The Season of Giving in Hollywood

Filmmakers Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (“The Patriot”) have been generous contributors to the Dinner of Champions, the yearly fund-raising banquet for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society. But Tom Sherak, the Hollywood executive who is the driving force behind the dinner, noticed last year that for some reason the pair had made less than their usual donation.

A longtime 20th Century Fox executive who recently left the studio to join Joe Roth’s new Revolution Studios, Sherak is not someone who takes no--or less than a gung-ho yes--for an answer. He called Devlin, who told him he was looking forward to seeing Sherak at the dinner.

That’s when Sherak, a master fund-raiser who’s not afraid to use his clout--he has a huge photo from “The Godfather” on the wall behind his desk--baited the hook. “Actually, you won’t be seeing me,” he said. Why not? asked Devlin. “Because from where you’ll be sitting,” Sherak replied, “you’ll need binoculars to see anything near the stage.”

Devlin laughed and quickly agreed to increase his contribution. He got the message.

In Hollywood, a town dominated by golden-tongued hustlers and artful deal-makers, raising money for charity involves just as much moxie, arm-twisting and salesmanship as persuading a movie studio to greenlight a downbeat drama without a bankable film star.

Money is a big story in Hollywood, but usually only when it comes to $100-million budgets, opening-weekend box-office receipts and sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom. But the entertainment industry also provides significant support for a wide array of charities, contributions often schmeared with the grease of longtime personal relationships. And because it’s Hollywood, every aspect of the fund-raising game--be it recruiting honorees and soliciting money or plotting seating arrangements--is practiced with as much zeal and competitive spirit as a bidding war for a hot new script.

Many of the industry bigwigs chosen as honorees are not only willing to solicit contributions, but eager to raise more money than an industry rival did the year before.

“Their reputations are on the line,” says Adlai Wertman, chairman of the board of Chrysalis, a nonprofit organization devoted to helping economically disadvantaged people gain employment. “We’ve found that our honorees get very involved. They don’t want to be the person whose fund-raising effort fell short.”

While charities raise money all year long, fall is the hot season for entertainment industry-oriented charity dinners: From late September to late October, the industry calendar is crowded with five major events, all including honorees with A-list show-business pedigrees.

Chrysalis held its awards dinner Sept. 28, honoring film producer Marc Abraham. The MS Dinner of Champions, held Oct. 3, honored Sony Pictures Chairman Amy Pascal. The Fulfillment Fund, a mentoring program that provides college scholarships for at-risk youth, had its dinner Oct. 7, the honoree being Disney President Robert Iger. The music-industry chapter of the City of Hope, an organization dedicated to preventing, treating and curing cancer and other diseases, honors Frances Preston, president of BMI, a leading music performance rights society, on Thursday. And on Sunday, Universal Studios Chairman Stacey Snider will be honored by the Special Olympics.

It’s no secret that the honorees are largely chosen for their ability to attract sizable contributions. In show biz, clout counts, which in the past occasionally led to questionable award selections. One low point was the 1973 Man of the Year award given by the United Jewish Appeal to the late record mogul Morris Levy. Though he was a tireless fund-raiser for the charity, Levy was also a longtime frontman for the mob in the music industry who eventually went to prison after being convicted on two counts of conspiracy to commit extortion.

At the end of the UJA banquet, emcee Joe Smith, then a top executive at Warner Bros., thanked the audience for coming, quipping, “I just got word from two of Morris’ friends on the West Coast that my wife and two children have been released.”

Today’s charities put a higher priority on good citizenship. In fact, Hollywood is such fertile fund-raising territory that some charities have redirected their focus to take advantage of the entertainment industry’s deep pockets and energetic attitude. Many national charities have entertainment industry “chapters” that specialize in show-biz fund-raising.

“You go to Hollywood because it’s where the money is,” explains Wertman, a longtime investment banker now in private investment. “This is a town where one industry is so dominant that it’s almost a breach of your fiduciary duty not to get that industry involved in your cause. But you also look to Hollywood as a place to help us market ourselves and tell our story.”

When Giving Money, It’s Who You Know

Still, fund-raising largely revolves around personal relationships. When Sherak needed help finding an honoree for this year’s MS dinner, he turned to Roth, a close friend and a past honoree himself. As Roth put it, only half-jokingly, when he spoke at the banquet earlier this month: “It’s a pleasure to yet again be a shill for Tom and help him rustle up some more awardees. . . . It’s sort of like an Abbott and Costello act. Tom has me call up the person he wants to be the honoree so if they say no, they’re saying no to me, not to Tom Sherak.”

