A Charitable Role

Almost every night, it sometimes seems, Hollywood's top performers, producers and moguls don black tie and Versace gown and gather in a hotel ballroom on the West Side to salute the humanitarian accomplishments of one of their own. Piles of money are raised for charity, and the image is conveyed to the public that Hollywood is generously giving back to the community some of the billions it collects for keeping the nation entertained. But the deeper truth of this scenario, as in so many movies, is not quite what it at first appears.

"The disease people started this," explains Marge Tobankin, an experienced nonprofit administrator who oversees private charitable foundations for Barbra Streisand and Steven Spielberg. "It works like this: You find a celebrity who agrees to be honored and attract a crowd of professional peers. Twenty-five percent of the audience will be there because they believe in the organization, and the rest are there because they feel it's part of doing business," commonly paying up to $2,500 a table. "It's a quid pro quo. Everybody knows the honoree is a shill to bring in their friends. It's just a matter of, do they care enough about the cause to let themselves be used?"

For thousands who work in the industry, the tidal pull of charity dinner invitations is the practical necessity of remaining in favor with anyone who might make your next movie or TV show happen. To the charity being served, the varied motives of those assembled may not matter, but to anyone assessing Hollywood's nontraditional way of giving, it's another story: the difference between true philanthropy and cause-related marketing.

"Philanthropy is underrepresented in Hollywood," says Torie Osborn, executive director of the local Liberty Hill Foundation, a progressive organization committed to "social and economic justice" that carries the slogan "Change Not Charity" and whose Hollywood donors tend to be younger writers and directors. "There's not enough long-term, sustained giving. The giving here is so often event-driven, tied to individual people's causes and trendy charities, built around a particular star."

Liberty Hill, by contrast, gave out $1.4 million in grants last year to small organizations like the Bus Riders Union and the Living Wage Coalition and sponsored briefings for its members on gang violence and "politics and spirituality."