“Hollywood has gone from the capital of conspicuous consumption to the cutting edge of conspicuous conservation,” Arianna Huffington declared recently. Case in point: A two-day Hollywood Goes Green summit that wraps up today. At the summit, tech giant IBM announced a plan to design new technologies that will increase computing capacity by a factor of 10 while using 50 percent less power by the end of 2010. (Which seems somewhat irrelevant to a Hollywood shindig, but a lot of computing goes into special effects, animation, and other movie-making needs.) And at a panel on marketing green messages, Paula Silver, founder of indie-film producer Beyond the Box Productions, advocated for making green seem normal in movies. “At the end of the day it’s the good stories that really win,” Silver said, adding that environmental messages have “to be part of the story and not just the story.” Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth notwithstanding, of course.
