Participant (company)
Participant Media, LLC was an American independent film and television production company founded in 2004 by Jeffrey Skoll, dedicated to entertainment intended to spur social change. The company financed and co-produced film and television content, as well as digital entertainment through its subsidiary SoulPancake, which the company acquired in 2016.
The company was originally named Participant Productions and went on to become a well-known independent financier. The company's name descriptively politicizes its basis on currently topical subjects presented to induce awareness of problematic social aspects.
The company produced, financed, or co-produced 135 films and five television series. Its films have been nominated for 73 Academy Awards, and have won 18, including Best Picture for Green Book and Spotlight.
Participant, which earned B Corp certification in 2017, was the largest company that exclusively produces and finances social impact entertainment.
On April16, 2024, Skoll announced that the company would be ceasing operations after two decades, with nearly all of its staff being dismissed and development of new content shutting down entirely.
History
Founding and early investments
The company was founded in January 2004 as Participant Productions by Jeffrey Skoll, the "second employee" of eBay, with $100 million in cash from his personal funds. Its goal was to produce projects that would be both commercially viable and socially relevant.Skoll was the company's first chief executive officer, but stepped down in August 2006. The firm's initial plans were to produce four to six films per year, each with a budget of $40 million. It focused on films in six areas the environment, health care, human rights, institutional responsibility, peace and tolerance, and social and economic justice. It evaluated projects by running them past its creative executives first, only then assessing their cost and commercial viability, and analyzing their social relevance last. Once the decision was made to go ahead with production, the company asked non-profit organizations to build campaigns around the release. In some cases, the studio has spent years creating positive word-of-mouth with advocacy groups, which are often encouraged to use the film to push their own agendas.
The new company quickly announced an ambitious slate of productions. Its first film was the drama film American Gun, with equity partner IFC Films. Two weeks later, the company announced a co-production deal with Warner Bros. on two filmsthe geopolitical thriller film Syriana and the drama film Class Action ''. Participant Productions contributed half the budget of each film. Its fourth production, a documentary film, was announced in November 2004. Titled The World According to Sesame Street, the film examined the impact of the children's television show Sesame Street on world culture, focusing on Kosovo, Bangladesh, South Africa and El Salvador. At the same time, the company began to implement an environmentally friendly strategy: Syriana was the company's first carbon-neutral production, and the company created carbon offsets for the documentary film An Inconvenient Truth.
First films and financial problems, maturing growth
In 2005, the company suffered its first stumble. It again agreed to co-finance a picture with Warner Bros., Vadim Perelman's second feature, Truce. Although Perelman claimed he had "never been moved by a script to such an extent", the film never went into production. North Country did poorly at the box office despite recent Academy Award-winner Charlize Theron in the lead. The World According to Sesame Street never found a distributor for theatrical release, and eventually only aired on PBS television, Sesame Street's broadcast home.The company announced in March 2005 that it would executive produce the Warner Bros. drama film Good Night, and Good Luck. At the Cannes Film Festival in May, the company bought the right to distribute the forthcoming drama film Fast Food Nation directed by Richard Linklater in North America in return for an equity stake. A month later, it bought distribution rights to the documentary Murderball in return for an equity stake. It also executive produced and co-financed Al Gore's global-warming documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
As heavier production scheduling grew, the company added staff. Ricky Strauss was named the first president in March 2005, with oversight of production, marketing and business development. Attorney and former non-profit chief executive Meredith Blake was hired in June as its Senior Vice President of Corporate and Community Affairs, to oversee development of awareness and outreach campaigns around the social issues raised in the company's films in cooperation with non-profit organizations, corporations, and earned media. Diane Weyermann, director of the Sundance Institute's Documentary Film Program, joined the company in October 2005 as Executive Vice President of Documentary Production.
The company's non-film-production efforts continued to grow. The company provided an undisclosed amount of financing in February 2005 to film distributor Emerging Pictures to finance that company's national network of digitally equipped cinemas. The company also began its first socially relevant outreach project, helping to finance screenings of the biographical film Gandhi in the Palestinian territories for the first time as well as in the countries of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. In support of its upcoming film, An Inconvenient Truth, the studio negotiated a deal for distributor Paramount Classics to donate five percent of its U.S. domestic theatrical gross box-office receipts to the Alliance for Climate Protection.
