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What’s a Movie Producer?
In the popular imagination, though movie producers act like big shots, they’re merely fast-talking con men, like Max Bialystock, the crooked Broadway impresario of Mel Brooks’s The Producers. To classic-era screenwriters, producers are treated in their biographies as greedy capitalists and script-butchering philistines. To film directors, who screenwriters generally regard as their sworn mortal enemies, producers are generally treated as meddling, movie-altering oafs disguised as white-shoe country clubbers.
Real-life producers laugh this off, but they do resent it. And they’re used to it. Being a producer is a real job and a hard one, whether you’re on the money end of it, the production end of it, or both.
A producer is the prime organizer of a film project. It’s a two-headed eagle of a job with different skill sets for each side of it: getting the money and spending it efficiently. Many producers are entrepreneurs who do both. They originate a project, often well before a director is even hired, and work with a writer or a team of writers to present a script that can win a production deal from a studio. These deals are complex and sometimes involve securing outside money as well, from a bank or an individual. Locking those deals in, and making them stick throughout the long period of production, is a specialized, full-time business skill all by itself. Some producers are valued strictly for that expertise.
Financing a feature film usually means setting up its distribution in advance, and getting worldwide interest means casting, giving foreign markets the stars they want to see. Getting the money is one thing, continually reassuring the people who lent you the money is another. Keeping them off the backs of the director and cast is a normal part of the job, as is keeping up a steady patter of confidence about the quality of the work in progress.
Physical production is a different part of the job, calling for a logistics specialist and process workflow expert. This kind of producer is often called a “line producer”. Someone who knows how many hours a day you can work a crew without legal repercussions; someone who knows helicopter rental companies with the special stabilizing gear and camera mounts to make movies; someone who knows how many electricians are actually needed, and how many of them have to be transported up the side of a mountain, housed and fed on location.
Like a construction project or a military campaign, you need continually updated alternatives because you can’t be in control of everything, especially the weather. Keeping the crew on that set costs $2 million a day; what if it rains all week? Or say you’re supposed to have 100 extras costumed and ready as 19th-century townspeople, but only 25 show up. Do you give up on the shooting day, or persuade the director to improvise a way to use a smaller crowd? The star has an iron-clad “stop date”, and now it’s only four days away. Is the director pushing hard enough to get the star’s most essential moments done no matter what?
Suppose you choose to save money with a smaller, less cumbersome crew. Bravo! But if you do, will you be the one who gets blamed if there’s some kind of technical hang-up and there’s no one on set who can deal with it instantly? And If you get blamed, will the studio back you up, or will they crumble like a wet paper bag and fire you, the supposed “boss” of the production? Unless you own the film yourself, they can do that.
Series TV is a different world than feature films, even though the job titles are the same, just as “Captain” usually conveys a different level of power in the Navy than it does in the Army. In the movies, the director is like a football coach—the boss, the leader in charge. In series television, the director is more like a baseball batting coach—a respected pro who helps the stars do their jobs better, but a hired hand, not an authority figure. The show’s writer outranks him, and ambitious TV writers seek to become writer/producers—“show runners”—rather than directors. BTW, Rob Long wrote the best book on this general subject of why producer/directors are the emperors of film, while writer/producers are the ruling gods of television.
The challenges of production for a comedy half-hour series filmed entirely on the studio lot are obviously different than those of a standalone feature film on location. It’s less like training for the Olympics and more like a daily commute from the suburbs, with the possibility of a sane home and family life. But it does have some challenges of its own. You’re not turning out 120 minutes of finished entertainment for your year’s main work, but 484 minutes. You’ll have to thrash things out with a dozen writers over the season, and handle talent relations with two dozen guest stars. Plus you may need to do the show before a live audience. You generally don’t have to do any of that when you make feature films.
(BTW, “Film” is mostly just a traditional description of what’s nearly always a digital process now. “Feature” is defined here not as a theatrical-vs.-streaming question, but as a simple format issue, intuitive in any medium: does it tell a complete story in somewhere between 80 and 180 or so minutes? Does it look and feel like a movie?)
