Movies with a Message

By the time Jeff Skoll, CEO of the newly formed film company Participant Productions, got the script for Good Night, and Good Luck--about the showdown between heralded 1950s news anchor Edward R. Murrow and infamous communist witch hunter Joseph McCarthy--it had been turned down by every studio in Hollywood. "Once I started to learn about McCarthyism and about what Murrow did, the story struck me as very relevant to what's going on today with this Administration and things like the Patriot Act," says Canadian-born Skoll. Nonetheless, Skoll also passed on making the script, which George Clooney had originally cowritten as a four-part television show. But when Skoll spent time with Clooney in Dubai during the filming of Syriana, the two talked for hours about history. Clooney explained his vision for the film, frame by frame, and Skoll was sold. He believed the film would meld with Participant's grandiose mission: to change the world.

Skoll isn't just any filmmaker. He's a cofounder of eBay, who retired at 35 with a reported $2 billion in his pocket. Like most other entrepreneurs who have made their first billion before 35, the boyish-looking Skoll is an intensely driven man. Exhausted employees say he is rarely out of touch and never without his Sidekick, Treo and cell phone. These days Skoll's primary objective is not to make money but rather to spend what he has pursuing such lofty ideals as government accountability and social and economic justice.

Skoll is no novice to philanthropy or quixotic causes. As eBay's first president, he created the eBay Foundation with a donation of 107,250 shares of pre-ipo stock to fund community organizations and provide grants to a variety of non-profit groups. His $600 million Skoll Foundation awards up to 18 grants each year, ranging from $500,000 to $1 million, to midlevel social entrepreneurs. But when Skoll opened Participant Productions in January 2004 and announced his intention to cure what ails the world through film, even his greatest admirers predicted the billionaire would soon be downsizing to a mere millionaire. In Hollywood there generally isn't much money to be made in doing good. Skoll was undeterred. "I believe that people are basically good and want to do good things, and this was a way to help them do that," he says. "Traditionally, people come to Hollywood for financial reasons, or they think it's glamorous. I'm doing this because I believe that movies and documentaries can be a wonderful pathway to change the world."

Skoll, who sees Participant as a way to straddle the line between business and philanthropy, is encouraged by the track record of other movies with a message that have achieved commercial success, such as Schindler's List, Gandhi and Hotel Rwanda. Persuading big- name stars like Frances McDormand and Charlize Theron to work on feel-good projects for a fledgling studio was a hurdle at first. "In the early days, we spent a lot of time trying to find people who were interested in what we were doing," he says. "Now we are inundated with people coming to us--actors, writers, directors--with great, entertaining projects. I've found that everybody has a project or issue that is special to them."

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