Activist pushes Hollywood to adopt cli-fi genre

By Dan Bloom

CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — You won’t be reading about my newly-launched 10-year Hollywood cli-fi movies initiative in any Hollywood trade publications like Variety or the Hollywood Reporter because they don’t cover cli-fi, but in 10 years they might.

Undeterred and full of confidence, I’ve launched the first-ever ”cli-fi movies initiative” to try to get the “cli-fi” term into the ears, eyes and minds of major Hollywood players in the 2020s. My long-term goal: to make cli-fi a genre term that everyone in Hollywood knows by the year 2030.

As you can see, I’m a patient man. I look at the big picture, in the long term. I’m Jewish.

Cli-fi has already caught on in the book publishing world and among literary critics worldwide for novels and short story collections — as a literary term. This literary effort has been successfully ongoing since 2011 and got a huge boost in 2013 when NPR did a 5-minute radio broadcast titled “It’s so hot now, it’s time for a new literary genre!”

Beginning now, my focus for the next 10 years will be on Hollywood, and with the help of many writers and reporters, cli-fi will catch on as cinema term among Hollywood producers, PR people, directors, actors, scriptwriters, talent agents, journalists and film critics.

A few years ago, I was talking on the phone to veteran TV producer and social activist in Hollywood, Sonny Fox, and I was asking him how scriptwriters and directors and producers in Los Angeles and other TV and film capitals around the world can make better use of their expertise and people to turn out more feature shows with climate change themes. Real movies, real TV serial dramas, written by people like Margaret Atwood and Aaron Sorkin and produced by people like Marshall Herskovitz, Steve Tisch and Leonardo DiCaprio.

While Sonny is retired now at 94, he remains active as a passionate and concerned observer of where the world is headed, and he knows that runaway global warming is a serious issue.

And he knows that TV and movie producers have the means to address it.

“It’s just a question of getting the right people together and setting up some organizations to work on this issue in Hollywood,” the Brooklyn-born Fox told San Diego Jewish World in an earlier email. And he’s been around the block a couple of times, many times, in Hollywood and New York. He knows what the game is all about.

Could we use serial cli-fi dramas — narrative TV shows — for the primary purpose of entertainment that also inspires and educates people about climate change?

Sonny said we can. And we should.

“It’s important to get TV and movie people involved in climate change discussions,” he says. “And to goad them into making TV shows and movies that go right to the heart of the matter: how will future generations fare in a world beset by dire climate situations worldwide — droughts, floods, wildfires, sea level rise, heat waves.”

There’s also Marshall Herskovitz, the TV and movie producer and writer, a Brandeis alum, and a major Hollywood climate movie activist. Alongside his career in the TV and film industry, Herskovitz has devoted years to thinking about our society’s climate change problems.

“I first got into this more than 20 years ago, just by reading the science and getting really terrified. There was a big dividing line before and after An Inconvenient Truth. Before Inconvenient Truth, the issue really was that people were not aware of climate change. After Inconvenient Truth, it became more complicated because people were aware of it, but it became much more politicized,” he told an interviewer at the City Atlas website in 2015.

When asked if he thinks that Hollywood can create the narratives needed to prod people to take action, Herskovitz said: ”Yes, we have the professionals who could do it. We have the professionals who could create the stories. Absolutely.”

So if all goes according to plan, the cli-fi term will be on the lips of every producer in Hollywood in ten years and directors will be  turning out cli-fi movies by the dozen each year.

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Dan Bloom, a climate change activist, is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer based in Chiayi City, Taiwan.  He may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com