Huffington Magazine Issue 76-77 | Page 70

Exit funds she raised mysteriously disappeared, the books shipped from London didn’t arrive, a trusted friend was found dead and an evil multinational corporation emerged as the game’s villain. Through tweets, puzzles, mobile games and live performance art in five countries, the audience hunted for clues to resolve the conflict. Ultimately, good trumps evil, and the real-life corporate sponsors, including Nokia and the NGO WeGiveBooks.org, released the funds to build and stock five libraries in rural eastern Zambia, contribute 10,000 books and donate 50 scholarships to girls — slickly blending the line between fiction and real life. Participants in the multimedia platform numbered in the millions which, in Hollywood parlance, translated into a very good box office opening. For Kring, it was proof that Hollywood fantasy and real-life impact can coexist. He counts among his heroes Jeff Skoll, the former eBay president who went on to found Participant Media, which has produced movies such as Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth and Good Night and Good Luck. As Skoll has said of his own THE THIRD METRIC HUFFINGTON 11.24-12.01.13 mission, “I just wanted to make good quality films that were about something and not worry so much about whether they were successful commercially or not. And they’ve done just fine commercially — clearly there is an audience for this kind of thing.” Kring, who lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children, has always had a streak of social activism. And given his I had stumbled onto the one theme that I wanted to talk about — our interconnectivity.” determination to upend Hollywood’s cynical prevailing wisdom — that programs about something are predestined for financial failure — it’s possible to see Kring himself as a character in a larger story, fighting for a vision of Hollywood that values impact alongside profit. “The business of show business is so dominant to the whole idea of what gets made,” Kring said, “that business will always be at the heart of it. You have to figure out how to sneak a message into the storytelling.”