Field Guide #7: Producers
What to know about the Swiss Army Knife of occupations
Welcome to more of my Field Guides to Modern Hollywood, covering the handling and care of the different personalities and professions who populate your neighborhood. I earlier wrote about Actors, Writers, Agents, Executives, Reporters and Directors. Still to come are Publicists and Assistants, but today, the under-sung straw that stirs the drink: Producers.
In many ways, producing is Hollywood’s Ur-profession — the calling that built the industry. It’s the hidden hand behind so much of what makes Hollywood great. While the artists get the attention, it is the producers who separate us from the animals, taking the swirl of artistry and putting it on solid ground.
It may be the most valuable of professions, but it is also the most misunderstood, starting with its very name which is claimed by all manner of dilettantes, glad-handers and charlatans who populate the margins of the industry.
It’s also a profession increasingly under assault in these times of pullback. The skills of a producer are often underappreciated, and this is evident when studios, looking to cut every possible corner, look to squeeze more out of their budgets.
So who are these people? From Jerry Bruckheimer to a billionaire’s nephew to the indie stalwarts trying to scrape together enough for camera rentals, what makes these people take on all the work for none of the glory and increasingly less of the rewards?
Here’s our field guide to your producers.
I. The Dilettantes
There are the producers who make things, the ones who get the PGA moniker, and then there are . . . lots of other people who show up in the credits with ‘producer’ in front of their name. The billionaires, the billionaires’ offspring, the Hollywood Wives, the person who passed a book along to someone else, the lawyer who let the team use his conference room for a meeting . . .
If you come to Hollywood and you’ve got money but no particular skills . . . or if you’re skill is being a Yenta, bringing people together and doing little after that, then what do you call yourself? Certainly not a director or a writer, or an executive, or an agent. So you’re a producer.
In a perfect world, there would be another term for all those people who helped a project along in some way but weren’t there on set solving problems, keeping the trains running. But in this world, the credit they want, the one that helps get them involved, is “Producer.”
