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Author:
Judith James
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Judith is the editor-in-chief of TRACTION and a film, stage and television producer who is in a film partnership with Richard Dreyfuss at Dreyfuss/James Productions and a theater partnership with Camille Cosby.
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Judith James is a film, stage and television producer who is in a film partnership with Richard Dreyfuss at Dreyfuss/James Productions.
Originally a New York theatrical producer of 11 award winning plays, her first television production was the Emmy winning "IN HER OWN WORDS" for KCET and American Playhouse and the Mark Taper Forum .
Her film credits include an executive producer of QUIZ SHOW, a producer of MR. HOLLAND?S OPUS, producer of TRIGGER HAPPY starring Dreyfuss, Jeff Goldblum, Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, and movies for HBO, TNT, ABC and CBS. In addition she has served as consulting producer on Mr. Dreyfuss? films.
In a theatrical partnership with Camille Cosby, Judith also produced the Broadway play of HAVING OUR SAY; The Delany Sisters? First 100 Years by Emily Mann, subsequent tours and the movie version, directed by Lynne Littman, for CBS, starring Ruby Dee and Diahann Carroll. HAVING OUR SAY received the coveted Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism.
In January 2006, she wrapped principal photography on the thriller, THE FOREST, which she produced in India in the foothills of the Himalayas. It is by writer/director Ashvin Kumar, an Academy Award nominee for a short film last year.
She is presently developing a Broadway musical on Pearl Bailey RAW PEARL with Bill and Camille Cosby and, with Viva Productions, readying the independent film, DAYS OF FEAR to star Woody Harrelson to shoot in South Africa.
In January 2005, Ms. James was instrumental in securing and constructing for WOMEN IN FILM an alliance with General Motors under which GM has supported a myriad of WIF programs and events for 3 years ending 2007.
She is the editor-in-chief of TRACTION.
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IT'S NOT EASY BEING GREEN...
A series of articles about the greening of productionIndividually we can recycle bags, capture the sun’s energy, mount windmill’s and buy responsible cars – and we do. Individuals in the entertainment industry tune in early, do the research, spend the money and speak out.
But collectively, our industry - as in the industry it takes to create our product – has been a major polluter everyplace we go.
It’s not like “we” aren’t aware, but the magnitude of our impact is equaled by the sheer size of the problems. Keeping a crew of 140 people supplied for 45 days with water without plastic has become daunting. Studios have taken steps to promote and recycle sets and materials because that’s something they can do. Film Commissions in states here and abroad are aggressively putting out green resource guides for productions to reduce their environmental impact on locations.
But consider the main polluter we use, that which we can’t do without. Consider how much fuel we use. Generators, night shoots, “distant locations”, trucks per shoot, idling trucks, moving cranes, moving everything, people, wardrobe, grip equipment, out to the set and back, move locations, fly crews, use helicopters.
We’ve been using diesel engines and petroleum diesel which are at least better for the planet than gasoline, whether or not we were aware of it. Rudolf Diesel’s gift to the world was inventing the intrinsically efficient diesel engine, which actually produces less greenhouse gas pollution than a gas engine. Further, petrodiesel is less-refined than gasoline, so the cost to produce it is 25% less than producing/refining gasoline for gasoline engines. But petrodiesel is still very eco-costly given that all oil has to be brought up and out of the ground and moved over huge distances, whatever the grade.
So if diesel engines could run on something other than petroleum based fuel.....
That’s what Voya and Trice Mikulic thought about after reading the information emerging in 2003 about carbon emissions, particularly about how our industry was such a major polluter. Voya, for 20 years was a gaffer and smelled the smell of petrodiesel. He also had a degree in business and one in film and a growing environmental consciousness. What about Bio-diesel and our industry?
They researched it.
1) Diesel engines are instantly adaptable to a vegetable based oil. ( In 1892, Mr. Diesel had thot farmers would use Peanut oil which the farmers could grow and produce locally. That was before the petro lobby grew.)
2) Diesel engines operate better, stay cleaner, on vegetable based oil (though they have to be watched for the first several months of use for gunk filtering out from the earlier use of petrodiesel.)
3) And it’s so much better for the environment.
Concurrently the studies were being released: depending on the mix between petrodiesel and biodiesel, reported an EPA study, biodiesel reduces lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by 10 to 50 percent over petrodiesel. (Because of caution and the matter of supply, anything from B5 – mixed with 95% petrodiesel- to B100 or all biodiesel.) Biodiesel was shown to reduce the emissions of everything - carbon monoxide, particulate matter (PM), and sulfates, as well as hydrocarbon and air toxics emissions. (It may emit slightly more nitrogen oxide according to some tests – not, relatively. a crucial minus.) What’s more, a Department of Energy study confirmed, when you add the lowered cost of producing biodiesel to the using of it, there’s a 78.5% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions using a gallon of it versus using a gallon of petrodiesel. If it’s being grown more ‘locally’ and the refining of it isn’t nearly as complicated as refining petroleum products, producing it produces less pollutant. Moving it over shorter distances in trucks powered by it – no contest.
