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LOS ANGELES (AP) Hollywood insiders and climate change experts agree that they can't shove messages about global warming down audiences' throats.

They met at the Skirball Cultural Center on Tuesday to discuss how storytelling in film and TV can translate broad issues about climate change to everyday audiences.

"The storytelling has to trump everything," said "West Wing" actor Bradley Whitford.

During the Population Media Center's Climate Change Summit, Whitford, Bruce Davison and Scott Wolf performed "Shuddering to Think," a one-act play by Jon Robin Baitz about a playwright bemoaning an Earth Day play. Baitz and Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, joined the actors by webcam.

"I think this play is a good template for how to communicate these types of issues to people," said Wolf, who starred in Fox's "Party of Five." "If we render an audience a school assembly, they shut off. The way that this issue is so beautifully incidental in this story is exactly how to get big giant messages across in such a small way."

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed that viewers are turned off by accusations and hectoring. He said dispensing incorrect information about climate change can also elicit depression and a "sticking-your-head-in-the-sand" attitude from the public.

"One thing we've learned is that apocalyptic stories don't work very well," said Frumkin.

David Rambo, a writer and supervising producer for CBS' "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation," pointed to the eighth-season episode "The Case of the Cross-Dressing Carp," which explores the issue of water treatment contamination, as an example of how an environmental topic can be woven into a compelling story, and not offend advertisers or public officials.

"It is a challenge," said Rambo. "A lot of the industries that we point the finger at when we talk about climate change are the very ones that make our livelihoods possible, but there's so much pressure on the corporations that advertise to be responsible world citizens, at this point, they pretty much make their own case for the things they're doing."

Many attendees said the major studios have successfully gone green in recent years. They cited e-mailing scripts and call sheets instead of printing them on paper, employing reusable cups instead of plastic water bottles and using hybrid production vehicles for transportation on set instead of gas guzzlers.

Source: The Associated Press

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ST. PAUL, Minn., Nov. 15 (UPI) -- More than 400 volunteers showed up Saturday morning to train as observers for Democrat Al Franken in the U.S. Senate race recount in Minnesota.

Republican incumbent Norm Coleman's volunteers also came in for training elsewhere, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported.

The hand state-run recount is to start Wednesday with volunteer observers at the 120 locations to challenge any ballots they say are invalid. The two candidates are separated by about 200 votes after about 2.9 million ballots cast in the Nov. 4 election, triggering a recount mandated under state law.

So many people showed up for Franken at Macalester College in St. Paul that the group had to be divided in two.

Franken, a writer who became famous on "Saturday Night Live," got some additional star power from Bradley Whitford, who played presidential aide Josh Lyman on "The West Wing." Lyman thanked the crowd for volunteering to do what he called a "soul-sucking" job.

Franken drove the point home by leading a cheer: "What do we want? Patience. When do we want it? Now."

Source: UPI.com

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Yesterday, president elect Barack Obama chose the person who will be his White House Chief of Staff. Rham Emanuel, the chosen guy, has been said to have been the model that Aaron Sorkin based Bradley's The West Wing character Josh Lyman on. Sometimes it's life that imitates art.

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