Show Biz Gets Its Organically Grown Awards

The scene: The first Environmental Media Awards held Monday at Sony Studios in Culver City. The awards are given by the Environmental Media Assn., a nonprofit group that provides ecological information to show business. They go to film, television and music video productions that have dealt well with environmental issues. “The organic Oscars” was one guest’s description of the event.

Who was there: Those who swing from the big trees in the Hollywood rain forest. Among them: co-chairmen Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and Peter Guber, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, (the third co-chairman, Donald Keough, president of Coca-Cola, was absent); plus about 700 guests including Sally Field, Norman Mailer, Random House president Harold Evans, Creative Artists Agency chairman Mike Ovitz, Ted Turner with Jane Fonda, Sting, Ted Danson, Lois Chiles, Daryl Hannah, George Hamilton, and Barbra Streisand, who arrived so quietly she even escaped detection by the paparazzi. The locale: The reception was held on Sound Stage 6, which is 90 feet tall. Its bare cement walls and hanging ropes give the impression of being inside a gargantuan elevator shaft. Dinner was served in the more classically proportioned Sound Stage 18. A sound track of rain forest noises played as guests entered. The area had been decorated in what Brown described as “earth tones and celery colors.”

Best piece of stray dialogue: From the “Days of Our Lives” soap opera, winner of the Daytime Programming Award: “How many more ducks do you want to see covered in oil?” the actress in the video clip pleaded. “I saw the way you cared about that bird.”

Tell Ted and Jane to be on the corner by 6:15: Here are people who live in mansions, own yachts, use private jets and the invite says “we urge you to car pool.” OK, so at least they try. And it was an almost limo-free event.

Irony: The organization’s focus is on television. The idea is that a medium that lowers IQs can somehow raise consciousness.

Money matters: Tickets ranged from $500 to $2,500 and more than $500,000 was raised.

Chow: An environmentally correct menu from Rococo--pesticide-free vegetables, free-range chicken, fish-farm salmon and hearth-baked whole-grain bread. Plus there was no smoking. “They’d lynch you in New York if you tried this,” said one ex-smoker.

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