Jeff Skoll
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At the 2019 Oscars, one production company was at the center of some of the year’s most talked-about films and on the cutting edge of some of the industry’s biggest trends. However, the men who supported it did not attend the ceremony.
That year, the film produced by Participant Media garnered 17 Oscar nominations. green bookwhich ultimately won Best Picture and grossed $321.8 million worldwide. Romewhich puts Netflix in the best movie race for the first time. RBGa documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was one of the highest-grossing independent films of 2018.
Indicative of the unique and dual mission of Participant and its backer, tech billionaire Jeff Skoll, Participant’s Oscar gathering that year included the main character of director Alfonso Cuarón’s film included a National Domestic Workers Alliance viewing party at the Jane Club in honor of . Romeafter-show party at Pali House, with Cuaron green book Director Peter Farrelly celebrated. Skoll, who spent much of Oscar season dealing with health issues and greenlit both films, sent an email to his executives congratulating him.
“This was a high point because these movies were something we built from the ground up,” says one of those executives. “It was surreal. [At the Oscars] of Rome The row was seated in front of us, and green book He was behind us. ”
When Skoll announced Wednesday that he plans to shut down Participant Media, the socially conscious production company he founded for 20 years, the news underscored the company’s decline from its 2019 peak.. The closure surprised much of Hollywood, but two sources with knowledge of the conversations said Mr. Skoll had been quietly considering selling Participant for more than a year, and that he and Laureen Powell Jobs, founders of eBay, It is said that he had approached Mr. Pierre Omidyar.
Skoll informed about 100 staffers of a memo citing “revolutionary changes in the way content is created, distributed, and consumed,” and brought in his own memo. Auditors examined the participants’ books last month. “We knew it was going to be bad, but no one expected this,” said a person familiar with the audit.
Mr. Skoll, 59, took pride in his company’s mission to agitate. Changing society through storytelling. When he couldn’t find a suitable buyer, someone who would maintain the company’s good purpose, he decided to keep the participant library and company name for himself. Participant CEO David Linde, who has held the top job since 2016, has not yet commented on Skoll’s drastic move.
Mr. Skoll, a Canadian engineer who was eBay’s first president, didn’t fit the profile of a wealthy dilettante who dabbled in Hollywood to meet stars and get invited to parties. He was an introvert, interested in appealing to an audience, and was well-liked by Participant’s staff, according to people who worked for him.
“Jeff was a great boss,” says Jonathan King, who led feature production at Participant for more than a decade and now co-runs Laurene Powell Jobs’ Concordia Studios with Davis Guggenheim. “In the early days when he was running the company day-to-day, he was very enthusiastic, ran good meetings, and was fun to be around. He was very clear about what we were trying to do. ” At the time, Mr. Skoll was splitting his time between Northern California, where the Skoll Foundation is based, and Los Angeles. “Even after that, he was a good boss from a distance because he put in enough time and believed in us.”
Another source said: “He was an excellent guy and seemed very proud of us. He considered Participant to be part of his heritage.”
One of the top executives at many of the studios who did business with Skoll and was paid handsomely for distributing Participant films said he was “likeable but unusual and definitely socially awkward.” Stated.
Sources said Skoll’s health may also have played a role in his decision to leave Hollywood. He is being treated for a severe autoimmune disease and also has a decades-old back injury. In 2014, he contracted yellow fever while working to support NGOs and epidemiologists to stop the Ebola outbreak in Africa. A representative for Mr. Skoll declined to comment on whether his health was a factor in the decision to close Participant.
The departure of two key executives, Mr. King, who left the company in 2019, and documentary champion Diane Weierman, who died of cancer in 2021, had a significant impact on Mr. Skoll and influenced the direction of the company. multiple officials said. “Diane was a pillar of the company and her personal spirit shaped the company. Her death was a terrible, terrible loss,” says one industry insider. Their absence, amid the COVID-19 pandemic that has shaken the industry, added to the feeling of participants being adrift. The company has continued to cut jobs in his 2022 and has gone from fully funding scripted features like 2019 to becoming more risk-averse in its investments. green book and Rome, only corroborates 25 percent of the documentary. Participant, as astute as Skoll, did not foresee the rise of streaming and the threat to theatrical distribution that was made worse by the pandemic.
