George Clooney: Now Who Will Fund Social Justice Movies!
George Clooney: Now Who Will Fund Social Justice Movies!
The Shuttering of Participant Media Sparks Needless Worry Among A-Listers
George Clooney is worried.
Ebay co-founder Jeff Skoll recently announced he would pull the plug on Participant Media, the production company he founded in 2004. Participant is best known for racking up Oscars and making “socially conscious” films like Spotlight, Green Book, An Inconvenient Truth, RBG, and Syriana, for which Clooney scored an Academy Award.
In response to Skoll’s surprising announcement, 118 artists and activists, led by Clooney, Matt Damon, Ava DuVernay, and Kerry Washington, released an open letter. In it they declare that “values-based storytelling is needed now more than ever” and they “call upon Hollywood to meet the moment.” The signatories urged industry money people to “greenlight films with purpose.”
Without Participant, who will make social justice films!
Have they heard of Netflix?
The streaming giant just released the not-too-subtle anti-cop Sundance doc Power, and just before that came Stamped from the Beginning, by the monocuture’s favorite “antiracist” Ibram X. Kendi.
The climate catastrophe film Don’t Look Up stars A+ listers like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep, and there’s plenty more where that came from.
You could go Down to Earth with Zac Efron or get inspired by young climate-conscious go-getters in Youth v. Gov. If you’d like you alarmism in a different genre, try the sci-fi Captain Nova or The Decline, an action-thriller about a group of survivalists who are so terrified by the threat of climate change that they head to the Canadian wilderness, where they “witness a fatal accident that sets off a string of horrific events and divides the participants into opposing groups.”
Want to keep the messaging going during family movie night?
Check out the animated flick Bigfoot Family. The family encounters a big oil company that’s planning to bomb great swaths of land in order to get to all that black gold. (A big oil company as villain, how innovative!)
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You’ll also find the obligatory “Pharma Bad” and “Trump Bad” offerings, as well as projects executive produced by noted filmmakers Barack and Michelle Obama. Apart from the Obama magic, many of the biggest names in entertainment dish out similar offerings.
Want to dial up your climate anxiety? Hulu’s got you covered. Ditto for Amazon, Apple TV and Disney.
And along with genres like comedy and drama, streamers have added new categories like LGBTQ and Black Voices—Netflix even offers a Black Lives Matter collection. (Do execs even care that black people never supported BLM’s most famous position?)
You’ll find lots of skin-deep diversity, but don’t expect Netflix or the others to get fired up about intellectual diversity among black people or any other minority group.
What Participant Means to Me
Participant Media’s demise is also a bit personal.
With our production company Korchula Productions, my wife and I aspire to be a different kind of Participant Media. Although Skoll’s budgets and impact dwarfs ours, we do borrow from Participant's playbook. We prioritize high production values, maintain a “double bottom line,” and mount impact campaigns that extend and deepen the influence of our projects.
That means partnering with organizations like the Institute for Justice, Heterodox Academy, and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on educational efforts and publicity. We punch above our weight when it comes to earned media, and have collected many impact highlights.
We’ve screened on hundreds of college campuses, and rarely got cancelled. We inspired an episode of the FOX hit Family Guy, and were a part of a film team that set the Guinness World Record for the largest film screening audience (28,442).
Our 2018 film Little Pink House was the subject of a bipartisan congressional screening, and The Hollywood Reporter noted that ours was the first such screening since Lincoln, a Participant Media film. So the indie film ride can be fun, but when it comes to comparing our company with Participant, the experience is mostly “same planet, different worlds.”
The difference isn’t just in scale, but also in worldview.
Although my wife and I may not share Skoll’s politics, that doesn’t stop us from appreciating some of Participant’s work. But I never quite understood why Skoll founded Participant in the first place. Imagine: A lefty billionaire surveys the lefty Hollywood landscape, and says to himself, “You know what this place needs? More lefty movies!”
Skoll brought sand to the beach, and twenty years later, there’s even more sand. Yet Clooney and company keep kvetching. And to switch to a more social justice-y metaphor, the studios mentioned above represent just the tip of the iceberg—one that’s definitely not melting.
A Million Skolls
All kinds of monoculture organs support social justice content. The money often flows from deep-pocketed foundations like Ford or trust fund kids, who usually lurch left with their family money, even when the source of it leans the other way. Consider Megan Ellison, daughter of billionaire conservative Larry Ellison, whose production company backs movies like Vice, She Said, and (coming soon!) Nightbitch.
And then there’s Abigail Disney, niece of Walt Disney (and a signatory to the open letter).
She not only funds monoculture-approved films like Reality, Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen, and The American Dream and other Fairy Tales, but she’ll quickly disavow a once-prized project after monoculture mandarins decide it’s suddenly problematic. That’s what happened when a small band of fundamentalists at Sundance led a mutiny against Meg Smaker’s excellent film Jihad Rehab.
And for even deeper pockets, Clooney and company can turn to governments around the world including the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK. After films are funded, the monocutlure’s finest film festivals (Sundance, TIFF, Cannes, and so on) will get busy generating buzz. Then they’ll pass the buzz duty off to a fawning media and an army of critics that doles bonus points to progressive projects.
The world of “impact producers” is just as intellectually homogenous, and adjacent to that world you’ll find a constellation of nonprofit organizations and university institutions that lobby for even greater social justice uniformity. Don’t let the countless hours of climate change docs, dramas, thrillers, and celebrity ensembles fool you, say organizations like the Hollywood Climate Summit, Reality of Change, Good Energy, and the USC Norman Lear Center—what we really need is more climate change content!
If you’re an Eight Percenter A-lister like George Clooney, you have nothing to worry about. A sprawling apparatus is hard at work supporting entertainment that affirms your worldview and suppressing projects that do not.
So sleep well tonight, George. There may have never been a time in recent memory when you’ve needed Jeff Skoll less than you do right now.
Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here.