I left a gathering of friends tonight on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and headed for my car which was parked in the garage underneath.  When I pulled out onto the street there must have been a hundred people buzzing around with cell phone cameras blocking my exit from the garage.  As I got closer they moved aside and let me through.  It was then that I saw they were watching a movie scene being filmed across the street. 

I called a friend who loves movies thinking she would enjoy seeing this.  She said she would so I headed down to pick her up.  We got back about 15 minutes later only to find the scene had already been shot and the fawning crowds had dispersed.  No problem... it was still fun to watch the crew tearing everything down that made up the scene that took less than 15 minutes to shoot.  (Yes, this all has a political point).  

There was a black stretch limo parked in front of an apartment building.  There was one of those bulky oversized Hollywood cameras mounted on the back of the front seat pointed towards the back seat.  It was impossible to tell exactly what had just occurred in the scene that was shot in less than 15 minutes.  But from what I gathered some famous actor and/or actress was there... explaining the crowd with its cameras.  And from the little I could piece together, this (or these) celebrity(ies) got out of the car and went into the apartment building, or they came out of the apartment building and got into the car.  It had to be one or the other.  But whichever it was, it took less than 15 minutes to shoot.

And that's where politics comes in!  

Have you ever noticed how much equipment and crew is involved in shooting a quick movie scene?  I counted at least 12 large movie trucks that were parked up and down 9th Avenue and halfway down 58th St towards 8th Ave.  Trucks, big trucks parked on both sides of both streets.  I also counted at least a hundred people who were part of the crew that made this short scene possible.

It dawned on me at that moment that movies are horrible for the environment.  I started to calculate how many hundreds of gallons of fuel must have been expended to get all those trucks, people and equipment to this one spot where they shot a scene that will probably last less than 30 seconds in a movie.   Then I thought about how many 30 second scenes can fit into a 2 hour movie.  It's 240! 

So let's play it conservatively (as we like to do here) and calculate if 12 trucks used 5 gallons of gas each that's 60 gallons.  If that happened 240 times for an average movie that comes to 14,400 gallons of gasoline used to make a single film!  So think about that next time you sit down to enjoy the latest hot flick.  Think about how much damage was done to the environment to produce this little piece of entertainment.  And I'm not even counting all the jet fuel that was used to fly people back and forth from Hollywood to New York, or any of the other thousands of energy expenditures involved in shooting a film.  I'm only calculating the local travel involved in carrying crew and equipment to shoot each scene of a two-hour movie. 

It's staggering to think that tens of thousands of gasoline are used in the shooting of each and every Hollywood movie.  And I'm not even counting the electricity used to power all those high-wattage bulbs and cameras!  It's staggering to think of all that, and it's mind blowing to think of all the Hollywood actors who come out and tell us we have to minimize our energy use in order to save the environment.