Rachel Dratch

Guest Post by Rachel Dratch Rachel Dratch spent seven years as a cast member on Saturday Night Live and can next be seen in the film "My Life in Ruins" with Nia Vardalos. Also, she went to college with Tonic News Editor Dan Estabrook, who roped her into writing this.

Recently I was shooting a little low-budget, indie movie in Brooklyn. It had been awhile since I did a film and I forgot just how wasteful a film set can be. I am referring specifically to plastic water bottles.  There are a lot of people who work on a movie — besides the cast, there’s the entire crew — electricians, wardrobe, makeup, lighting, sound, cameras, on and on.  So I start to notice everywhere that there are trash cans piled high with water bottles. Just one of these barrels contained more bottles than I would use in a year. And they were not being recycled! Maybe I should say something?

The schedule on this movie was very tight — it was an 18-day shoot and that could make people pretty frazzled. But I had to speak up! After that day of shooting I wouldn’t be back on set for a week … that’s probably 1,000 bottles right there! One of the actors thought it was cute that these bottles were bugging me. In an effort to get my goat, he’d crack open a bottle, take a swig and say to me, “I only like the first sip,” while flinging the bottle away.  Fear not, he was just doing it for comic effect.  The real solution would be to not have bottles at all.

In my daydream, there is a Little House on the Prairie style well that all can take from, using a beat-up metal ladle to pour water into their old metal cups. OK, maybe that wouldn’t be practical. As I was grumbling about it to a few of the cast members, everyone agreed. “Yeah, movie sets are extremely wasteful,” they said. Everyone seemed to agree these throwaway bottles were a bad practice but like in some strange Psych 101 study, when there is a system in place, you feel like you are really making a fuss to ask for a change. Especially when you are not high up in the pecking order. Though there were legends of movie sets that had “gone green,” it certainly wasn’t the norm. Any change in the system had to start with a squeaky wheel piping up, right?

Someone mentioned they had just worked with Kate Beckinsale and she had demanded a green set.  Another told of a wardrobe woman who was so disturbed by the bottle waste that she actually collected all the bottles, piled them onto her pickup truck and brought them to a recycling center herself! Every day! Now THAT is dedication. That is commitment! OK, surely I can gently suggest some recycling. I found my moment. I spoke up to one of the producers. “Is there any way we can get some recycling going on? Every day I see all these bottles and it’s making me sick to my stomach!”

“Yeah! You’re right!” he said. “Yeah! We’ll do that.” Wow! Instant results!! My small act of speaking up actually paid off! Why hadn’t I done this right away?

I arrived on the set a week later. I had kind of forgotten about my act of enviro-nerdism. I was going about the day when I received a text from One-Sip Water Guy. The caption was “What Happened?” and the photo was this:

No one had actually done anything about recycling the hundreds and hundreds of bottles.  Things went on exactly as they had been. At that point the shoot was almost over and I lost my gumption to approach the producer. So much for my big moment of activism. What would be great is if being environmentally minded in a business setting was seen as the norm rather than as rocking the boat. I guess I learned that on the next shoot, it’s going to take more than one try to get some results.  I’m going to have to do some real research about on-set recycling options and some more squawking if I’m ever to be the Norma Rae of Poland Springs.