June 2005

“Get on the ground, motherfuckers,” declares Wayne Coyne, directing two somewhat confused kids to lie on their chests in the dingy kitchen of a Vietnamese noodle bar.

I am Marc Vogl, a 30-something East Coast kid who came out to San Francisco in the 90s following a Richard Dreyfuss-in-Close Encounters kind of urge. I didn’t know what was luring me west or what I’d find when I got here, but I was powerless to resist. And, like the lemmings in Close Encounters, I was not alone. A critical mass of musicians, actors, comedians, and filmmakers moved here on the eve of the dot-com rollercoaster and felt like making our own entertainment. To that end we seized the means of production.

There was one good thing about Malcolm Lee’s 1999 studio film The Best Man: Terrence Howard. I wrote a review of the film for Africana.com (now Blackvoices.com) in which I said just that. I got lots of emails from angry black men because I likened the film to an R&B video (and I’d say it again today). But Terrence Howard was something else. You just sort of waited for him to enter the frame.

There is a mystique to filmmaking—the silvery light that reflects off the screen, the way the story shapes a character’s whole life in two hours and how that life can then resonate so deeply with an audience. The myth of filmmaking is what makes it such a powerful medium. But more and more, art and independent film have dovetailed with the contemporary commercial demands of the medium.

To most people, Jeff Skoll is the eBay guy. He was the first employee and first president of the online auction behemoth. With over $4 billion worth of eBay stock, he was named the third richest man under 40 in the country by Fortune magazine in 2004. What most people don’t know about Skoll is that he is also a committed do-gooder. In 1999, he founded The Skoll Foundation, which champions and invests in people who create positive changes in the world.