Eight years ago, tech billionaire Jeff Skoll clapped enthusiastically as Al Gore assuaged the opening-night Sundance crowd just hours before Donald Trump was sworn in as the 45th president. “We will win,” Gore said after the Skoll-backed climate change documentary “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” made its world premiere. “We want this movie to recruit others.”
But a funny thing happened over the ensuing years. The founder and chair of Participant Media appears to have defected to the other side. In January, on the weekend Trump was sworn in as the 47th president, Skoll hosted both the Make America Great Again Victory Rally and the inaugural parade, sending shockwaves through the indie film world. (Skoll declined comment.)
For the past two decades, the eBay mogul was the most reliable financier of progressive documentaries, from “RBG” to “He Named Me Malala.” Skoll’s 180-degree turn as he shuttered Participant has left a void that hasn’t been filled by another left-leaning billionaire.
“Jeff didn’t give a fuck. He was just, ‘Get me out of this business. I’m not interested in making Al Gore documentaries anymore,’” says a source familiar with his film business exit, which separately included selling his equity stake in Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Partners at a steep discount. Another source says Skoll became “obsessed with Elon,” a reference to Trump’s biggest tech benefactor, Elon Musk.
Skoll’s departure isn’t the only seismic shift in the doc world. The same month this year that Amazon acquired a trio of environmental documentaries — “Groundswell,” “Common Ground” and “Kiss the Ground” — it plunked down $40 million for a Melania Trump doc directed by disgraced filmmaker Brett Ratner. That deal covers a three-part docuseries about the first lady and a film that Amazon will release theatrically. And Amazon is no outlier. Sources familiar with the Melania bidding process say it was competitive. Disney was chasing the project and offered far more than the $14 million that has been previously reported. (Disney did not respond to a request for comment.) Meanwhile, Netflix has made it clear to sellers that it’s just not that into political fare like its Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez-centered “Knock Down the House” or Russian doping exposé “Icarus” right now.
The fact that Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos quietly made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago or that Apple CEO Tim Cook stood alongside Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in the Capitol Rotunda on Inauguration Day was lost on no one. Suddenly, the doc world — arguably the most liberal bastion of an already uniformly liberal Hollywood — is panicking over the MAGA-ification of the gatekeepers.
“It seems very obvious that they’re just going for things that are not gonna rock the boat,” says Submarine’s Josh Braun, who represented three of the five documentary Oscar nominees this year. “The whole climate now is having a chilling effect at the development level. Financiers are getting nervous. At our company, we’re developing more projects internally. Other companies are pulling back. I wouldn’t say that we’re pulling back. I would say that we’re evaluating projects carefully.”
But for those who rely on deep-pocketed liberals, there’s no new Skoll on the horizon. The entrepreneur himself began to lose interest following the 2021 death of his top doc executive, Diane Weyermann, who also was the director of George Soros’ Open Society Institute for seven years. Though Soros funds progressive causes, he has only dabbled in financing documentaries as he did with 2020’s “Welcome to Chechnya.” Laurene Powell Jobs’ Concordia Studio hasn’t quite found its groove after an executive exodus that included Jonathan King leaving to join Zhang Xin’s Closer Media. And though Xin is incredibly wealthy, sources say her money is tied up in Chinese real estate, which recently took a hit. (King is also an alum of Participant.)
Cinetic’s John Sloss, who sold “Knock Down the House” for a record-breaking $10 million just six years ago, says there is a palpable “feeling of reluctance” coming from the streamers about taking on political projects. That means Cinetic title “No Other Land,” which chronicles the escalation of tensions between Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, still finds itself without a home despite winning this year’s documentary Oscar.
“I don’t think that the chill on the First Amendment is necessarily about whether filmmakers are making content,” Sloss says. “They are going to find a way to make content. The question is where will people be able to see them?”
“No Other Land,” for one, is having trouble even landing screening venues. Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner recently tried to pressure O Cinema into canceling its “No Other Land” showings and then threatened to evict the non-profit cinema and withdraw financial support. But the art-house cinema stood its ground and amid widespread protest, Meiner withdrew his proposal to terminate the theater’s lease with the city.
Any documentary that disparages Israeli prime minister and Trump ally Benjamin Netanyahu would seem tricky in the current climate. Alex Gibney’s “The Bibi Files,” which chronicles the corruption charges against the polarizing world leader, still has no U.S. theatrical distributor after its splashy Toronto world premiere in September. Ratner might be better positioned with a MAGA-friendly documentary about the Abrahamic Accords, which has secured the participation of Trump, Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. (An Amazon spokesperson says it is not distributing that film.)
Meanwhile, some see Gibney’s upcoming documentary about Musk as a major litmus test for how far the gatekeepers will go to support a film that might antagonize Trump. “Musk,” which received financing from Closer, already has distribution via HBO Max. Some say it may be ready in time for the Cannes Film Festival in May, in a redux of last year’s “The Apprentice,” which incurred Trump’s wrath. (HBO said the film will not be done in time.)
Still, documentarians on the right say there’s nothing new about feeling the squeeze. Amanda Milius, who directed Russiagate rebuttal “The Plot Against the President,” saw her film inexplicably held up for release by Amazon Prime in 2020 right before the presidential election. Following press reports about the holdup, it was released and became one of the most-watched documentaries on the platform. But Milius says it disappeared in 2024, again ahead of the presidential election, when Amazon pulled the entire catalog of her distributor, Turn Key Films, due to a music copyright violation by one of its titles.
“These people all feel censored,” she says of left-leaning documentarians feeling the cold shoulder. “They’re the most uncensored people on the planet. We’ve been having this problem forever. The fact that they’re just now getting a taste of that is actually kind of satisfying.”
Addie Morfoot provided additional reporting.
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