Source: The Mercury News
Jeff Skoll — the shy multi-billionaire co-founder of eBay — left Silicon Valley last year, and set out to test his theory “that people are basically good”‘ on the movie industry.
At first, people here quite naturally assumed he must be demented. But employing many of the same business principles he used at eBay, Skoll assembled a slate of movies, the first of which begins rolling out today.
Good Night, And Good Luck — about broadcaster Edward R. Murrow‘s battle with Sen. Joseph McCarthy — is the first of Skoll’s feature films to open in San Jose. It will be followed next Friday by North Country, starring Charlize Theron as a Minnesota miner confronting sexual harassment in the workplace. The highly-anticipated thriller Syriana, in which George Clooney and Matt Damon play operatives in the global oil trade, arrives Nov. 23.
What each of those films has in common is an underlying assumption that they can “educate and inspire” people to “actually get involved in the issues,” Skoll says. When he founded Participant Productions last year — to make pictures that not only do well at the box office, but also good in the world — Skoll relied on a concept called “the virtuous cycle” that had been part of his original business plan for eBay.
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Jeff Skoll