The company had a very successful 2005 awards season, with eleven Academy Award nominations and one win. Good Night, and Good Luck garnered six nominations, including Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Director, Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role and Best Original Screenplay. Murderball was nominated for Best Documentary Feature. North Country was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role and Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Syriana was nominated for Best Actor in a Supporting Role and Best Original Screenplay. But of the eleven nominations, only George Clooney won for Best Actor in a Supporting Role in Syriana.
Film line-up addition and continued growth
In June, the company announced it would partner with New Line Cinema to produce The Crusaders, a drama about Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483, a landmark ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States which ended racial segregation in public schools. But the film never got beyond the development stage. In September, the company entered into an agreement to co-produce the drama film The Visitor with Groundswell Productions, and two months later agreed to co-produce a documentary film about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, Standard Operating Procedure, directed by Errol Morris.The company also took an equity position in and a co-production credit for Chicago 10, an animated documentary film about the 1969 Chicago Seven conspiracy trial.
Finally, in December, the company agreed to finance and produce the documentary film Man from Plains, directed by Jonathan Demme, that followed former U.S. President Jimmy Carter as he promoted his political-science book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
The company also co-financed, with Warner Independent Pictures, the documentary film Darfur Now, and, with Universal Studios and others, co-financed the biographical film Charlie Wilson's War. The film had the biggest budget of any of the company's films since Syriana.
Three major corporate events also occurred in 2006.
- In September, Skoll stepped down as the company's chief executive officer and was replaced by James Berk, the founding executive director of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Foundation and former president and chief executive officer of Hard Rock Cafe International. Berk's duties included daily operations and management, earned media efforts and corporate branding.
- In December, the company won its first significant award when the Producers Guild of America presented the 2007 Stanley Kramer Award to An Inconvenient Truth.
- The company was also one of the backers in April 2006 which invested $1 billion in Summit Entertainment, allowing that company to restructure itself as a full-fledged film studio. This did not become known, however, for near three years.
Corporate growth continued in 2007. On January 8, the company hired motion-picture marketing veterans Buffy Shutt and Kathy Jones, both Executive Vice President of Marketing, to coordinate marketing of the company's films. Eight days later, the company hired Tony Award- and Emmy Award-winning event producer John Schreiber as Executive Vice President of Social Action and Advocacy to enhance the company's earned media, non-profit and corporate outreach and advocacy campaigns.
February saw the hire of Adrian Sexton as Executive Vice President to oversee digital and global media projects, and April saw veteran production head Jonathan King join the company as Executive Vice President of Production. Lynn Hirshfield was hired in May as Vice President of Business Development to launch the company's publishing division, and saw Bonnie Abaunza and Liana Schwarz both Vice President of Social Action Campaign Development and Operations to assist with social outreach and advocacy campaigns in mid-June.
In November, the company signed a deal with actress Natalie Portman's newly formed production company, Handsomecharlie Films, under which the two studios would co-produce socially relevant films for a two-year period. No films were produced under this agreement, however. The same month, the company hired veteran Showtime producer John Moser to oversee development and production of original programs for television and home cable. But despite the management activity and expansion, not all of the company's films did well. Chicago 10 did not sell for several months after it premiered at Sundance, and only significant editing and a reduction in running time led to a distribution deal.
The company also announced additional productions. In January, it said it was co-financing the drama film The Kite Runner with Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and DreamWorks Pictures, the latter company then owned by Viacom via Paramount Pictures. The Kite Runner was the first collaboration between both Participant and DreamWorks; the two companies would not collaborate again until The Help in 2011. That spring, the company took an equity position in Angels in the Dust, a documentary film about children orphaned by AIDS, and paid the filmmaker to update the film and shoot more footage.
In April, it closed a deal with Warner Independent to turn Randy Shilts' biographical book, The Mayor of Castro Street into a film, but the project entered development hell, as well as the feature-length documentary about the 2007 Live Earth concert later. Five months later the company agreed to co-produce and co-finance the company's first comedy film, Taildraggers, revolving around five pilots trying to stop oil extraction from an Alaskan preserve. As of June 2009, however, the film had not been produced.
Participant then signed a co-production deal with State Street Pictures to finance the biographical drama, Bobby Martinez about the eponymous Latino surfer in November. The film entered development hell for nearly two years but hired Ric Roman Waugh to rewrite and direct in April 2009, with supposed production by the beginning of 2012. By the end of 2007, the company was seen as a key player in documentary production.