“If you’re like Jeff Skoll and you want to co-finance a movie that may never be shown in theaters anymore, you’re going to have to A) lose a lot of money and B) lose the social impact you’re hoping for. You’re not going to get that,” says a studio executive who works with Skoll. “The market has changed a lot since he first started, and he’s no longer very involved. I’m not sure what the Participant brand once meant in today’s environment.”
a A graduate of Stanford Business School, Mr. Skoll was at the center of the Silicon Valley boom of the late 1990s. He left eBay with $2 billion in cash and an influential circle of friends, including Elon Musk, former Paypal COO David O. Sachs, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and investors. Many of them, including Keith Lavoie, remain his friends today. Interested in leveraging his own wealth, which Forbes magazine estimates today at $4.5 billion, to have a major impact on his philanthropic efforts, Mr. Skoll began his career in 1999 to fight global poverty. Established the Squall Foundation.
Mr. Skoll arrived in Hollywood in 2004 and founded Participant with the motto: “A good story, told well, can change the world.” His early films, put together by him and his chief executive Ricky Strauss, attracted star power and major studio partners, including a 2005 historical drama with George Clooney. Good night and good luckdistributed by Warner Independent, starring Charlize Theron northern country, released by Warner Brothers.But it was Al Gore’s climate document inconvenient truth In 2006, the film made Participant a household name, winning two Oscars and collecting nearly $50 million at the worldwide box office. This is a staggering amount for a documentary, helped Gore win his 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, and sparked a global debate about climate change. Documentaries have become a staple for Participant, accounting for 50% of his 135 films released to date, while the company has found a wide audience for scripted films such as: Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, infectious disease, lincoln and help.
Squall visited the set, attended the premiere, and read the script. “In the early days, if we wanted to do something, we’d give him the script,” says one former Participant employee. “He was reading it that night. We talked about it the next day, and then we talked about whether or not to pursue this. Gradually he took a step back and said, ‘I trust you, You can do it.”
Sources said Mr. Skoll intended to run Participant at some loss. “There were people working on social impact that were never intended to generate income,” says one former Participant employee. “He was fine with doing that because he knew the company would never make money.”
But losses widened in 2013 when Participant’s then-CEO Jim Burke engineered the launch of Pivot, a cable network focused on social issues, and in 2015, Skoll sold McKinsey & Company requested an audit. “It was a huge investment, a terrible business idea on Jim’s part, and they lost between $200 million and $250 million,” the source added. “It’s not the same as running a company at a deficit of $15 million to $20 million every year.” Burke was fired and Skoll returned to run day-to-day operations, rather than in Burke’s old office. He chose to use a small office between King and Wareman. He soon hired Linde, who ran Focus Features for years before briefly serving as co-chairman of Universal, as Participant’s new CEO.
Squall’s influence in Hollywood extended beyond Participant. He invested millions of dollars in Summit Entertainment in 2009 as a way to release his films theatrically, but Lionsgate later acquired Summit. In 2015, he helped throw Steven Spielberg a lifeline as one of the backers of the new company Amblin Partners, reviving the Amblin name with Spielberg’s first production single and ending the demise of DreamWorks SKG. I told you. Spielberg’s team had already worked with Participant on several notable films. lincoln and help, and Skoal invested $200 million, while Reliance Group and eOne also invested in the business. Amblin’s Participant Agreement ended in his 2020, and Amblin was later rebranded to Amblin Entertainment.
Skoll’s ties to L.A. weakened after he and TV executive Stephanie Swedlow divorced in 2019, and when the pandemic hit, he sold two Los Angeles mansions and moved to Palm Beach, Florida. He moved to focus on his foundation and investment firm, Capricorn Investment Group. The state also has no capital gains or income taxes, and is home to many Silicon Valley crews.
As Participant prepares to wind down, the company has nine projects currently in theaters and streamers or waiting to be released. shirleya Netflix Shirley Chisholm movie starring Regina King, Food Co., Ltd. 2the sequel to the company’s 2008 corporate farming expose documentary, features Magnolia and we have grown nowA Sony Pictures Classics drama set in the Cabrini Green apartment complex in Chicago in the 1990s.
Mr. Skoll will no longer support film or television projects, but will maintain ties to the industry through his charity, the Skoll Foundation. Last week at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England, George Clooney and Amal Clooney spoke about their work with the Clooney Justice Foundation, an organization that consults with film and television companies on the representation of Native Americans. Donated $2 million to an Illuminative. people on screen.