One reason that the title “producer” may not always have gold standard-like value is job title inflation that, while sometimes comical in Hollywood, is by no means confined to it. “Assistant Producer” is legit; there’s a lot to do every day, sometimes in varied locations, and direct assistants to the big boss are often needed at each site.
“Associate Producer” isn’t much different, but it often subtly implies a degree of specialization. They have some personal authority over a specific area, like special effects or talent relations. Unfortunately, it’s also become a well-meaning perk to a non-producer who really put in time and effort and is felt to deserve a little ego boost that’ll look good on the resume. Like money’s gold standard, a little bit of constant minor job title debasing here and there starts to add up to less value for an often-deserved distinction. Too bad.
But the really vague, crazy job title is the biggest one of all, Executive Producer. It sounds like the boss of everybody, right? Sometimes it is. Clint Eastwood is not a mere employee of his film company. Jerry Bruckheimer knows something about producing Pirates of the Caribbean. If Tom Cruise thinks he ought to do a skydive scene one more time, no one is going to stop him.
Much of the time it means something more like, “He got the Kuwaiti Emir to put up the final $30 million”, or “He bought the book first, and he wouldn’t sell his rights to anyone unless they gave him a meaningless Exec Prod credit”. This is how Brian Kelly, the dad on Flipper, would end up being officially credited as one of the producers of Blade Runner, without ever so much as stepping on the set.
This is also how longtime cinematic schlock merchants, Si Raab and Max Litinoff, were able to dictate high placement as executive producers in the credits of A Clockwork Orange, although they had nothing to do with the actual film. Their sole “contribution” was having bought the rights to Anthony Burgess’ unknown new novel for about $600. They thought they could turn it into a showcase for the Rolling Stones. Raab and Litinoff’s title “card” came up third in the credits, as contractually required. But Stanley Kubrick pulled one of the driest of all inside gags. For the first and (to our knowledge) only time in film history, the fourth card, immediately following, was for the hairdresser. “Hair Styles by LEONARDS of London,” it said in bold colors, in 1971 a none-too-subtle sign of how little respect Kubrick actually had for his unwanted so-called “executive producers”, Si and Max.
Here’s a historical side note that’s a fading sore spot for producers and writers: “les politique des auteurs”, more commonly known here as “the auteur theory”. It’s an intellectual attitude and set of ideas about films that came out of France in the late Fifties. It declares that most of the time, the director is really the main creator of a film, not the writers or the producers. This wasn’t a crazy idea, and at the time it was a useful idea, though not a new one. Frank Capra’s great screenwriter, Robert Riskin, once sarcastically handed him 120 pages of blank paper. “Here, give this the ‘Capra Touch’”. The auteur policy wasn’t completely a theory. Prestige movies in particular had become ponderously, pompously literary by the postwar Fifties and a revival of screen basics was overdue. The Boomer directors provided it.
Think back to a nighttime scene in Jaws, 46 years ago this summer. A couple of men have finally sunk a harpoon into the killer shark tormenting the tourist town of Amity. They tied the rope to the old wooden pier so it won’t get away. But the (still unseen) shark is so strong that the end of the pier snaps right off and is towed rapidly to sea. The two fishermen, gloating only a moment ago, are now frantically thrashing in the ocean, their arms and legs visible underwater, and by now we know what that means. The end of the dock that’s being rapidly dragged away ominously slows to a stop, and we know why. Then, it begins to start coming back to shore, slowly and then faster as the audience is shouting with excitement. Author Peter Benchley didn’t create that timeless moment; Steven Spielberg, the director did. The so-called auteur theory emboldened a generation of directors, some to be geniuses, some to be dullards, some to be egomaniacs, and of course, some to be all three. It may not have been a golden age of timeless dialog, but it enabled some of the most kinetic, visually exciting movies of all time.
