News

March 1, 2006 - [ RealScreen ]

Two years ago, eBay magnate Jeff Skoll founded Participant Productions to make media with a message a profitable business. With a series of successful dramas to its name, the company turns its attention more fully to non-fiction.

February 24, 2006 - [ Fortune ]

How can anyone living through today's bizarre and mutable weather not be concerned about global warming? This winter, New York had its largest snowfall in history on a Sunday, followed by a 60-degree day Thursday. A week later, I sat in the audience at the TED conference in Monterrey hearing Al Gore enumerate fact after fact that underscored the gravity of the changes in global weather.
 

February 21, 2006 - [ The Globe and Mail ]

Hollywood turned left the day the internet billionaire and the Hollywood star met at the luxury hotel. It was the last day that Jeff Skoll, the former eBay whiz kid, would be in Dubai. George Clooney wanted to meet for breakfast. Both men were in the sheikdom for the shooting of the movie Syriana—Skoll as producer, Clooney as star...

February 9, 2006 - [ The Hollywood Reporter ]

Her vocal contributions to Good Night, and Good Luck earned Dianne Reeves the award for Best Jazz Vocal Album. "A lot of it had to do with George Clooney, who selected all of the music," Reeves said, adding that she believes the film, while set in the 1950s, carries an important theme for today.
 

January 31, 2006 - [ New York Times ]

In a year when size has counted for less than serious intent among voters, Oscar nominations were divvied up on Tuesday among mainly small films with deep political and social themes, from gay romance to the abuse of government power to racial relations to the cycle of vengeance in the Middle East.
 

January 27, 2006 - [ Associated Press ]

...The former Vice President (Al Gore) came to town for the premiere of An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary chronicling what has become his crusade since losing the 2000 presidential election: Educating the masses that global warming is about to toast our ecology and our way of life. He sees the situation as "a true planetary emergency."
 

January 8, 2006 - [ The Observer ]

The scene is the back room of a shop in Tehran. A middle-aged American is making a delivery - but there is a hitch: one half of his lethal cargo disappears, at gunpoint, behind a curtain, in the hands of a man whose language he does not understand.
 

December 20, 2005 - [ National Pos ]

Last week was a triumphant one for Participant Productions and its Canadian chairman and CEO, Jeff Skoll. The production company's first four movie projects -- Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, North Country and Murderball -- picked up a total of eight Golden Globe nominations, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures named Good Night, and Good Luck the best picture of the year.
 

December 19, 2005 - [ Variety ]

Fox Searchlight has picked up domestic distrib rights for Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater's fictional telling of Eric Schlosser's nonfictional account of why you should never eat at McDonald's, Wendy's or Burger King ever again.

December 12, 2005 - [ Boston Globe ]

A tale of forbidden love in the saddle beat out Steven Spielberg's drama of realpolitik revenge yesterday, as the Boston Society of Film Critics voted Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain Best Film of 2005 and Lee Best Director. Spielberg's Munich was edged out in both categories. Brokeback opens in Boston on Friday and Munich on Dec. 23.
 

December 1, 2005 - [ TimeWarner Newsroom ]

"At a time when honest and fearless journalism is vitally important and yet in distressingly short supply, Good Night, and Good Luck has had particular resonance with our organization,” said Joey Berlin, BFCA President. “The film's central character, Edward R. Murrow, remains an iconic figure in our profession – broadcast journalism. While our efforts to inform the public about new movies cannot be compared to Mr. Murrow's seminal 'See It' Now broadcasts, much of our work has evolved from his ‘Person to Person’ shows."

November 20, 2005 - [ Variety ]

George Clooney is tackling two issues that studios may have once considered potentially prickly this fall, questioning the state of American journalism in Good Night, and Good Luck, which he helmed, co-wrote and stars in, as well as critiquing the country's dependence on Middle East oil in Stephen Gaghan's Syriana...

November 7, 2005 - [ Business Week ]

Jeffrey Skoll, former eBay (EBAY) president, aims to pair movie production with social-action campaigns. His goal: To get film audiences worked up enough about something that they've seen on the big screen to get involved. Skoll has some Hollywood heavyweights in his corner: George Clooney, who stars in both Good Night and Syriana, and Oscar winners Matt Damon and Charlize Theron, who star in Syriana and North Country, respectively...
 

September 23, 2005 - [ Salon ]

George Clooney's second picture as a director, Good Night, and Good Luck, is a modestly scaled movie, one that cost only around $8 million to make. But there's something deeply luxurious about the mere idea of making, in 2005, a movie about Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy.
 

May 15, 2005 - [ The New York Times ]

Syriana, which Mr. Gaghan (the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic) wrote and directed and which is to be released by Warner Brothers this fall, dramatizes one spy's role as the tip of the bayonet of American policy in the Middle East, loosely inspired by the memoirs of Robert Baer, a career field operative.
 

Jeff Skoll

December 1, 2005 - [ Esquire ]

"I'm interested in leveraging the power of Hollywood to tell great stories and make a difference in the world," says Jeff Skoll, the forty-year-old CEO of the suddenly ubiquitous Participant Productions, sit-walking his chair out from behind the desk in his Beverly Hills office. www.KeepMedia.com
 

December 4, 2005 - [ Variety ]

..."Any time you're doing a film that's outside of the box, it's a more complicated investment decision," says Stern. "And as the studios have a more tentpole philosophy today, that allows for people like myself or Jeff Skoll or Bob Yari to participate in films, and I think that can be a very good business, and good for cultural dialogue." And like Stern, Participant prexy Ricky Strauss notes, "Talented filmmakers are drawn to these kinds of movies, and it's always a good idea to be in business with really talented filmmakers."...

December 12, 2005 - [ Time ]

By the time Jeff Skoll, CEO of the newly formed film company Participant Productions, got the script for Good Night, and Good Luck--about the showdown between heralded 1950s news anchor Edward R. Murrow and infamous communist witch hunter Joseph McCarthy--it had been turned down by every studio in Hollywood. "Once I started to learn about McCarthyism and about what Murrow did, the story struck me as very relevant to what's going on today with this Administration and things like the Patriot Act," says Canadian-born Skoll...
 

December 2, 2005 - [ ABC News ]

Three films that are considered serious Oscar contenders — North Country, Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana — have one thing in common. They are all bankrolled by one man, a man whose life story might be said to share a title with a less prestigious film — Revenge of the Nerds. He's the 40-year-old mogul who heads Participant Productions, Jeff Skoll.

December 2, 2005 - [ ABC News ]

..."I (Jeff Skoll) started the company called Participant Productions, which is focused on movies that are important, that are socially relevant — entertaining for sure," he said. "They have to be great stories that people want to see. But they're about something."