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To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (27098)	1/25/2006 1:58:46 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 57684

Web mogul puts politics in spotlight at Sundance today.reuters.com Wed Jan 25, 2006 1:03 AM ET By Anne Thompson PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - With politics taking front and center stage among the movies screening at the Sundance Film Festival, an Internet billionaire has injected two opinionated documentaries into the fray. Davis Guggenheim's "An Inconvenient Truth" takes aim at global warming and stars former vice president and environmentalist Al Gore, while Linda Goldstein Knowlton and Linda Hawkins Costigan's "The World According to Sesame Street" looks at how the educational series is adapted in other countries. Both films are seeking distribution. They also arrive as part of what to date has been a successful two-year experiment engineered by eBay co-founder Jeff Skoll and production partner Ricky Strauss to use "the power of Hollywood to do good," as their participantproductions.com Web site declares. They earned eight Golden Globe nominations for four of their movies -- "Murderball," the documentary about wheelchair rugby that debuted at last year's Sundance; "North Country," the feminist consciousness-raiser starring Charlize Theron; and two films produced with George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh's Section 8 Prods., the Middle East oil thriller "Syriana" and the Edward R. Murrow drama "Good Night, and Good Luck," a strong Oscar contender. "The success of our fall films helped the film community to get what we're doing," Skoll said. "When we started the company, the goal was to facilitate media that could make a difference in the world. That could mean development, funding, marketing or a social-action campaign." As important as the box office and cultural impact of such movies are to Skoll, so is the "social campaign alongside each film with our social-sector partners, like the National Organization for Women," he said. "We reach out to their members and alert them to a movie, like 'North Country,' that's in their interest. Once they've seen the film, they're able to be in touch directly via our Web site participate.net, a hub for campaigns separate from our corporate Web site. With each film we're building a community." After only three months, participate.net logs between 5,000-10,000 unique visitors a day. The site took off quickly, because when Participant partners with a studio like Warner Bros. Pictures on "Syriana," it places the participate.net URL on all advertising materials, including online ads. The "North Country" DVD also will have an insert promoting participate.net's campaign to reduce sexual harassment and domestic violence. Skoll said that he would have liked to have been able to help Don Cheadle last year when the actor was speaking out on behalf of Rwanda after the release of "Hotel Rwanda." "He was a one-man band," he said. Backing documentaries also is part of Participant's mandate. Participant fully funded "An Inconvenient Truth" after the filmmakers, Guggenheim and Lawrence Bender, took the Participant execs to a Gore presentation on global warming. "I was blown away by how compelling the presentation was," Skoll said. "I thought I was up to speed on environmental issues, global warming in particular, but Gore presented the urgency of what's going to happen not in the next 20 to 50 years, but in the next five to 10 years." Skoll only became interested in "The World According to Sesame Street" when he realized it was about more than just the show itself but about the PBS series' impact on children around the globe. Next up for the company is Richard Linklater's adaptation of Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation," which Participant funded with producer Jeremy Thomas. Fox Searchlight will release it this year. Its development pipeline includes James Frey's controversial drug memoir "A Million Little Pieces." "The material will make a difference in the world, whether it's true or not," Skoll said. In addition, Participant also is readying an adaptation of Azar Nafisi's memoir "Reading Lolita in Teheran" and "Electric Dreams," based on a Deena Goldstone's book about teenagers in rural Carolina who built their own electric car. Reuters/Hollywood Reporter