Earth the new star as green fills screen

If “Wall Street” were made today, Gordon Gekko might be a television executive who would shrewdly say: “Green is good.”

Green is now officially big business in Hollywood.

Beginning in the fall, programs on the youth-oriented CW network will include story lines that promote environmental themes. Some of the CW’s hottest stars will tout energy-saving tips in public service announcements. And, the network recently decided, all the paper it uses will be recycled and printed on both sides.

The CW, jointly owned by CBS Corp. and Warner Bros. Entertainment, says it’s jumping on the green wagon because it wants to champion a cause that’s important to 18-to-34-year-olds, a group that’s particularly concerned about global warming.

“This really does align us with the interests of our target audience,” said Rick Haskins, the CW’s marketing chief.

In Hollywood, of course, motivation comes in a different shade of green.

“There’s definitely goodwill involved, but from a business perspective, there is a huge opportunity in the marketplace to support environmental initiatives,” said Cary Rubinstein, who is in charge of buying advertising for Bank of America, the main sponsor of the Discovery Channel’s “Planet Earth” series.

So Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive of General Electric Co., which owns NBC Universal, plans to come to Universal Studios in Los Angeles next month to trumpet the company’s “ecomagination” campaign and its line of energy-efficient products, including lightbulbs, wind turbines and hybrid train locomotives -- and perhaps soon an NBC reality show with an ecological twist.

This month, cable programmer Discovery Communications Inc. said it would dedicate $50 million to produce original shows with Earth-friendly themes. After its success this year with “Planet Earth,” the Silver Spring, Md., company decided to relaunch its Discovery Home digital channel next year as Discovery Planet Green, with shows that explore such topics as eco-design, organic food and green architecture.

Advertisers are lining up.

“This is being driven both by consumer interest, people who want to live their lives in more environmentally friendly ways and by advertisers,” said David Zaslav, chief executive of Discovery. “We’ve gotten enormous encouragement from advertisers not only to take a big swing, but to let them join us as partners.”

“Planet Earth” has attracted nearly 50 million viewers in its first five weeks. The 11-part series, co-produced with the British Broadcasting Corp., focuses on life in such ecosystems as ice caps, caves, mountain ranges, forests and the Great Plains.

“We’ve been exceptionally pleased by the customer feed-back that we’ve been getting,” said Bank of America’s Rubinstein. Last month, the company announced a $20-billion initiative to provide lending and other support to businesses that have products and services aimed at addressing climate change and plans to give $1,000 to customers who qualify for “green mortgages” on homes that meet energy saving requirements.

Meanwhile, competitor Citi Smith Barney sponsors “Robert Redford Presents: The Green,” a show on the Sundance cable channel, along with Lexus, which makes hybrid cars.

Ford Motor Co. is just as motivated to find the right entertainment environment in which to advertise its hybrid SUVs, the Mercury Mariner and the Ford Escape. The Escape even has its own green pitchman: Kermit the Frog from the Muppets.

“Today many companies have separate green budgets in addition to their advertising budgets,” Discovery’s Zaslav said. “We think this whole concept of green living is not a fad. It’s a real movement, and it fits with our brand and what viewers expect from us.”

GE is generating $13 billion a year in revenue from its “ecomagination” products, a coup for an industrial giant working to distance itself from its old reputation as a major polluter. Now, Immelt has charged the heads of GE’s business units to come up with projects that are more energy-efficient and profitable.

For NBC Universal’s theme parks, that means creating ways to recycle more trash. For the film and TV units, it’s about increasing the use of digital film and more energy-efficient lighting in its huge sound stages.

Even though Leonardo DiCaprio drives a Toyota Prius, Hollywood isn’t exactly known as environmentally friendly. A UCLA study in November found that the film and television industry emits 140,000 tons a year of ozone and diesel particulate pollutants from trucks, generators, dynamite and special effects such as earthquakes and explosions.

But on Friday, just in time for Earth Day, the Motion Picture Assn. of America said that in 2006 the major film studios collectively diverted 20,500 tons of solid waste, including studio sets, from landfills to be reused and recycled.

At the CW, the seeds of its campaign -- the network calls it “Free 2 B green” -- were planted nearly a year ago, when Dawn Ostroff, the network’s entertainment president, ran into environmental activist Laurie David at a conference. David was showing Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which she helped produce.

David dragged Ostroff into the screening.

“We’re going to do something,” David recalled Ostroff telling her after the executive had watched the film. Within a few weeks, David met with Haskins, the CW’s marketing chief. “They really decided to take this on,” David said.

The CW had already picked green as its signature color, but Haskins said he was struck by the Cassandra Report, which found that last summer, when “An Inconvenient Truth” was making news, global warming was the No. 1 concern of people under 40.

“This was a group that was raised with recycling in the schools, with Habitat for Humanity and Save the Rainforest campaigns. It’s a group that cares about the environment,” said Jane Buckingham, president of Intelligence Group, the market research firm that conducted the Cassandra study.

“They love to be part of the group. The minute they see the momentum gaining, they want to jump on board. They want to be part of something big.”

Just like Hollywood, which has the environmental establishment on its side.

“The entertainment industry, television networks in particular, have a huge cultural impact,” said Allen Hershkowitz, a Natural Resources Defense Council scientist who advises the CW. “They are important players in reaching those who influence and define our cultural values.”

meg.james@latimes.com