DiCaprio-produced series will rebuild tornado-ravaged Kansas town
It’s official: Nine months after the rumors began, Leonardo DiCaprio has confirmed that he and a partner will give birth to … a reality series on green building. DiCaprio will executive produce the 13-part Eco-Town on the Discovery Channel’s Planet Green arm, launching in 2008. The original notion was to upgrade Anywhere, USA, for a show called E-topia, but the new series will focus on rebuilding a Kansas town that was hit by a tornado in May. The tornado caused 10 deaths, displaced almost all of the town’s roughly 1,500 residents, and leveled homes, a hospital, and other buildings. And we’re not saying Leo and his peeps are crass, cold-hearted vultures, but how excited do you think they were when Mother Nature wiped out a town called — wait for it — Greensburg? “This is not about a TV show and about a cable channel that reaches 50 million homes,” says Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav. “We’re the number one non-fiction media company in the world, but we also want to make a difference.”
