Daryl Hannah is a passionate environmentalist
Karl Weathers | Thu, Feb 7th, 2008 | Category: Commentary | Tags: environment, sustainability, shark swarm, wall street, daryl hannah, kill bill, karl weathers, grumpy old men, woody harrelson, the clan of the cave bear
This is part 1:
Part two involves Daryl Hannah, specifically. No idea how we got on her mailing list, but someone at the Hallmark Channel decided The Next American City (and it’s mission of environmental and economic sustainability) deserved notification that Ms. Hannah—of Kill Bill, Grumpy Old Men, Wall Street and The Clan of the Cave Bear fame—has a new movie coming out. The PR is a little odd, even for PR. It begins: “Not only is Daryl Hannah a much sought after actress, she is also a passionate environmentalist, dedicated to several causes.”
Which is fair enough. But then it gets interesting: This Summer, Daryl will star along with John Schneider (“Smallville”) and Armand Assante (“American Gangster”) in the Hallmark Channel Original Movie Event “Shark Swarm,” premiering as part of a blockbuster Memorial Day Weekend, Saturday, May 24. Set in the small coastal town of Full Moon Bay, the film deals with a greedy corporate real estate developer who is secretly releasing toxins that are killing the fish and turning otherwise tame sharks into man eating killers. Hannah plays the wife of Schneider’s character, whose fishery is threatened by the deadly toxins in the water.
How far should we take the insinuations of that goofball plot synopsis? “Are humans, like, sharks? Are environmentally-unfriendly developers and corporations, like, releasing toxins into our minds?” This is especially considerable since Hallmark made its fortune brightening people’s lives with generically emotional holiday cards, and because paranoid action films may be the new greeting cards.
Regardless, we don’t want to disparage anyone—even Daryl Hannah—for trying to make the world better. It’s what we do at The Next American City, and we encourage everyone to do the same. Keeping that in mind, I’ll note that the last part of the aforementioned PR release says Hannah runs an ”eco-friendly website ... featuring environmental news, tips and video blogs ... as well as a goods section offering sustainable products for sale.” And that’s great! It’s just tough to praise her film, Shark Swarm, on principle only. Because it’s tough to praise any film portraying “a greedy corporate real estate developer who is secretly releasing toxins that are killing the fish and turning otherwise tame sharks into man eating killers” as a serious political statement about the environment, without the aid of mind-altering substances. Especially when the movie is bankrolled by a huge corporation.
Related:
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Jaws
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MHC in Optional
Mon, Mar 03, 2008 at 10:47am
I’m one of the writers of Shark Swarm. My writing partner and I love action horror movies. We love monster movies. We love disaster movies. We grew up watching black and white creature features at the local drive-in. We loved JAWS and ORCA and PIRANAH and ALLIGATOR and all the rest of the films in that guilty-pleasure sub-genre. We love silly plots, special effects, and over-the-top set pieces. We love entertaining people who enjoy that kind of film.
But we’re also eco-minded Democratic Party members who scrape by like struggling grad students and yet still manage to financially support Green organizations. We spend as much time writing complaint letters to Fox advertisers as we do writing monster movies.
Boiled down, the movie is about a wealthy corporate villain who wants to buy up all the land in a small working class fishing town so that he can make a lot of money. His villainous plan involves poisoning the bay so that he can drive out the fishermen who’ve lived there their whole lives. One of the heroes is an EPA agent. The others heroes are blue collar fishermen, ocean science professors, a priest, and a few surfers. Daryl’s character runs a small shop that sells nothing but recycled objects found washed up on the local beaches. It’s in the script.
Shark Swarm is a made for cable science fiction/action/horror/adventure movie, not An Inconvenient Truth. Our job on this show was to write the wildest shark movie adventure we could dream up. We added the environmental issues because they worked for the story and because we support them in real life.
If this experience has shown me anything, it’s that no matter what your intentions are, someone will always find a way to point out your supposed failings.
By the way, the “greedy corporate real estate developer who is secretly releasing toxins that are killing the fish and turning sharks into man eating killers” gets a nice gory comeuppance in the end. No need for a SPOILER warning for that one.
As far as the idea that there might be “otherwise tame” sharks out there in the ocean… I have no idea who wrote that dopey description. Not me or my writing partner, that’s for sure. “Tame” sharks are never mentioned in the script. But if you folks want to get your knickers in a bunch over the wording of the PR, knock yourselves out.