Producing : Why Participant Media closing does not mean doom and gloom for impact films and entertainment. by Laurie Ashbourne

No one likes to see a production company shut down, especially an independent film studio that is beloved or even an offshoot of a major studio. I’ve been employed in both of these when they’ve shut down and it’s never a pleasant day even when you know it’s coming.

But there are many factors that go into these decisions, and very rarely are they a reflection of the industry as a whole. In the case of Participant Media, its founder and CEO Jeff Skoll has not been an active “participant” in the day-to-day running for sometime; for various personal and professional reasons he left others in charge. He has billions of dollars — it’s not as if he was bankrupt. However, a handful of years ago the person he had running it started a streaming channel long before everyone had one and lost $250 million. Skoll was more than willing to operate at a loss of 10 or 20 million dollars a year depending on Box office for his specialty titles. But this loss just made no sense even for someone who had the cash to spare and just wanted to do good in the world. He’s still going to run the library of all of the wonderful films that they made over the years, it’s just no longer going to be footing the bill. But they hadn’t been footing the bill for quite some time; the past several years Participant has only come in with partial funding for the films that had their name on them. As much as I admire the intent behind the content that participate media helped bring to life, the actual impact of these films was not as great as it could’ve been. Skoll still has his foundation, and he funded the Social Impact Entertainment Society.

Like most documentaries or narrative films that are heavy-handed about an issue they tend to limit their reach because most people that go see them are already in tune with the issue. In other words, they’re preaching to the choir. That is the problem with “cause cinema” in general. However, it doesn’t mean , that Hollywood can’t make an impact and entertain at the same time. I like to use a case study between AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (2006), which Participant produced, and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW (2004). AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH was extremely successful for a documentary bringing in just shy of $50MM at the box office, and earning all kinds of awards. But it didn’t have a measurable environmental impact. THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW brought in over a half $1 billion in box office money, and a study among all Ivy League Universities showed that as a result of seeing that film, enrollment in environmental studies increased, and according to Yale, the film also increased consumer perceptions on how their day-to-day activities impacted climate change. Now that is an impact and it certainly was not due to the fact that A DAY AFTER TOMORROW used it as a recruitment tool to universities or a soapbox for the crisis. But, imagine if ten-cents of every ticket sold went to scholarships for people who could not afford these academic endeavors or even just went to fund research into the effects of climate change. Ten cents of every ticket sold would have been over $9MM, that by now, 20-years later — we may be in a much different place.

Another case in point more recently, THE SOUND OF FREEDOM had its audiences screaming from the rooftops to save the children, that people must see this important film for the sake of the children. Yet not one cent of the hundreds of millions of dollars that film made went to actually help victims of child trafficking.

Participant Media and Hollywood in general are well intentioned in their philanthropic endeavors, but until the stories we tell actually do more than bring brief awareness — until they actually support change within the very communities and issues that they focus on, we’ve not made a strong enough impact.

When one door closes another one opens and I am stepping through.