As ‘80s-‘90s film budgets got pushed into the upper stratosphere, though, and after a few well-publicized excesses, studios took a much firmer daily watch over their high-risk investments. Even on independent film productions, Baby Boomer producers began to regain more control over Generation X directors. A tacit balance of power was restored. Today the X-ers are the business bosses in the producers’ offices, and the Millennials are the skinny, surly artist-rebels with sunglasses sitting in canvas folding chairs with their names on the backs, making the creative decisions on the set.
Published in Entertainment
This is an intelligent analysis IMHO. But Hollywood isn’t a monolith. Plenty of people recognize that theatrical openings were the bellwether of everything downstream–at one time, cassette, DVD, and cable; now cable and streaming. A movie acquired an aura of fame and power from the North American box office. The studios had nothing against that culturally. For decades, though, the exact negotiation line between studios and theaters has been a battlefield, as it is in broadcasting between networks and local TV stations, or car manufacturers versus their independently owned dealers.
Covid has been a special, once in a century case for filmmakers. They have no built-in need or desire to kill off theaters, which since 1948 have been owned by different companies than movie producers. During the colossally expensive changeover of every movie screen in America from film to digital, theaters were allowed to (in effect) deduct the cost of their new equipment from the revenue that went to the studios, since digital meant no savings to theaters but enormous savings to studios. If studios were really bent on killing off in-person moviegoing, they had a golden opportunity there and passed it up.
No, after Covid theaters will come back–many or most of them, anyway–but for a few types of films above all:
Children’s films–little kids still love to see their heroes in masses of other cheering and screaming children.
Date movies–teenagers do not want to bring their dates home to the family living room, and couples in their twenties find it less awkward encountering romcom’s sexy situations at a theater than in the apartment of someone they just met.
Spectacles, the tent pole movies you mentioned.
It’s true that the streamers have what amounts to an all-you-can-eat marketing strategy that can’t be sustained forever.
Yes, I think 1948 was the peak for movie attendance – the average American went to a movie on average once a week. I think thats now down to once or twice a year – on average. Even before the pandemic – I think I only went to a couple of movies a year – at most. And its been a few years since Ive been. I think the last movie I remember going to, was the Big Short. (2015) I think movie executives have been planning for the eventual extinction of the movie theater for decades – and have been strategizing on how to generate box office from fewer and smaller screens.
Covid is a once in a century event? I dont think so. Pandemics are regular natural events occurring every 10-15 years. This is has been the most outrageous response to any pandemic – ever. But now that its been done – it’ll be considered every time there is an uptick in flu cases at the clinic. Going forward I expect to see this level of response from the government 2 or 3 more times in my lifetime. (I am 54)
Sure. Kids films could do well in theaters – but this category is dominated by Disney … I think Disney would rather get parents locked into a subscription than give up 50% of the box office to theater owners.
Date Movies? Teens dont really date anymore. They hang out in cliques – boys and girls dont really pair off like when I was an octopus, back seat terror.
The Tent Pole doesnt really work – if the audience doesnt come back to see other movies. Maybe the tent pole works better for a streaming service. The one show drives subscriptions for as long as it’s got some wider pop-culture appeal.
Zero Mostel did make the role famous, but this was going to be a movie released nationwide. Not everyone had seen the Broadway production. I think Jewison’s reason was that he thought that Zero’s stage presence would overwhelm a movie, and there is that problem when filming a stage play. Plus, Mostel had been a PITA for the Broadway producer during the original run.
Thanks for clearing things up, Gary! For the longest time, when I thought “Movie Producer,” I thought this:
Tom Rothman, Chairman of Motion Pictures at Sony Pictures, is very bullish on the theatrical experience. One of his core principles of selecting and making films is the idea of theatricality, of being a good experience in the theater. It is an event, and people like events.
There is a lot of confidence out there that in-person movie viewing will come back strongly as people crave an experience they have been denied for a year. There is some evidence this is true. Demon Slayer set all time box office records in Japan over the past six months.
Also, there is going to be a remarkable run of big film releases as theaters open. The studios have a huge backlog of titles to release. You can expect a blockbuster a week for a while.
A quick video going over the impact the theatrical box office has on studio revenue.
Really? I was under the impression that a lot of production had been shut down or delayed due to COVID.
