Hollywood Green : Now the Color of Cash Means Environment

Ghosts and gangsters, bullets and blood may have dominated movies this summer, but as fall and winter arrive, look for Hollywood to start turning green.

Filmmakers have been vowing for months to do something about the environment, and all that talk is finally hitting the screen as summer comes to a close.

In David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Laura Dern frets that the depleting ozone layer means the Earth could burn like “an electrical range.” In “Men at Work,” brothers Emilio Estevez and Charlie Sheen play garbage collectors who find a body in the trash and become involved in a plot of murder and environmental poisoning.

Even Don Corleone is cleaning up his act. In 1972, the business of Marlon Brando’s mob chief in “The Godfather” was definitely business. In 1990, the don returns in “The Freshman” as a quasi-ecologist who worries about the ozone and preserving endangered species.

That’s just the beginning. The full-fledged arrival of film vert is still in the works.

Academy Award-winning screenwriter Tom Schulman (“Dead Poets Society”) is working on the “The Stand,” a love story set in the Brazilian rain forest, starring Sean Connery. Production is scheduled to start in January.

Director Oliver Stone, another Oscar winner, has been seeking rights to the story of environmentalist Sam LaBudde, who helped start a national campaign to save mammals after secretly filming the indiscriminate slaughter of dolphins.

Actor Dan Aykroyd is working on a comedy called “Valkenvania,” in which the hero takes on enemies of the environment.

Robert Redford, who has long been involved in social causes, is working on a film based on the life of Chico Mendes, who opposed development in the Brazilian rain forests and was shot to death in 1988.

“We’re going to begin to see a lot more films whose story lines actually revolve around environmental issues,” predicted Andy Spahn, president of the Environmental Media Assn., an advocacy group of producers, directors, actors and agents that has been assisting filmmakers wanting to include environmental themes.

“You’ll see political thrillers with an environmental hook, movies involving environmental crimes, discussions that deliver an environmental message but may not be central to the story line, two people talking about recycling, or cloth diapers or Styrofoam,” Spahn said.

David Zucker, one-third of the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker production team that developed the comedy “The Naked Gun,” thinks solar energy can have ‘em rolling in the aisles for “The Naked Gun II.”

The film reunites Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley, the stars of “The Naked Gun,” and is scheduled for release next summer.

“The whole movie is about the environment and the whole issue of recycling energy,” Zucker said.

But Zucker hasn’t forgotten about his characters. A “poignant” love story between Nielsen and Presley is promised, with a closing line that neatly encompasses the chemicals in the sky and the fire down below:

“Love is like the ozone layer,” Nielsen advises. “You never miss it until it’s gone.”