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EBay Employee Number One
by Richard Horgan |
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4/3/2008 at 10:56:36 AM |
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So far, Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions has had a hand in eight documentaries and seven feature films, the latest being Tom McCarthy’s sophomore effort The Visitor (April 11th) and Errol Morris’s newest war politics polemic Standard Operating Procedure (April 25th). On average, his movies have drawn an impressive positive critical rating of 72.5%, with the 2005 documentary Murderball sitting at the high end (98%) and the well-intentioned 2006 crime drama American Gun bringing up the rear (38%).
But perhaps Skoll’s most intriguing movie project so far is the one not on this list: The Gandhi Project. Launched three years ago this month, the initiative involved taking a version of 1982’s Best Picture Gandhi, dubbing it into Palestinian and then screening it across Palestine and other portions of the Arab world. There is a clip on the Skoll Foundation website of Ben Kingsley delivering his wisdom in Arabic, and I urge you to check it out. There’s something truly affecting about watching the actor as Mahatma deliver the words ‘God be with you’ in that language.
The slogan for umbrella company Participant Media is “Changing the World, One Story at a Time.” Like Sidney Kimmel, Skoll (pictured above, left) makes movies that he wants to see and certainly, The Visitor is a wonderful addition to that outlook, if for no other reason than the fact that like the recent Frank Langella tour de force Starting Out in the Evening, it has the guts to cast a character actor (Six Feet Under’s Richard Jenkins) in the lead.
But whereas Kimmel has had a hard time getting people to follow him into theaters, prompting the clothing industry magnate to recently announce a 50% cutback in his film operations, Skoll presents an admirable track record both on the fiction and non-fiction side. The average worldwide gross for his made-up stories is a solid $41.5 million per film. Granted, the 43-year-old Montreal native has had the wherewithal to partner with folks like George Clooney (twice), Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks. Still, he’s doing pretty damn good so far, especially if you wipe off the slate American Gun’s $34,138 box office take.
Bountiful billionaire Skoll recently got his first taste of the two-strikes-and-you’re-out Hollywood M.O. He was all set to fund Craig Zadan and Neil Meron’s Harvey Milk biopic, perhaps even – as FilmStew first reported – with Steve Carell in the lead. But then along came Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn, who recently wrapped their version in San Francisco, and all of a sudden this project was about as viable as the idea of peddling Nazi memorabilia on eBay.
But if you make the effort to go out and see The Visitor in theaters this month, find yourself renting the brand new DVD release Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains or are hoping to get a piece of a $3 million Sundance Institute initiative funding documentaries about social entrepreneurship, count your lucky stars for the current pursuits of EBay’s first full-time employee. This Stanford grad could have easily retired to a Caribbean island, but instead, like the peanut-loving 39th President of the United States, he is genuinely interested in working to leave a lasting footprint on this crazy world.
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