There was a time when Hollywood thought of Africa as a kind of exotic backlot, but these days it's the venue for many of the causes about which activist members of the industry feel most deeply.
Over the next two weeks, in fact, the continent is getting top billing on the town's social to-do list. Last Monday, an unprecedented summit of first ladies from across Africa gathered with local activists and celebrities at the Skirball Center to discuss a panoply of developmental health issues, particularly those that affect women and children. Next week, former President Clinton will be in town raising money for his global foundation, Millennium Network, which supports a number of important African initiatives. (In his memoir, Clinton confessed that he regarded his failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide as perhaps his most haunting mistake.) Will.i.am is set to headline the Clinton gala Thursday at the Roosevelt Hotel.
It's hard to imagine anything more moving, though, than the scene at the Beverly Regent Hotel on Tuesday night, where a who's who of industry power brokers joined international luminaries, most notably former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to raise money for Malaria No More.
Why malaria? Just ask outgoing News Corp. and Fox honcho Peter Chernin, who, along with Wall Street financier Peter Chambers, founded the organization three years ago. As Chernin explained in Beverly Hills, what they saw was a devasting public health problem that could be resolved by a relatively simple, business-style solution if they could raise the money.
America put an end to malaria more than 50 years ago, so it's a disease that has slipped off most of our radars. Not so in Africa, where it ravages young children and pregnant women in tragic numbers. On a continent where war, disease and malnutrition decimate whole regions, malaria remains the No. 1 cause of death among children.
What Chernin, who devotes an increasing amount of his time to work as Malaria No More's chairman, saw was that it also was a disease that could be stopped in its tracks with three simple steps: distributing mosquito nets (malaria is spread by the insects' bites), spraying to push down mosquito populations and supplying local clinics with the relatively inexpensive medicines needed to treat infected patients. The mosquito nets distributed by Malaria No More cost just $10 each.
