Earlier this month, I was saddened to hear the news that tech billionaire Jeff Skoll was shutting down Participant Media, the do-gooder entertainment studio that produced a string of hit movies. I felt like it wasn't there. Without feature films and documentaries about its participants, Hollywood would be an even poorer place. At the same time, it's also a triumph of entrepreneurial hope over Tinseltown's cynicism that the accidental media mogul's money-losing passion project lasted for two decades.
I first met Squall about 15 years ago when I wrote a profile of him and his unusual tycoon habits for Fortune magazine. Originally from Canada, Skoll graduated from Stanford University Business School and was lucky enough to land the first full-time job at eBay, which started out as a type of online flea market. Mr. Skoll became the president of eBay and quickly became a millionaire.
After just five years, he left eBay to pursue two dreams. One is to make films that have an impact on society, which is why he became Participant. Another is his passion for social entrepreneurship, which suggests that companies trying to do good while navigating the market can be more effective than charities at curing the world's ills. It's a thought. Around the same time that he launched Participant (whose name evokes a call to action), Skoll launched a foundation that annually awards awards to exemplary social entrepreneurs.
But it was at his entertainment company, where Mr. Skoll had his most far-reaching impact, that he faced the deepest skepticism. When I interviewed Hollywood establishment figures in the early days of Participant, most of them told me within minutes about the Participant's prospects that they could tell me some variation on the old idea of how to make a little money in Hollywood. He gave it to me.
That's something Skoll certainly had, thanks to his eBay wealth. But Participant got off to a fast start, releasing Davis Guggenheim's 2006 feature documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” in which Al Gore warned about climate change, just two years after its founding. A string of critical and commercial hits followed, earning him 21 Academy Awards.
The participants' desired niche was mass market “impact” as defined by Skoll. In this way, The Help, an adaptation of a novel about the relationship between black domestic workers and their employers in the Civil Rights-era South, conveyed a social message. Other hits include films such as “Spotlight'' and “Green Book,'' as well as “Waiting for Superman'' (about education), “RBG'' (about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg), It included a number of socially themed documentaries such as The Visitor. ” (About immigration inspection)
The belief in what Mr. Skoll called the “double bottom line,” that movies make money and influence, was almost heresy in Hollywood, which worships the almighty dollar above all else. “I don't expect everything I put into Participant to come back. I expect that money to be put back into more films and projects,” he said of his 2010 release. told me.
Projects that lost money were even considered successful. For example, the 2005 film North Country starring Charlize Theron grossed about $10 million less than the $35 million it cost to make. But the stories of women facing sexual harassment in the workplace became fodder for a participant-funded campaign in support of federal legislation that protects women from sexual violence.
Squall himself never fits the mold of a Hollywood mogul. Of the many millionaires I've met in my career, he struck me as one of the best in terms of how lucky he was to acquire his wealth. There was humility about him and a real determination to do something meaningful with the loot he stumbled upon.
He was an introvert in a world populated by extroverted alphas. “If you put 50 people in a room and tried to find a billionaire, you'd be in your 40s before you found Jeff Skoll,” an entertainment executive told me. Yes, Squall accepted his chosen role and flew from place to place on a private jet. However, he also played the guitar with his friends and could never quite shake off his shy Canadian personality.
And in the end, he did what any Stanford MBA who was always in the red would do. He shut down his ambitious company and fired all but a few of its 100 or so employees. In an unapologetic memo to staff, Skoll cited the “revolutionary changes in the way content is created, distributed, and consumed” in recent years. He's referring to the brutal economics of streaming and Hollywood's increasing reliance on blockbuster feature series. This is the antithesis of Participant's “broccoli-eating documentaries and dramas that explore underrepresented communities,” as the New York Times puts it.
The moment passes for the participants. Hollywood, buffeted by labor strife, shifting business models, and endless technological changes, has proven to be an inhospitable place for Mr. Skoll's extraordinary vision. His company's body of work (135 films and other projects) remains the legacy of a man who tried to do something different and meaningful with his wealth. He was successful, but he couldn't do it forever. This is another inconvenient truth.
