Founding
The company was founded in June 2004 as Participant Productions by Jeffrey Skoll, the "second employee" of eBay, to produce projects that were both commercially viable and socially relevant. Skoll had earlier co-founded Ovation Entertainment, a start-up film production company, in 2001 but quit the company in the summer of 2003. Skoll began discussions with Hollywood insiders, technical experts and financiers in September 2003 to educate himself about film production. One of Skoll's critical advisors was Peter Schlessel (formerly the president of Columbia Pictures and later the president of Sony Pictures Entertainment). By January 2004, the company had pulled together most of its staff, many of whom attended the Cannes Film Festival. The company believed it had a deal to distribute the documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), directed by Michael Moore, but lost the distribution rights to the Fellowship Adventure Group (a film-distribution company formed by Bob and Harvey Weinstein specifically to release Fahrenheit 9/11).
With $100 million in cash from Skoll's personal funds, Skoll was the company's first chief executive officer, but stepped down from that position in August 2006. Participant Productions' initial plans were to produce four to six films per year, each with a budget of $40 million. The company focused on films in six areas – the environment, healthcare, human rights, institutional responsibility, peace and tolerance, and social and economic justice. It evaluated projects by running them past its creative executives first, assessing their cost and commercial viability second, and then analyzing their social relevance last. Once the decision was made to go ahead with production, the company reached out to non-profit organizations to ask them 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 (announced on September 7, 2007) was the drama film American Gun (2005), on which IFC Films was an equity partner. Two weeks later, the company announced a co-production deal with Warner Bros. on two films – the geopolitical thriller film Syriana (2005) and the drama film Class Action (later retitled North Country (2005)). 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 (2005), 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 (2006).
Read more about this topic: Participant Media
Famous quotes containing the word founding:
“The responsible business men of this country put their shoulders to the wheel. It is in response to this universal demand that we are founding today, All-American Airways.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“... there is no way of measuring the damage to a society when a whole texture of humanity is kept from realizing its own power, when the woman architect who might have reinvented our cities sits barely literate in a semilegal sweatshop on the Texas- Mexican border, when women who should be founding colleges must work their entire lives as domestics ...”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education. School is where you go between when your parents can’t take you and industry can’t take you.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)