Celebrity Mound

Stand Up to Cancer announced this week that their concert last Friday – simulcast on three networks – tipped their donations over the nine-figure mark.

How do you raise $100 million for a foundering cause? Get a group of girlfriends mad. It helps if they’re as connected as Katie Couric, former head of Paramount Sherry Lansing, Academy Awards producer Laura Ziskin, Disney-ABC prez Ann Sweeney and Lisa Paulsen, head of the Entertainment Industry Foundation.

“We just all opened up our Rolodexes,” Paulsen told us.

It started when Ziskin met TV producer Noreen Fraser in a chemotherapy room, where both were getting treated for breast cancer. Ziskin, who’s produced movies from “Pretty Woman” to “Spider-Man,” said, “Enough is enough.”

“It’s frustrating that we’ve lost the war on cancer – 1,500 Americans a day die of it,” Ziskin told us. “We are at a moment when we actually have the tools to master it, but not the resources. That is so unacceptable.

“Katie and I wanted to do something, as did [philanthropist] Ellen Ziffren. We were all doing different projects, but we decided to pull together. We all met and said, ‘Let’s combine our resources. Among us we all know … well, everyone basically.’”

L.A. Reid and Babyface stepped up and wrote an anthem performed at the show. Sheryl Crow and Melissa Etheridge performed, and hugged fellow breast-cancer survivor Christina Applegate in a moving moment onstage.

“We split the atom. We went to the moon,” sums up Ziskin. “Every one of us in America has either had cancer or been close to someone who has, including our presidential candidates. We can tackle this.”

So where will the $100 million go?

The women are going to insist that scientists do what they did – collaborate.

“No more competing for funds or doing research just to write a paper,” Ziskin tells us. “And take what we already know – which is a lot – and develop treatments from that knowledge. And some of the money is going to go to out-of-the-box thinking. We’re just getting started.”

(source)