LOS ANGELES – Hollywood insiders and climate change experts agree that they can't shove messages about global warming down audiences' throats.

They met at the Skirball Cultural Center on Tuesday to discuss how storytelling in film and TV can translate broad issues about climate change to everyday audiences.

“The storytelling has to trump everything,” said “West Wing” actor Bradley Whitford.

During the Population Media Center's Climate Change Summit, Whitford, Bruce Davison and Scott Wolf performed “Shuddering to Think,” a one-act play by Jon Robin Baitz about a playwright bemoaning an Earth Day play. Baitz and Lawrence Weschler, director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, joined the actors by webcam.

“I think this play is a good template for how to communicate these types of issues to people,” said Wolf, who starred in Fox's “Party of Five.” “If we render an audience a school assembly, they shut off. The way that this issue is so beautifully incidental in this story is exactly how to get big giant messages across in such a small way.”

Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agreed that viewers are turned off by accusations and hectoring. He said dispensing incorrect information about climate change can also elicit depression and a “sticking-your-head-in-the-sand” attitude from the public.

“One thing we've learned is that apocalyptic stories don't work very well,” said Frumkin.

David Rambo, a writer and supervising producer for CBS' “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” pointed to the eighth-season episode “The Case of the Cross-Dressing Carp,” which explores the issue of water treatment contamination, as an example of how an environmental topic can be woven into a compelling story – and not offend advertisers or public officials.

“It is a challenge,” said Rambo. “A lot of the industries that we point the finger at when we talk about climate change are the very ones that make our livelihoods possible, but there's so much pressure on the corporations that advertise to be responsible world citizens, at this point, they pretty much make their own case for the things they're doing.”

Many attendees said the major studios have successfully gone green in recent years. They cited e-mailing scripts and call sheets instead of printing them on paper, employing reusable cups instead of plastic water bottles and using hybrid production vehicles for transportation on set instead of gas guzzlers.

CBS is a division of CBS Corp.

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