Stephen Gyllenhaal has decades of experience as a filmmaker and Hollywood insider. In person he's a charming raconteur who stuck around Salon's New York studio for several minutes after our interview was concluded, live-streaming an impromptu backstage video on Instagram. He seems relatively good-humored about the fact that his last name is most familiar because of other people who share it. (To be clear, those people would be actor Jake Gyllenhaal and actor-director Maggie Gyllenhaal, who are his children.)
In his new film, "Uncharitable" — which he doesn't want to call a documentary, for somewhat inscrutable reasons — the senior Gyllenhaal has adopted a peculiar but arguably important social justice crusade: redeeming the reputation and the transformative possibilities of the nonprofit sector and more specifically of "charities," which as he observes has become a mildly poisonous term. Thanks to the repeated attacks of TV journalists, often in the form of misbegotten "exposés" largely devoid of nuance or context, numerous prominent not-for-profit charitable organizations have either been destroyed or radically downsized in this century, amid the widespread perception that they're wasting money on "overhead": executive salaries, marketing campaigns, travel, conferences and consultants and so on. Donors often insist that their dollars must go to "programs" — whether that means housing the homeless, feeding the hungry, providing medical care to children with disabilities, funding cancer research or any of a million other worthwhile causes — as if those things could happen in an institutional vacuum, with no professional management, strategy or planning.
