling, doing all these things. In the1990’s, I moved into a 1936 house, decided to do a retrofit and to do what I could in a very common sense approach. I did all these things for the love of it and for the environment. I had no idea at the time that it would have such a dollar and cents benefit over the years.

What I always urge people to do is pick the low hanging fruit first. It’s wonderful to want solar and electric cars – I have both. But pick the low hanging fruit first; don’t get all “I have to do everything today.” You drive yourself crazy trying to build a whole system the way I did. Do the common-sense approach that makes good business sense today: compact fluorescent bulbs, energy-saving thermostat, and good insulation.

What can they do on a sound stage, a movie lot, that is a common sense approach? They can start collecting the white paper, mixed papers, and cardboard, and do it in an efficient manner where it makes sense for the studio and does not hemorrhage money. It comes down to the nuts and bolts stuff.
You have to have someone who is responsible, someone who is overseeing it, someone who is on the set. The crafts services person: do they have time to do it? Is it going to be another person who is going to do it? Who is going to collect the recyclables? How does it actually work? It’s great in theory. What are the nuts and bolts of it?

Now finally with Set Resuse. We are going to hear from the people from Reuse today. I just saw this CalMAX thing: available materials, wanted materials? It’s terrific. All this stuff you can get, doing a low budget movie or any budget movie. You can get this stuff. Prop guys want 90 percent of the stuff I see in this book here. It’s available material. This should be widely disseminated material, and I hope it is available.

I also want to take a little bit of pride in, not just the Coalition of Clean Air and Mary (and others that have helped clean air), but also EMA, the Environmental Media Association. We try to interface or act as a liaison between the entertainment industry and the environmental community to tell people how they can clean up their act environmentally. Gretchen has been there for 20th and Brett for Disney. We have tried to show the way that they can do it. It’s great to suggest. For example, I hope you get all those generators the movie groups are using and run them on bio-diesel. It’s a great idea. But what are the nuts and bolts of that, how is that going to happen, how are they going to get biodesel on the set they are shooting in Azusa? How are they going to get it out there? Are there teams, transportation captains? What are the nuts and bolts of this stuff and how does it work? I believe it can work. But we have to make sure we have common sense deadlines: what can we do, and when can we do it?

I want to say, you have to be careful of being too shrill sometimes. I know I had a reputation of being an “in-your-face” kind of guy, kind of an environmentalist, kind of a gorilla fighter. I’ve been an activist certainly. On a set in 1992, a very frightened assistant director came to me and put a little ear piece in. “Ed can I talk to you for a minute?” “Sure Bill, what’s the matter?” “We got a little problem.” “Did anyone get hurt?” “No, no, can I sit for a minute? We have a shot tonight, but we haven’t been able to find an electric station wagon.” He thought I wouldn’t sit in a regular station wagon. Another time, people were afraid I was going to walk off the set, because they didn’t have a recycling bin. I guess people know that there are many serious people out there, but ultimately it comes down to who’s going to handle it, who’s going to lug the glass bottles or aluminum cans, whatever it is? Who is going to do it, the crafts services guy? Is he going to have time? You got to find the money, you got to find the time, you got to find the common sense approach and that’s what you are going to hear in great detail from the people at Reuse, including Brett and Gretchen and all the other people that have been on the ground doing this. I believe it can be done, and I’m so proud to be a part of this today. Thank you very much.