A lot of it was at first, but production resumed last year with lots of testing and sequestering. The biggest problem wasn’t the actors, but the crews; they’re far more numerous and it’s harder for them to isolate themselves. It worked out pretty well; there were a few outbreaks but not nearly as bad as other local industries of roughly the same size and worker density.
Sometimes it’s not worth working with somebody difficult. There comes a point when life is too short to deal with Jeremy Clarkson, Charlie Sheen, or Roseanne. It’s understandable; producers have their breaking points too. But making that choice harms the quality of the finished product. Top Gear was better with Clarkson. Fiddler would have been better with Mostel. Topol was presented as sort-of “More authentically Jewish” because he’s Israeli. But his accent and manner is not very much like that of the Americans in the audience. After all, Fiddler is about a Russian who, in the end, emigrates to America, a family history and an accent known to millions of American Jews.
Streamers are an all-you-can-eat buffet. It makes no sense to spend $200 million on a film and then throw it away on a service where it will only attract new business indirectly. They’d do it in an emergency like 2020.
Studios don’t want to kill the theaters. Clavius has the inside line on this. Oh, they’d love to screw the theaters to get more of the money, but if the theaters die, nobody gets that money. Studios have no motivation to eliminate one of their biggest income streams.
Most people watch TV over cable or streaming, but CBS doesn’t try to kill off TV stations.
Correct. That’s why I thought that big budget movies – and large salaries for the stars was going away.
Although it might be more expensive that we would assume – for example – Ive heard that the Mandalorian costs about $100 million per season to produce. (around 4 hours on screen) While this makes sense for a Star Wars production – it would be hard to justify for an unknown property.
Also, there were many films for which principal photography had post-production completed during the lock down (post production moved to the cloud so it could be completed with people remote). There were also films that were complete and ready to release that were held back by the studios. There is no point in releasing a $100 million film when you know there will be no box office from it. So it sits and waits. Sony held back Peter Rabbit 3: The Runaway, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Cinderella, Hotel Transylvania: Transformania, among others. They are now planned for summer and fall. This is true across the industry.
Getting production back up was critically important, particularly for TV, as the studio gets paid on delivery and the talent and crew get paid during production. Thankfully, the protocols have worked well so far.
I believe the production cost for The Crown is about $13 million per episode. That is expensive.
There is a lot of focus on cost control on productions. There are fewer instances of a star getting a big salary and a back end. Much more on the back end.
I think we may see a shift in advertising spend too. Typically a studio spends about as much on marketing a film as it does on production — So a $100 million film costs $200 million by the end of the theatrical run. With the hiatus in theatrical releases, there has been time to step back and truly assess the effectiveness of marketing and to test things in smaller markets. I may be wrong, but I think there will be a pull back in the level of marketing spend.
It’s true that there are periodic cramdowns on salaries after each boom year when the studios have to give away the store. There was a notable cramdown about fifteen years ago. Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah’s couch wasn’t the real reason why Paramount balked at continuing the Mission Impossible series. It was his exceptionally rich, Nineties era deal that stuck in their craw once DVD revenues peaked and then fell. When Cruise agreed to renegotiate, the series resumed.
Even Harrison Ford has felt the chill. At the turn of the century, Julia Roberts and Jim Carrey used to receive $20 million even for fairly ordinary films. By contrast, Ford is reported to have gotten somewhere around a “mere” $16-18 million for appearing in The Force Awakens, part of the wealthiest franchise in film history, where his participation was crucial to the plot.
A sidenote about actors and salaries. I’ve always liked Robert Duvall–besides his great acting, he’s a solid conservative who helped the ACF a couple of (greatly appreciated) times–and I always liked his direct, unpretentious explanation of why he turned down being in Godfather III. Although in storyline, Michael Corleone was the only must-have element, outranking Tom Hagen, as actors go, Duvall’s non-Godfather career has been better and more lucrative than Al Pacino’s, so Duvall balked at the uneven terms that Coppola was offering. “Twice as much as me, fine. But four times as much for Al? Forget it”.
