A love letter to the Hollywood Climate Summit
The good, the bad and the Paramount.
“Maps are full of shit. They lie because they gotta lie. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be maps, they’d just be the world.” — Bill Brown, “Saugus to the Sea”
The attorneys rose to make their closing arguments. The charges were seismic: that the meat and dairy industries had run misleading ad campaigns, deceived consumers about plant-based foods and attempted to hide their massive role in the climate crisis.
But as soon as the prosecutors began to speak, things went haywire.
The lawyers reminded the jury — in reality a packed house at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater — that one of the defense attorneys had literally thrown a bag of soybeans into the audience in a fit of anger. This proved that the meat and dairy industries were — wait, what was happening?! The lawyers rushed off the stage and into the crowd. No way: A member of the “jury” had mashed the projectile soybeans into soy milk.
“This is objectively milk!” declared prosecutor Esteban Gast, holding the bag high.
The crowd went wild. Gast and co-counsel Joanna Hausmann — both of them actually comedians, not lawyers — started a theater-wide chant: This is milk! This is milk!
The defense attorneys (also comedians) weren’t having it. Feigning outrage and trying not to laugh — and sporting milk mustaches from an earlier bit — they pointed at the resourceful juror, shouting: Witch! Witch! Murder the witch!
If everything I’m describing sounds totally unhinged — well, it was. It was also very funny. And it captured the spirit of the Hollywood Climate Summit.