How do you make climate science or (yawn) energy efficiency dramatic enough to captivate a Showtime audience more used to the serial killers, sex, and nail-biting plot twists of Dexter or Homeland?
I was part of the production team behind Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime’s new documentary series on the global impacts of climate change. Our mandate was clear. For global warming to get airtime, we needed the essentials: Drama. Celebrities. Emotion.
We needed to make climate, well, climactic.
As production unfolded, we kept a list of ‘commandments’ in mind.
1) Pick your natural disasters carefully.
When it comes to good television, not all weather events are equal. Crashing waves and raging fires: Great! Dry corn heads? Not so much. Tornadoes make for exciting footage – clouds meting death, debris swirling across the sky – but the climate link is “tenuous at best,” series co-producer Joel Bach said in an email. “So we avoided those completely.”
For the series’ producers, scientific accuracy came first, snazzy visuals were a bonus. Those dry corn fields, it turns out, are a huge climate change problem. We needed to find a compelling narrative. How? By following commandment No. 2.
2) It’s all about the people.
Production on the series started in the summer of 2012, and one of my colleagues spent his first month on the job cold-calling ranchers in Texas daily with one recurring question: Any rain lately?
Drought is a slow, visually unexciting weather shift. But its impact can be devastating. In communities like Plainview Texas, where the biggest employer, a meat-packing plant, closed when the water ran out, the reality of a changing climate has turned people’s lives upside down and inside out.
“At times, in the edit room, I found myself feeling that it would be impossible for me to recover,” editor Paul Frost told me in an email about his response as he reviewed our footage of Hurricane Sandy victims. This empathy, this feeling of “what if it happened to me?” is perhaps the main reaction producers are hoping the series will generate. There’s a reason we have executive producer James Cameron in the series’ trailer saying, “This is 100% a people story.”
3) Celebrity life is crazy. Deal with it.
I’ll be brutally honest: Trying to plan shoots around the schedules of people more overbooked than the Library of Congress was a nightmare. Other times, the shoots themselves were madness. Producer Jesse Sweet once described his first day filming with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Brussels as “a mix between being paparazzi and riding a bull.”
“Everywhere we went he was mobbed,” Sweet told a short-lived, in-house newsletter early on in the production. “He kept moving to avoid a complete crush, so you had to race to keep up with him while being jostled by pushy Eurotrash reporters.”
One of the signatures of Years of Living Dangerously is its celebrity correspondents – ranging from New York Times columnist Tom Friedman to Hollywood A-listers like Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jessica Alba.
How did two hard-news, 60 Minutes guys enlist top Hollywood talent? A first lucky break came in the form of Joel’s old college friend, who happens to be the niece of Ocean’s Eleven producer Jerry Weintraub. Weintraub called the pair over to LA to meet with him and made a few key introductions once he’d signed on as executive producer.
4) The sexiness of an energy-saving light bulb depends on the person changing it.
This one was pretty clear. If you want to get anyone, in particular males over 14, interested in energy efficiency, you have to somehow involve Jessica Alba. (For females under 14, we had Ian Somerhalder).
5) Conversations, not interviews.
Series co-founders David Gelber and Joel Bach issued a red line of sorts to the crew: No “talking heads” droning on and on in front of staid backdrops.
“We wanted people to turn on the TV and see Matt Damon and say: what’s this new Matt Damon movie? Hopefully by the time they realized it wasn’t a movie, they’d be engaged enough to stay for the rest of the show,” said Bach, adding that “when people interact in real life they talk, they don’t interview each other.”
Sounds great, except for one practical detail. In real life, people don’t usually have three cameras and a microphone pointed at their face. Nor are they usually talking to Matt Damon.
6) Film it like a Drama Queen.
For Bach and Gelber, the series had to be as entertaining as it was informative. “We stole as many devices used in narrative film-making as we could and applied them to the news/doc world,” explained Bach, the mastermind behind much of the series’ stylistic choices. Majestic aerials, plunging jib shots, high-tech graphics – the series’ cinematographers “gave us a lot to play with,” said editor Frost.
Initially, though, not everyone in the project was thrilled.
Producer Mishi Ebrahim recalled one early shoot:
“Joel had hired – I swear I don’t know where he found these kids – two guys who apparently just graduated high school and had built this drone in, like, their mother’s garage,” said Ebrahim. The crew rigged a camera on the remote-controlled device and flew it over the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s building in Boulder, Colo., overlooking the Rocky Mountains. A delighted Bach directed the shoot “like a boy with a shiny new Christmas toy.”
Meanwhile Ebrahim had just started a big interview with Gabrielle Petron, a NOAA air pollution scientist, in one of the building’s glass-paneled conference rooms.
“Out of nowhere comes this sort of ‘brrrrrrrrr’ noise. It kept getting louder and louder” recalled Ebrahim. ” Suddenly, the drone popped up in front of one of the windows, hovered, then darted away. An irate Ebrahim sent an assistant down to “tell Joel to stop playing with his toy during my interview.”
Bach’s enthusiasm for fancy gear became something of a recurring joke on the set. But Ebrahim eventually came around to what she initially considered superfluous tricks. “I’m now sort of a convert to Joel’s cinematographic ways,” she laughed.
7) Run, don’t walk, to the edge of the cliffhanger.
Getting a mass market audience to hang around for one show on global warming would be success in most cinematography circles. Producers wanted viewers to come back for eight more. The hunt for suspense points – cliffhangers – that would keep the audience gripped was intense.
Editor Paul Frost singled out a favorite, the one that concludes the first episode: Correspondent Harrison Ford has just witnessed the ravages of deforestation in Indonesia. He’s furious, demanding to meet those responsible.
What happens next?
Check out the second episode.
8) Make ’em laugh.
After a long, hot morning working the fireline of a smoldering blaze in Superior, Mont., executive producer Arnold Schwarzenegger shared a tale with the firefighters.
Thirty years ago, while filming The Terminator, he got into an argument with film director James Cameron over his now cult line, “I’ll be back.”
“We did, like, 20 different takes in 20 different ways, “the actor tells the crew in episode 2, Fire Line. Schwarzenegger thought it sounded better if he said “I will be back.” To which Cameron apparently replied: “Uh, no, let me do the writing and you do the acting.”
9) Don’t sacrifice science.
Fun and drone games aside, producers never forgot that the main challenge was to break down the science in ways both clear and compelling.
In some stories, the work of scientists in the field became an integral part of the narrative, explained editor Frost. Episode 6, “Chasing Methane,” follows scientists taking live, smoking-gun measurements of methane leaks from natural gas sites. Action carries the story. Celebrity correspondents can take a back seat.
In others, celebrities become the vehicle, as when NASA scientists show Harrison Ford satellite imagery of deforestation as well as global temperature projections.
Ultimately, the key was to find facts that spoke for themselves. It’s one thing to say that climate change “probably” made superstorm Sandy worse. It’s another to point out that, because of the extra foot of storm surge due to sea level rise, flooding reached the homes of an extra 83,000 people that would have otherwise been spared.1
Sure enough, finding those people – and filming their lives – can make for some gripping TV.
*Image of dry ground via Shutterstock
