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
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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.”