Dr. Gary Gitnick, the UCLA gastroenterologist who heads the Fulfillment Fund, snagged Disney’s Iger with the help of two fund board members, one a longtime Iger friend, the other a Disney board member. “There’s nothing like a face-to-face meeting to get someone’s attention.”

At Sherak’s MS dinner, which raised nearly $3.2 million this year, more than 80% of the take came from the purchase of tables at the event. He keeps a color-coded seating chart, known as the Board, in his office, which tracks table assignments for the dinner held annually at the Century Plaza Hotel’s Los Angeles Ballroom, one of the few rooms big enough to fit 150 tables for 1,500 people.

The best seats are in what’s known as the Pit, a sunken area in the front section of the ballroom. The tables in green go for $50,000 to $100,000; the tables in orange go for $25,000. The outer rim of tables, marked in yellow, red and purple, go for anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000. The remainder of the take comes from ads purchased in the dinner’s official program, which was 400 pages thick this year.

Although the best seats go to the biggest donors, that doesn’t make seat assignment an open-and-shut issue. Scott Goldman, the City of Hope’s vice president of development, says the charity has had “raging four-hour debates” and received nasty letters over seating arrangements. “It’s like a secret society,” he says. “No one wants to admit they’re involved with seating issues, because if people are unhappy, you don’t want to get the phone call.”

Just because you’ve paid $25,000 for a banquet table doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. The latest new fund-raising wrinkle is an after-dinner auction that raises sizable amounts of cash and often provides an extra dollop of entertainment. At the Chrysalis dinner this year a gospel choir assembled on the stage; whenever someone in the audience would raise their bid during the auction, the choir would offer a chorus of “Hallelujah!” and “Praise the Lord!” Last year’s Fulfillment Fund event featured a spirited bidding war between Courtney Love and News Corp. czar Rupert Murdoch over a trip to Paris with two premiere seats for the debut of the fall Christian Dior fashion collection. Love eventually gave $32,500 for the rights to the trip.

At the same event, Seagrams tycoon Edgar Bronfman, the dinner’s honoree, paid $31,000 for a deluxe fountain pen, $1,000 more than Murdoch had spent for a similar pen at auction the year before. When Bronfman accepted his award, he said of his purchase: “It’s the first time anyone in this town has spent more money than Rupert Murdoch for anything.”

“It’s not just about giving money,” says Universal Music Group President Zach Horowitz, who is president of the City of Hope’s music industry chapter. “Many of our honorees have become so emotionally attached to the City of Hope that they’ve continued to play an active role in our fund-raising long after their own dinners.”

Sometimes the personal part of personal relationships cuts deeper than executive networking. Horowitz’s ties with the City of Hope began with his father, Benjamin, who ran the charity for more than 30 years. Sherak’s involvement with the MS society came after his daughter, Melissa, was diagnosed with MS 13 years ago. She always gives a speech at the dinner, this year announcing that she had become a mother of a now 10-month-old daughter and had been symptom-free throughout her pregnancy. Adam Sandler introduced honoree Amy Pascal at this year’s MS dinner with the expected jokes--and a personal reminiscence about his favorite cousin, who has MS.

The Fulfillment Fund relies on a similar emotional appeal. At its dinner, inner-city youths who have benefited from the program give speeches detailing the progress they have made in their lives that are often as dramatic as any Hollywood Oscar-worthy film.

Even though Hollywood has an often well-deserved reputation as being overcrowded with insecure egotists, the entertainment world also has a can-do spirit that makes it a fertile ground for ambitious fund-raising efforts. “People in Hollywood are doers,” says Wertman. “They’re very action-oriented people. They’re not looking to be on a committee. They’re very geared toward results, which is what our kind of organization needs to be successful.”

Of course, in the Hollywood universe, it’s often hard to tell where the giving ends and the hustling begins. At last year’s Fulfillment Fund’s auction, Sherak cajoled Danny DeVito into paying $10,000 for some Microsoft software that was valued at $1,000. The two old friends ran into each other in the bathroom later that evening. That’s when the real one-upmanship began.

Sherak said he teased DeVito, telling him he’d really overpaid for the software. “Danny told me, ‘Tom, I want to you know something. I would’ve gone to $15,000.’ And I said, ‘Danny, if it wasn’t for you, I would’ve sold it for $5,000.”