Word: bochner
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that Jones liked enough to visit three times on idea-gathering travels he and his wife Gene made to stadiums, airports and even shopping malls. Over the past few years, Gene also headed a project that commissioned site-specific works for the stadium by artists like Franz Ackermann, Mel Bochner and Olafur Eliasson, museum-quality names whose work you don't usually find in a building with a retractable roof. "I just thought it would be great to have art that's not just football art," she says. "To have something that's very contemporary, like the building, very cutting...
...greenest of them all may be a name that's less known: Hart Bochner. Bochner co-stars in the USA Network drama The Starter Wife, featuring Will and Grace alumna Debra Messing. (To Americans of my generation, however, Bochner will always be known for directing the classic early-1990s college comedy PCU, which proved Jeremy Piven's comedy chops long before he swaggered onto the set of Entourage.) What makes Bochner different from his celebrity peers is that he's willing to do the anonymous, behind-the-scenes work to make the industry more environmentally friendly. "It can't just...
...Bochner and his colleagues at the Environmental Media Association (EMA), where he's been a board member since 2000, are working to change that. He started by creating the EMA Green Seal, which is a badge of approval for productions that follow environmentally friendly practices. "You hit the targets, and you get the stamp of approval," says Bochner, who in his own career as a filmmaker helped ban the use of luan, a rain-forest mahogany wood often harvested in threatened Indonesia, in favor of more sustainable materials. "We want to make this the norm...
Even more admirable is his attempt to get Hollywood to believe that the hybrid Toyota Prius was as hot as a Ferrari. Explains Bochner: "We just tried to position the Prius as the new sexy thing. It wasn't easy - making driving a smaller, more economic car hip was a task. So I'd just ask my friends, 'Do you love your children?' That was the linchpin in convincing them. I told them, 'The decision is yours, but the nation is watching what you want...
...hard to take Hollywood's greens altogether seriously - gee, if only we could all afford to shell out $22,000 for a shiny new hybrid - but Bochner's got a point: the nation does watch Hollywood. The TV and film industry tends to be on the cutting edge of social change, from civil rights to the war in Iraq, and that's true when it comes to the environment as well. From films like An Inconvenient Truth to high-profile attempts at carbon neutrality (by the Fox drama 24 last year), Hollywood is working to set the bar higher...