Event description:

Climate Defiance is hosting our first-ever Los Angeles benefit.  This cocktail party will be at the home of Adam McKay & Shira Piven. We are coming together to celebrate everything we've accomplished in our first year and raise funds for the struggle ahead.

About Adam McKay:

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Adam McKay's Don’t Look Up is one of Netflix’s most successful films of all time and stars Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as two low-level astronomers who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching comet that will destroy Earth. It received four Academy Award and BAFTA nominations including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, as well as a WGA Original Screenplay win for McKay. His 2018 feature, Vice, about Dick Cheney received eight Academy Award nominations. In 2015, McKay and Charles Randolph adapted Michael Lewis’s New York Times best-selling book, The Big Short. McKay and Randolph won Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards, BAFTA and WGA. Previously, McKay co-wrote and directed iconic comedies Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers. For television, McKay is an executive producer on HBO’ Succession, as well as Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

A well-known climate activist, McKay is on the board of the Climate Emergency Fund and in May 2023, founded Yellow Dot Studios, a non-profit media organization that creates videos to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

About Climate Defiance:

We started off last spring as a rag-tag group blockading the White House correspondents Dinner. Now we're making Fortune 500 directors resign in disgrace and forcing senior Presidential Advisors to come to the table to negotiate.

We do not go along to get along. We do not sit in cubicles pushing papers around and signing coalition letters. We block doors. We crash galas. We shut down speeches at think tanks and hotels and conferences and fundraisers and Congressional office buildings. We act like our very lives are on the line because they are.  

We do direct action. We get in the face of climate criminals and politicians who enable them, call them out for their misdeeds, and share videos of them fleeing.

And we get results.

• We played a major role in the White House's decision to freeze approval of all new gas export infrastructure.
• We also played a significant role in the White House's decision to stop new leasing on 14,000,000 acres in the Arctic.
• We've had full profiles written about us in the New York Times, New Republic, Rolling Stone, and the Guardian.
• We have reached over 80,000,000 impressions on Twitter, organically.
• Deputy Interior Secretary Tommy Beaudreau (who signed the Willow Project) resigned 15 days after we protested him.
• Jody Freeman resigned from Conoco just weeks after we protested her.

Here is the word on the street about us:

Congressman Ro Khanna said about our group: "You have gotten the country's attention...People in Congress are talking about you. Senators are talking about you. The President is talking about you. And remember this, the future is with you.”

Chelsea Handler said Climate Defiance is "the best new, nonpartisan group that goes after politicians on both sides in the U.S."

Steven Donziger said: "They do what is needed better than just about any group in the world. Climate Defiance has shown time and again the ability to execute effectively on the strategy of disruptive activism and to reach millions of people in the process."

Don't Look Up creator Adam McKay said: "I love Climate Defiance...They’re one of the most energetic, loud, and focused activist movements in the last 30 years."