Participant Media – keynote with founder Jeff Skoll and CEO Jim Berk

Montreal-born Participant Media founder Jeff Skoll moved to L.A. in 2004 to launch a global media company with a specific mandate to create commercially viable entertainment that promotes social change.

“The mission was to try to make a difference in the biggest issues in the world. In the early days, we had a template of world issues we were trying to tackle; we wanted to facilitate the most tangible real change that we possibly can,” Skoll recalled during his keynote conversation Friday at the Glenn Gould theatre.

Some of the positive surprises in the early days? Skoll remembered as part of his first year of diligence before officially launching Participant Media meeting with several studios heads to talk about the company and its mission. Allan Horn, the then-head of Warner Brothers Pictures, got it. The company’s first movies were Goodnight and Good Luck, Syriana and North Country, all produced with Warner Brothers, which put Participant on the map.

Company CEO Jim Berk, who joined Participant seven years ago, said the company’s stool has three legs – film, TV and digital media. The film biz is fairly mature, producing between eight and 12 narrative and/or doc films per year. And the company this year launched the Pivot network, with 365 hours of original content and currently available in 42 million homes. The network programming follows the thread of Participant’s films, a brand of social change and calls to action. The TV biz, though, wasn’t an easy nut to crack, Berk said.

“[Film is] a fairly closed industry. But with financing, if you’re willing to fund your own content, the last barrier is to find a distributor, which is a daunting task. The television industry is…a closed industry, but it also has high walls and a cement roof to protect it, with a small group of distributors who are full to capacity.”

So how does a company get into the TV space? “Literally take somebody else out and move in…which is dramatic,” Berk said. In the film world, Skoll and Berk paved the way for Participant by investing in Summit Entertainment, now part of Vancouver mini-studio Lionsgate, to ensure they had a direct path to distribution.

In the digital space, Participant’s takepart.com, which was launched about three years ago, sees about 5 million visitors a month and between 16 and 17 million monthly page views, according to Berk. The site is a hub for calls to action – a place people can go to do social good, volunteer, and find more information.

Skoll early in the conversation said Participant as an indie film producer is not a traditional company, in that it doesn’t focus on a specific genre, structure or type of film. The company makes decisions based on its main tenets to make financially viable, high-quality films based on social change – and have continued building that brand across platforms.

“Every piece of content that Participant makes has its own individual action you can take relative to that piece of content. That’s the activator,” Berk said.

Dede Gardner, president, Plan B Entertainment

Earlier in the day, Playback also caught the “Moguls” session featuring Dede Gardner, president of Brad Pitt’s prodco, Plan B Entertainment.

In a discussion that focused largely on Plan B’s slate, past and present, Gardner opened the presentation by describing the genesis of she and Pitt’s partnership as a meeting of kindred spirits. At that point an experienced media executive, she said she was drawn to the founders Pitt, Brad Grey, and Jennifer Aniston’s desire to create a “safe harbour for filmmakers, a place where people might come if they were having trouble getting films made elsewhere.”  (In recent news, Plan B boarded Hulu original series Deadbeat, also produced by Lionsgate.)

Of their adventuresome slate, which includes Tree of Life, World War Z and this year’s 12 Years a Slave – Gardner discussed Pitt’s belief in the library potential of great films, not just opening weekend box office, an ethos that is reflected in the projects Plan B pursues. Of 12 Years a Slave, which premiered Friday Sept. 6 at Princess of Wales theatre,  she described director Steve McQueen’s desire to make a film about the institution of slavery itself, which he believed had never properly been done. The $20 million movie was tightly budgeted: shot in just 35 days and with actors who agreed to do it “for a song.” “Everyone just wanted to be there,” Gardner said.

— with files from Dani Ng-See-Quan and Katie Bailey