02.08.2020

jeff skoll illness

He helped launch a Silicon Valley startup on the belief that strangers would trade goods online for cash. The social action unit has screened films for members of Congress, NGOs and other decision makers.Participant CEO Jim Berk reels off facts on the scope of the Participant community — 3.1 million individuals accessible via email; 777,000 “actions” (signing petitions, writing lawmakers, pledging behavioral changes) taken in a single recent month. Skoll, already slight in build, lost 10 pounds to what doctors diagnosed as yellow fever, perhaps contracted from Ebola caregivers. After meeting Skoll a decade ago, Horn says: “I found myself thinking, ‘If anybody on this planet is going to have a lot of money, let it be a person like him.’ I liked his values.

When Skoll was fourteen, his father was diagnosed with cancer which prompted him to discuss with his son how much he regretted not having had the time to do everything he had planned in life. He pressed for the company’s TakePart website to do more. They say he has an obsession, large even by Hollywood standards, with where he sits at events (demanding, for instance, that he be at a premier table in the “pit” for the Golden Globes).One former employee says he fussed obsessively with the color and fonts on the TakePart home page, and repeatedly rewrote the boilerplate about Participant’s mission, even when it seemed everyone had signed off.Berk says that he has modeled his “empowering” style of management on Skoll’s. Participant helped finance some films that were both commercially viable and socially relevant — including Oscar-winning climate-change documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and a trio of best-picture nominees, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “The Help” and “Lincoln” — and backed them with education and social-action campaigns on its crusading website.Walt Disney Studios chairman Alan Horn describes Skoll as “a fully formed human being,” unmoved by celebrity, the usual Hollywood trappings or the prospect of greater riches.

We are going to figure out what we are going to do.”A strategic rethinking of Participant’s digital operations is also expected. They complain that his micromanagement particularly hobbled “TakePart Live,” the nightly public-affairs talker positioned as a network flagship. Mr. Skoll earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto and an MBA from Stanford University.

He declined to comment for this story.Berk says some creative differences are to be expected when quickly ramping up a 24/7 television operation. He says Pivot deserves credit for expanding to 48 million households, and calls the operation (under new manager Kent Rees) “hell-bent” on reaching 60 million homes in 18 months. By the first quarter of 2016, Berk pledges, Pivot will sign up for a Nielsen rating.Skoll’s decisions about what to do in TV will be influenced not only by the McKinsey review, but also by a talk he had while on a 2012 climate-change expedition to Antarctica. His employees say he’s a prankster who once spiked a companion’s food with flaming-hot habanero sauce and, on another occasion, called Participant’s chief operating officer from the Sundance Film Festival at 3 a.m. to treat him to a blast of grating techno music. In January, he turned 50.After it all, he moved with the urgency of a man making up for lost time. If something happened to me, that would be a problem.During a rare and wide-ranging interview at his Sunset Boulevard office, the soft-spoken Skoll divulged plans to push ahead with a long-stalled initiative to appoint a board of directors for the Beverly Hills-based maker of films, television and new-media content. “Lincoln” lost the top Oscar to “Argo” in 2013.But Participant measures the success of its films not just by the awards they win, but by the number of viewers they move to action. It carves out a symbiotic niche and prolongs the shelf life of its content, largely through its TakePart website. “It was ‘Dodgeball!’ ‘Dodgeball!’ I said, ‘Nice try, guys, but no.’ ”Skoll says those making the offers didn’t much care about his mission. Which dollar helps the world more: the one spent on a renewable energy project in Africa, the one to fund Indian solar-panel evangelist Bunker Roy, or the one to back a Pivot show about climate change?“My goal is to make the biggest difference possible in the world,” Skoll says. His mother was a teacher and his father was a chemical company owner who sold industrial chemicals. Initially founded with a focus on film, over the past decade Participant has expanded to become a multi-platform content company producing and distributing film, television and digital entertainment. … I liked his humility and I liked his intelligence.”But inside his entertainment company, Skoll — who in 2013 publicly proclaimed his intention to make Participant “the most important media company in the world in terms of impact” — expressed frustration. A Participant employee recounted one staff meeting: “Someone said, ‘Should we get started? In the prior year, 2013, he had been bedridden for months after back surgery needed to repair damage from an old snowboarding accident. © Copyright 2020 Variety Media, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Business Media, LLC. But rather than make world-changing films, the modest production company generated a couple of clunkers, low-lighted by the Robin Williams-starrer “House of D.”Skoll rebooted in late 2003, taking offices on the Sony lot and working closely with new advisers — Hollywood insiders Peter Schlessel and Rick Hess, the CAA agent.

“You know what the movie was?” Adams recalled. “There was endless tinkering, and it never had an opportunity to find its feet,” says one individual connected with the program, co-hosted by political scion Meghan McCain, before its December cancellation.

The film was nominated for six Oscars, including best picture, and is one of 67 films — about half of them documentaries — that Participant has helped finance.

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