Hollywood's involvement in world affairs tends to be very showy. No matter how well-meaning the effort, celebs use their star power to attract cameras and ink to causes. Think George Clooney shining a light on the crisis in Darfur or Angelina Jolie visiting refugees in Iraq, or, in an earlier era, Audrey Hepburn promoting Unicef.
Some of these endeavors are invariably met with a great degree of circumspection. Sean Penn, for instance, ignited debate over interviews he did with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro for the Nation.
As the dawn of the Obama era reignites hopes in the power of diplomacy, many in showbiz are starting to take a more subtle approach via salons, forums and discussions conducted away from the glare of cameras and focused far less on the celebrity quotient.
Among the most prominent of those efforts is the Foreign Policy Roundtable, which since 2007 has met roughly every other month and has hosted everyone from Queen Rania of Jordan to poverty guru Jeffrey Sachs.
At the latter event, at the home of Peter Chernin, guests chipped in funds to buy netting in Sachs' effort to combat malaria. At another recent Roundtable, co-hosted by Chris Silbermann of ICM, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman drew a crowd including Taylor Hackford, Helen Mirren, Jeff Berg, Peter Roth and Damon Lindelof.
The invitation-only forums, held at places like the home of J.J. Abrams or the auditorium at CAA, are intended to expand the base of those who are well-informed in foreign affairs, with the recognition of Hollywood's global reach. While the group's benefactors include showbiz types, they also get a grant from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
The director of the Roundtable, political consultant Donna Bojarsky, is bolstered by the idea that under the new administration, and with Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, "global affairs will take a new priority and will be welcomed in a way that it wasn't before."
It's easy to dismiss the possibility of the entertainment community having serious influence on foreign-policy matters, but it's not so farfetched. Shortly after 9/11, Karl Rove spoke at the Beverly Hilton to dozens of industry leaders in what many saw as an effort to unite Hollywood behind the cause in the same way that it mobilized for World War II. But in the drumbeat to the war in Iraq, support fractured.
What was missing, in Bojarsky's eyes, was nuance.
"This is not to decide that there is some kind of panacea, that somehow overnight you can change America's image by making a few good pictures," Bojarsky says. "... It is really about understanding, engaging and trying to do it in a responsible way, not just saying, 'If only we had better PR, everything would be fine.' "
Even those who champion showbiz's role in "soft diplomacy" are aware of its pitfalls. Trevor Neilson, president of the Global Philanthropy Group, says he is "stunned by the naivete that there is toward foreign policy in certain parts of the entertainment industry."
He cites the way that many "jumped on the bandwagon" to criticize the Chinese over the Darfur crisis without the full awareness of the intricacies involved in Beijing's relationship with the Sudanese. The situation there remains dire.
But that is one of the intents of the Roundtable: an alternate point of view. In his talk, Friedman delivered the sober reality that, as much as Hollywood is awash in environmental activism, the shift to the green economy will take much more than celebrities in Priuses.
At the Sachs event, the keynoter got some respectful hints of criticism from another speaker, Mary Balikungeri, director and founder of the Rwanda Women's Network, who acknowledged his efforts to combat malaria but said that not enough attention was paid to empowering locals to take over after international relief ambassadors left.
"We have malaria nets, Mr. Sachs, but when they are ripped and you are gone, we are not sure how to repair them," she said. Some were somewhat galled by the moment, others admired her more for it.
In other words, it turned out to elevate foreign policy to something more than a bumper sticker, to a substantive forum. The news cameras were nowhere to be found, but it didn't seem to matter.
Contact Ted Johnson at
ted.johnson@variety.com