I can’t remember the name of the postwar businessman who (supposedly) said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The problem is, I don’t know which half”.
I have noticed that audible.com and kindle (both owned by Amazon) lately seem to be run by people (aka idiots) who would rather be in an all-you-can-eat streaming businesss. Kindle has been pushing a subscription model, which I’ve stayed away from. They have both adapted terminology like “Your next listen” and “Your next read” rather than “your next audiobook” or “your next book.” Their apps now push this stuff in an obnoxious enough manner that it slows down my listening and reading and therefore slows down my purchase of new audiobooks or kindle editions. I have the suspicion, seeing some of the stuff that they try to push at me, that they’d rather sell me a steady stream of cheap dreck rather than well crafted books for which royalty arrangements have been made.
If they’re tired of the book business, I wish they would sell these two businesses off to somebody who will run them as book businesses.
Your sister, the sex therapist?
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Nice to meet you, Mr Lewinsky
Great flick.
Thanks for your kind words, Mark. That’s very true about Ricochet; it’s an incredibly wide, varied catalog of expertise. Space satellites, Army maneuvers, the world of medicine and of law; model builders, general aviation, concrete, and cheese.
I wondered about that. Mrs. Tabby and I have been catching up on a Canadian television series that started about 15 years ago, and is still in production, with (to our surprise) all of the lead actors unchanged. But we have noticed that as the episodes progressed, more of those actors showed up in the credits as “Executive Producers.”
The Exec Prod title, as I’ve said, gets actors to think of themselves as management rather than labor, although it probably means little or nothing on the set. But the psychology is important, even if the actual producer’s fee is merely a token. If I may be forgiven quoting a coarse remark from an old time producer, “When you’re pissing away your own money, you tend not to piss away so much”. In the rough argot of the early 1900s, it was a pithy bit of truth.
When a major studio announces that they’re backing a film, what actually happens is a one-shot, one-time limited liability corporation is formed that is the official recipient of the funds. That LLC handles rights, payroll, insurance, what have you, and the studio sponsorship is a line of credit that you’ll pay interest on. So they’re really loaning you that $90 million, at markedly stiffer rates than you pay for your mortgage. You won’t be using it all at once, thank goodness. But if the production runs late, or (just as bad) it is filmed in time but the final edit misses its slot in the releasing schedule, that interest keeps accruing whether it’s your fault or not.
So if we say, “Paramount is making Chinatown 3D for 2023 release”, not one of the people on the payroll of that (imaginary) film is a Paramount employee, helpful if later on any of those people does something dumb (legally, sexually, financially, or all three) with high liability. The LLC is a firewall, as it was for Warner Bros, after the Twilight Zone helicopter crash.
It is also a custom vehicle for equity shares and/or partnerships. Each one has to be custom tailored, although it must be admitted that there are still plenty of off-the-rack deals being written by off-the-shelf lawyers.
I had to go back an find this video, that Ive seen a few days ago. Its about the production hell of Superman V, Directed by Tim Burton, and staring Nicolas Cage.
On the one hand, I am glad this thing never made it to theaters – but on the other hand… Wow. So the studio sank $30 Million in pre-production costs, but did not get any kind of movie to release. Does the studio sue the production entity? It seems that the firewall is a 2 way street – if they dump a boatload of cash into an empty shell – but no movie comes out the other end, it seems that they can just kiss that money off. They can probably send in the auditors, and make sure the money was spent properly on movie related stuff. But does the studio get stiffed?
I think this sorta thing happens a lot, because we hear of all kinds of tv shows or movies – that dont actually get made… For example there is a BattleStar Galactica reboot series on the way – for about 5 years already, and a Disney Whedon-less Firefly reboot for at least 2 years…
I wanna see … I wanna see!
(my viewing habits may be a trifle esoteric.)
The YouTubes about the production of the movie Heat are very interesting.
Interviews of Sid and Marty Kroftt are really excellent too.
I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I really like Marty Kroftt.
Tango & Cash was also quite the disaster:
Which is oddly tied up with the superman movie in the other video…