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The news earlier this month that technology billionaire Jeff Skoll was shutting down Participant Media, his do-gooder entertainment studio that produced a string of hit films, struck me as sadly inevitable. Hollywood will be a poorer place without Participant’s feature films and documentaries. At the same time, that the money-losing passion project of an accidental media mogul lasted as long as it did — 20 years — is a triumph of entrepreneurial hope over Tinseltown cynicism.
I first met Skoll nearly 15 years ago, when I wrote a profile in Fortune magazine about him and his unusual mogul habits. A native of Canada, Skoll was a Stanford University business school grad who had the good fortune to sign on as the first full-time employee of eBay, which got its start as a kind of online flea market. Skoll became eBay’s president and, in short order, a multibillionaire.
Having left eBay after only five years, he set out to pursue two dreams. One was to make movies that had a social impact, which became Participant. The other was his passion for social entrepreneurship, the notion that companies seeking to do good while navigating markets can be more effective than charities at curing the world’s ills. Around the same time he started Participant — its name evoking a call to action — Skoll stood up a foundation that awarded annual prizes to exemplary social entrepreneurs.
It was with his entertainment company, though, that Skoll had the broadest impact — and faced the deepest skepticism. When I interviewed establishment Hollywood types about Participant’s prospects at its dawn, most told me within a matter of minutes some variation of the old saw about how to make a small fortune in Hollywood: Start with a large one.
That was something Skoll certainly possessed, thanks to his eBay riches. But Participant got off to a fast start, releasing the Davis Guggenheim feature documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s 2006 warning about climate change, just two years into its existence. A string of critical, and sometimes commercial, hits would follow, along with 21 Academy Awards.
Participant’s aspirational niche was mass-market “impact,” as defined by Skoll. Thus, “The Help,” an adaptation of a novel about the relationships between Black housekeepers and their employers in the civil rights era South, which carried a social message. Other hits included films like “Spotlight,” “Green Book” and a host of socially themed documentaries, including “Waiting for Superman” (about education), “RBG” (on the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg) and “The Visitor” (about immigration.)
Skoll’s embrace of what he called a “double bottom line” — that a film would make money and have an impact — was almost heretical in Hollywood, which venerates the almighty dollar above all else. “Everything I put into Participant, I don’t expect to get back,” he told me in 2010. “I expect the money to be refunneled to do more films and more projects.”
It was even possible for a project that lost money to be considered a success. The 2005 film “North Country” starring Charlize Theron, for example, grossed about $10 million less than the $35 million it cost to make. Yet its story of a woman facing sexual harassment at work was fodder for a Participant-funded campaign to support federal legislation to protect women from sexual violence.
Skoll himself never fit the mold of a Hollywood mogul. Among the many billionaires I have met in my line of work, he struck me as nearly in a class of one for understanding that he had lucked into his wealth. There was a humility about him that conveyed a genuine determination to do something meaningful with the loot he had stumbled upon.
He was an introvert in a land of extroverted alphas. “If you put 50 people in the room and tried to find the billionaire, you’d get into the 40s before you found Jeff Skoll,” an entertainment executive told me. Yes, Skoll embraced his chosen role, flying hither and yon on his private jet. But he also played guitar with his pals and never quite shook his Canadian shyness.
And in the end, he behaved as any Stanford MBA who was consistently losing money would: He shuttered his ambitious company, firing all but a handful of his 100 or so employees. In an unapologetic memo to his staff, Skoll referenced the “revolutionary changes in how content is created, distributed and consumed” in recent years. He’s referring to the brutal economics of streaming and Hollywood’s ever-growing reliance on blockbuster, tentpole franchises — the antithesis of Participant’s “eat-your-broccoli documentaries and dramas that explore underrepresented communities,” as the New York Times put it.
Participant’s moment has come and gone. Hollywood, battered by labor strife, shifting business models and endless technological change, proved to be an inhospitable place for Skoll’s unusual vision. His company’s body of work — 135 films and other projects — stands as the legacy of a guy who tried to do something different and meaningful with his wealth. He succeeded but couldn’t make it last forever — another inconvenient truth.
The sad and inevitable fall of Jeff Skoll’s Participant Media
54
9
29.04.2024
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The news earlier this month that technology billionaire Jeff Skoll was shutting down Participant Media, his do-gooder entertainment studio that produced a string of hit films, struck me as sadly inevitable. Hollywood will be a poorer place without Participant’s feature films and documentaries. At the same time, that the money-losing passion project of an accidental media mogul lasted as long as it did — 20 years — is a triumph of entrepreneurial hope over Tinseltown cynicism.
I first met Skoll nearly 15 years ago, when I wrote a profile in Fortune magazine about him and his unusual mogul habits. A native of Canada, Skoll was a Stanford University business school grad who had the good fortune to sign on as the first full-time employee of eBay, which got its start as a kind of online flea market. Skoll became eBay’s president and, in short order, a multibillionaire.
Having left eBay after only five years, he set out to pursue two dreams. One was to make movies that had a social impact, which became Participant. The other was his passion for social entrepreneurship, the notion that companies seeking to do good while navigating markets can be more effective than charities at curing the world’s ills. Around the same time he........
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