By Iain Blair

A lot of people in Hollywood have made a lot of noise about “going green” in recent times, but few have put their money where their mouths are in the way Lauren Shuler Donner and Dick Donner have. The couple are one of the most successful and versatile producer/director teams in Hollywood – his credits include the Lethal Weapon franchise, Superman and The Omen while she’s produced such smash hits as Dave and Free Willy, You’ve Got Mail, Any Given Sunday, Radio Flyer and 3 Fugitives.

Shuler Donner is having a particularly prolific year with four highly-anticipated films upcoming: X Men Origins: Wolverine, starring Hugh Jackman, which is the next chapter in the successful X Men Fox  film franchise, The Secret Life of Bees for Fox Searchlight, DreamWorks’ Hotel for Dogs which stars Emma Roberts,  and Cirque du Freak, a Universal film written by Paul Weitz who also directs the adaptation of the bestselling young adult’s book series by Darren Shan.

 I was chatting with both of them recently and it turns out that Lauren always reaches out to the studio heads when she begins a movie about recycling materials and making a donation to Go Zero, or a comparable organization, to help nullify the carbon footprint. “It’s been very easy doing it,” she told me. “In the early ‘90s I was part of a group called Echo when we were based at Warners, and we started the whole recycling thing. Then in the past few years, I started going to studio heads about bringing our carbon footprint down to zero when we’re making a movie. And different studios use different funds, but Fox, Dreamworks, Universal and so on agreed to do it. Isn’t that wonderful?”

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