By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Toasting Skoll: Participanting pictures
There’s a lengthy profile of billionaire producer and activist Jeff Skoll and his Participant Productions by Gaby Wood in the Observer: “Skoll describes Participant as a venture that straddles business and philanthropy. He’s not trying to buck the system, he’s trying to help it, in the form of what he calls a ‘virtuous cycle: the movie helps the non-profits, the non-profits help the movie.’
“[Robert] Redford is one of the Seventies ‘heroes’ to whom people constantly refer when they speak about Participant’s current crop of films. Yet one of the surprising things about Skoll is that he does not fit into the liberal tradition of Hollywood. In a move that cleverly removes him from the knee-jerk backlash against Hollywood lefties, he has said that, although he is Canadian and therefore doesn’t vote in America, had he been a US citizen he would have voted for Reagan, and for Bush Sr as well as for Bill Clinton. He calls himself a ‘centrist’ and has asserted that he would be equally open to making films that speak to conservative moviegoers… Meredith Blake explains how they decide to make a film: ‘We have a pretty unusual three-step review process,’ she says from their office in Beverly Hills. ‘First the creative team looks at it, then finance, and then I do a social sector review.’ Blake… greenlights films on the basis of the issues they raise. A project will only move forward if she finds it has a valid social or political message. She also selects the non-profit, corporate and media partners that will help audiences to get involved… John Boorman, veteran director of political films, thinks Participant’s work is less like the movies of the Seventies than those of the Thirties and Forties, when studios produced ‘problem pictures’ intended to combat alcoholism or racism.” [More nitty and more gritty at the link.]
