cinemapolitique?

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

<http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1681324,00.html>

Hollywood's new politics

Founding eBay made Jeff Skoll a billionaire. Now he is doing something
very different - producing political movies that recall the
rabble-rousing days of Warren Beatty and Robert Redford, and turning
American filmgoers into grassroots activists

Gaby Wood
Sunday January 8, 2006
The Observer

The scene is the back room of a shop in Tehran. A middle-aged American
is making a delivery - but there is a hitch: one half of his lethal
cargo disappears, at gunpoint, behind a curtain, in the hands of a man
whose language he does not understand. As the American escapes the
scene down a dusty road, he glances up towards a rooftop. A car
explodes behind him.

This is Syriana, the most political film to have come out of Hollywood
since there was a war in Vietnam. Both subtle and contorted, it has
launched a thousand cover stories and been hailed as the crowning
product of a newly politicised Hollywood; liberals have welcomed it as
a throwback to the days of Warren Beatty and Robert Redford.
Conservatives have gone so far as to suggest that it condones
terrorism.

Written and directed by Steven Gaghan, the Oscar-winning screenwriter
of Traffic, Syriana plots the ways in which American interests in
Middle Eastern oil lead to the very acts of violence that America most
fears. George Clooney, who plays the nervous American spy - bearded,
overweight and fluent in Farsi - executive-produced the movie. His own
political allegory, Good Night, and Good Luck, was released in the US
a month earlier, and with these films he has become a kind of hero for
our time: more powerful than any producer, a vocal source of dissent,
giving performances modest to the point of invisibility. He is behind
the scenes, you might say, even when he is in them.

The New York Times film critic AO Scott wrote that Syriana made the
darkest of Seventies paranoid thrillers look as sweet as Capra. David
Denby in the New Yorker described it as offering 'not so much a story
as a malaise'. This is a large part of its novel provocation: it's a
film about an ideology, not a government, a single conspiracy or any
given war, which is more subtle and more insidious, in a way, than
many of the films of the 1970s to which it is being compared.
'Corruption is our protection,' says an oil executive played in the
film by Tim Blake Nelson, 'Corruption keeps us safe and warm.
Corruption is why we win.'

In left-leaning America's new favourite blog, the Huffington Post, the
holistic guru Deepak Chopra gave Syriana the following review: 'We are
quickly learning that when the right hand is cut, the left hand bleeds
... Something like global co-operation must emerge if this new reality
is ever to make sense. The first step, as Syriana suggests, is to
realise that we are all part of its cast, one way or another.'

That last line could serve as a motto for Participant Productions, the
company behind Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck. Set up in 2004
by Jeff Skoll, billionaire co-founder of eBay, Participant's express
purpose is to make movies that will help to change the world. In the
words of Meredith Blake, the firm's executive vice-president: 'Our
product is social change, and the movies are a vehicle for that social
change.'

But if a film is too preachy, as Participant knows, no one will
listen, so the films must also be commercially viable. So far, they
have been a spectacular success: in its opening weekend, Syriana got
the second-highest box-office rating of the year. Participant's second
film, Good Night, and Good Luck, Clooney's drama about the downfall of
Joseph McCarthy, has grossed more than double its budget and triggered
widespread discussion about the freedom of the press. North Country, a
film starring Charlize Theron as a miner involved in a sexual
harassment case, has been disappointing at the box office but
effective in its social impact. This is what Skoll refers to as a
'double bottom-line' - he has different criteria for measuring
success.

Other recent Hollywood films have had a basis in politics - Jarhead,
Munich, The Constant Gardener - and many movies are now independently
financed by people with non-Hollywood backgrounds: there are internet
entrepreneurs such as David Sacks and Mark Cuban; the Christian
Republican communications mogul Philip Anschutz is behind Ray and The
Chronicles of Narnia; real-estate entrepreneur Bob Yari helped finance
Crash and Thumbsucker. Jim Stern, part owner of the Chicago Bulls
basketball team, funded Hotel Rwanda

But no one is doing what Skoll is doing. Inspired by such films as All
the President's Men, Erin Brockovich, Hotel Rwanda and Gandhi - which
he has paid to have dubbed into Arabic by Palestinian actors to spread
peace in the Middle East - Skoll saw that the films he loved didn't
have much 'follow-up in the real world' and decided to provide an
infrastructure that would allow movies to make a difference far beyond
the cinema. Participant Productions creates partnerships with activist
groups, organises an action campaign around each movie, and has set up
a community website (participate.net) where people can become involved
in group blogs with high-profile experts - and even, in the case of
Good Night, and Good Luck, with real people on whom the film's
protagonists are based.

So who is this social messiah? Business Week has repeatedly voted him
the most innovative philanthropist.The Financial Times has named him
one of eight most eligible 'billionaire bachelors'. Others refer to
him simply as 'the filmanthropist'.

Skoll, who turns 41 next week, grew up in Montreal and Toronto, the
son of an industrial chemicals salesman. When he left to study for a
BA in electrical engineering, he was the first person in his family to
go to university. He ran a computer-rental company in Toronto for a
while, then went to Stanford University to do an MBA. It was there
that he met Pierre Omidyar, with whom he founded what was to become
eBay. (On being told of his raising venture funding, Skoll's parents
said: 'Hey, that's great, and your cousin Leonard just opened a dry
cleaners.' No one in his family suspected what eBay would become,
until one day it went public and his parents saw it on CNN.)

EBay went public in 1998, and the following year Skoll, the company's
president and first full-time employee, became Canada's youngest
billionaire. He immediately sought philanthropic outlets, one of his
schemes being a sort of developing world eBay in which craftspeople
could sell their wares over the internet directly to the West and make
a living instead of making pennies by selling to distributors. He left
eBay in 2000, retiring at the age of 35 with an estimated $2bn in his
pocket.

