Hollywood Responds to BP British Petroleum Oil Spill

Hollywood gets a bad rap for being a highly profitable land of glitzy make believe. The California based - though Hollywood's really only a state of mind - is regularly called fantasy land, La La land, Hollyweird, and other things much too impolite, even vulgar to print in an article of mine. However, desperate times indeed call for desperate measures. The shocking inability of BP British Petroleum to plug their oil leak, and properly clean up an ever expanding oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is desperate by any definition. Now, Hollywood answers this desperate environmental call with some of its biggest players. Nobody calls them 'Hollyweirdos' now. Instead of mocking folks like Kevin Costner, or James Cameron, both BP and the United States government is warmly receiving them with open arms.

Kevin Costner doesn't just play a heroic water based hero like in his epic movie Waterworld. Yes, you can snicker that Waterworld fizzled as a box office and critical bomb, but something good came of it. Costner's ecological imagination fired up while working on the film. He has since invested millions of his own dollars into a company called Ocean Therapy Solutions. His high tech machines are said to actually take oil fused seawater and separate crude oil from the H2O. Supposedly BP considered these tech claims. They're now testing the machinery to possibly implement in the oil clean-up effort.

James Cameron isn't just the film director who gave the world two of the most seen and profitable feature films of all time - Titanic and Avatar - but he's pretty much of a real scientific geek. In both Titanic and his other ocean based epic film The Abyss, Cameron pioneered the use of underwater submersibles and made breakthroughs in camera equipment he helped design. The man seems to know a bit about everything, and that well read genius is now being tested by the United States government. The EPA - Environmental Protection Agency - called Cameron into a meeting of experts to discuss options, strategy and high tech solutions to help minimize the damage to the environment from BP's oil spill.

It may play well for the media - even us movie goers and TV fans are guilty of it - to lump all of Hollywood into a black hole of vain, illusion chasing, pop culture pirates. Are there a load of 'plastic' Hollywood types? Sure there are, but fake people can be found everywhere. If nothing else, the Hollywood concept defines itself, and thoroughly sustains itself by utilizing creativity. The creativity of men and women laboring to create a visual art form that can spotlight societal ills, or highlight our lofty aspirations. Right now, as BP British Petroleum struggles to contain this oil spill, Hollywood heavyweights offer that kind of awesome creativity. Maybe Kevin Costner's film was on to something. Waterworld - or Oilworld? Seems it's what we're in now.

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/06/02/celebrity-oil-spill-experts-can-cameron-costner-and-redford-really-help/

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/06/02/james-cameron-consulted-on-oil-spill-john-mayer-drops-out-of-european-tour/

http://www.ots.org/