Given our growing understanding of eco-costs, let alone politics, it should be a huge plus. Has it’s time come? If there’s a demand for it, could it be supplied?
In 2005, Voya and his wife Trice, deciding the benefits of biodiesel were unarguable for the industry, people and the environment, started Standard BioDiesel, committed to delivering the message of bio-diesel and the biodiesel fuel itself to the industry. Richard Blackledge with a background in biodiesel advocacy joined them in 2007.
Voya is a man on a mission: "The film and television industry is second only to the petroleum industry as a source of pollution. It doesn't need to be that way; there is a viable solution that will boost the industry's image, improve the working conditions on set and save productions money, that's why I started Standard Bio Diesel."
To commit to the amounts needed for one show, let alone for an industry, Standard Bio Diesel has turned to US biodiesel refining companies in the mid-west and north-west which ‘manufacture’ their fuel primarily from soy beans, locally grown, and to Canada where the oil manufactured is from rapeseed ( resulting in Canola oil or Canadian oil low in acid – always interesting where words come from.) FYI in South America, the biodiesel fuel is mostly palm oil. As Richard says – if the sun shines on a plant that produces oil, you can capture it for fuel. It’s an earth-friendly concept.
Understandably, getting the industry to switchover is first a matter of education. But not using bio-diesel isn’t due to suspicious, slow-moving corporations worrying over the bottomline (it’s competitively priced with petrodiesel). What we probably don’t know or don’t think of is that the trucks ‘we’ use are either driver-owned or transpo-captain owned. It’s taking time for those individuals to sift through the pros and cons.
1) Is there conversion needed? (No – just watch out for the gunk factor.) And not only is there no need for conversion, an engine can return to petrodiesel or any mixture of petro and bio that’s available without a slow-down.
2) Is it ‘bad’ for the engines? (No, they operate better and therefore longer, less wear and tear, though rubber bearings may need checking, not because of damage, but for what ‘preservatives’ aren’t in the biodiesel.)
3) Does it spew fumes that drivers have to deal with (No – and Standard BioDiesel tried it at the grade of B99 on the closed sets on INDIANA JONES. No smell, no breathing difficulties, no soot.)
4) Does it contribute to asthma and all related ills? (Not at all – the EPA controlled lab tests on rats showed no lung damage at all).
There is one odd deterrent, as is often the case when you dig into the reasons why something doesn’t get done. Neither a lack of consciousness or caring determines that some manufacturers’ older warranties may not cover an engine if non-petroleum based fuels are used. Truck owners have to look into that. Assumedly, as a deterrent,
it will become an obsolete rule.
In answer to waiting for awareness to catch up, it certainly doesn’t hurt if there’s a nudge from corporate. About a year and a half ago, at Fox News Corp, a direct order from “above” (Rupert Murdock) determined that the entire News Corp would become carbon-neutral by 2010. (It is so much simpler, when positing a supposed ‘enemy’, if they’d fit the stereotype.)
Mike Posey, the Manager of Production at 20th Century Fox Television, immediately sourced and tried a combination of biodiesel and petrodiesel on their show 24 with everyone on the show’s enthusiastic support. Using a test mix of B5 (5 parts biodiesel to 95 parts petrodiesel) , the reduction in carbon emissions by use of biodiesel was 5 metric tons over 8 episodes. With additional efforts (lighting, green power purchases, motion sensor equipment etc.) the show reduced their footprint by 243 tons for those 8 episodes. With success at hand Mike went to Standard BioDiesel for supply and he and the individual transpo departments turned My name is Earl, then The Unit and The Women’s Murder Club into bio-diesel sets (using variants of B5 to B20).
(An additional note regarding Fox News Corp – as a corporation it has reduced its carbon footprint through all the abovementioned efforts considerably. They are on their way to their 2010 goal. Congratulations Fox!)
Similar studies and intentions and will are showing up at all the studios. So, slowly but surely . Of course the petroleum fuel suppliers are still behaving as if biodiesel is a fad, leaving it to Voya , Trice and Richard to educate, educate, educate and then to grow and grow and grow to supply an industry which seems almost ready to listen.
We should do this. It’s a proven, major step and it counteracts the adage – “nothing grows where a film crew goes”. While we are trying to figure out what to do about water bottles and people’s habits regarding water on the set, while we re-adjust the concept of perks to mean something other than Excess, it’s something we can do that makes a huge difference. And since the bottom-line does matter to even environmentally aware Big Companies, it’s not only competitive with petroleum now, it could even cost less than petroleum soon because petroleum is either under foreign countries or under deep oceans.
Should we do it? Yes. Can we do it? Of course.
www.standard-biodiesel.com
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