Skoll, universally said to be earnest, boyish, shy, thoughtful and
down-to-earth, has, by his own reckoning, wanted to change the world
since he was 14. He firmly believed in 'the power of storytelling to
do good' and planned to make enough money to be able to write stories
himself.

You might say he got a little waylaid. But in a sense, Participant has
brought him back to that purpose. 'When I first started talking to
people about investing in movies,' he has said, 'I heard over and over
that the streets of Hollywood are littered with the carcasses of
people like me.' He remained undeterred, because, as he told Time
magazine last month: '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.'

Still, there are perks. A few years ago, he was a geek in Silicon
Valley. Now he's going to parties where Paris Hilton is tapping him on
the shoulder and giving him her number.

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.' Redford, who
collaborated with Skoll on a TV series called The New Heroes, has said
he has 'not come across anyone who was so genuinely altruistic about
their purpose. I've usually come across people who want to do good,
but they are looking for a return.'

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.

Production meetings at Participant stray wildly from the usual
Hollywood fare. Where other companies might discuss the astronomical
fees demanded by actors or complicated shooting schedules,
Participant's executives are more likely to dwell on windmill
facilities or the use of cow manure as a source of alternative energy.

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, a lawyer who founded
Break the Cycle, an organisation devoted to putting a stop to domestic
violence, 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.

I ask if Participant has contributed money to causes touched on by
films they decided not to make. 'No,' she says, 'but there have been
movies proposed that have been creatively fantastic but been found to
be socially falling short.' These, she says, are turned down without
question.

One of the difficulties with 'the second, social part of the bottom
line', she explains, is working out how to track it. 'Social return is
harder to measure.' But they know what their non-profit partners are
experiencing, metrics are being tracked behind the website, and they
get anecdotal reports - from teachers, from college campuses, from
women who have found lawyers to represent them in sexual harassment
cases. 'Oil Change', their Syriana campaign on participate.net, is
very active, she says.

One of the phrases used by Ricky Strauss, Participant's president, is
'passive activism'. He has suggested that there are small things
people can do without giving up their entire lives, things that might
be equivalent to wearing a Lance Armstrong bracelet.

An example of passive activism in relation to Syriana, Blake suggests,
would be buying a TerraPass, 'which takes up three minutes of
someone's time' and funds clean energy projects so that they reduce a
proportionate equivalent of the carbon dioxide emissions from their
car.

It's difficult to know how smooth the leap from discussion to action
will be, but a good deal of discussion, at least, is already under
way. JD Lasica, author of Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital
Generation, is participating in the group blog about Good Night, and
Good Luck, and thinks Participant's project is 'a fascinating idea and
a worthy experiment. It's still too early to tell whether it's going
to pan out. As we're moving into the digital age, people in Hollywood
are starting to grasp the idea that they have to do more than just put
pictures on the big screen. They have to take into account where the
audience is today, and more and more people are involved in the
internet. It's more than just a gimmicky, viral marketing approach -
they're looking for a serious conversation about the issues that are
raised in the film.'

One of the other people participating in that blog is Milo Radulovich,
the Second World War veteran who was accused of being a Communist by
McCarthy, and with whose persecution George Clooney's film begins. On
the blog, Radulovich says he has been inspired to see how many people
who never lived through the McCarthy era have been to see the film and
have understood Clooney's intended allegory about today's political
climate. 'Truth is truth,' Radulovich writes, 'unconditional and
flaming.'

One easily forgotten aspect of the politically charged cinema of the
1970s was the ease and swiftness with which the counterculture became
the mainstream. As Ben Dickenson, whose book Hollywood's New
Radicalism is due out this month, puts it: 'People like Warren Beatty,
who had been on the fringes, were suddenly a part of the mainstream
because they had something to say that the mainstream wanted to sell.'

Could the same not be said of the new politicisation of Hollywood? If,
since Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, politics have become de
rigueur, a cynic might suggest that organisations like Participant
were just cashing in.

Lasica laughs at this idea. 'I think Jeff Skoll has enough money not
to have to cash in,' he says. Clooney, for his part, has countered
that he grew up during the civil rights era, during Vietnam, with the
protest films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This is what shaped
him, he has said - his tastes are long-standing not opportunistic.
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.

Which leads one to ask how comfortably Participant will continue to
lie as bedfellows within the studio system. The studios, after all,
own all the distribution channels. 'You wonder what would happen if
the chips were really down over a particular film,' muses Dickenson,
'whether Skoll with his financial clout and Clooney with his star
power would have the ability to get a film produced that really
challenged the big media industries. Maybe they all feel they're on
borrowed time, or maybe they think they've sussed the game enough to
keep it going indefinitely.'

Next up is Richard Linklater's feature version of Fast Food Nation,
and dozens of Hollywood stars have been lining up outside
Participant's door. 'Who haven't we seen?' Skoll joked not long ago.
Meg Ryan, Salma Hayek, Michael Douglas and all, it seems, have pet
political projects. 'It's been a wild time,' says Blake.

In the end, though, whether Hollywood is newly politicised or not,
each film will have to speak for itself.

Boorman speaks from experience when he says 'you have to be very wary
about looking for trends. What we're looking at now is an experiment,
perhaps, and both Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck are very
welcome. But I think the key is not to draw any conclusions about
Hollywood attitudes from these films. When you talk about politics in
Hollywood, the politics of money is the only politics.'

· 'North Country' opens on 3 February, 'Good Night, and Good Luck' on
17 February; 'Syriana' on 3 March