What do producers do?

What do producers do?
They can play golf, fiddle the expenses, ruin perfectly good film ideas ... who says producers are useless?

* David Mamet
* The Guardian,
* Friday April 9 2004
* Article history

You may recall Ingrid Bergman, in For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), asking: "Where do the noses go?"

My consternation equals her own. I differ but in subject: what do producers do?

Just as we have been instructed that we may safely elect any politician who decries causes we espouse as, on election, he will as sure as sin be forced to embrace them, similarly, I say, producers, perhaps, are those who "make" nothing.

Would it be too precieux to suggest that they are thus named like the fat boy known to all as "skinny"; or, are they, perhaps, so-called as an earlier age referred to "Jews" as "those of Hebrew persuasion", thus saving the supposed feelings of all?

Or is their general title but a catch-all for deluded practitioners and onlookers loathe to speak plainly and, thus, by naming, reveal the folly of the obvious?

And how many sail beneath this flag? Do we not find, in the ever-lengthening head credits of the film, producers, toute-entière, co-, executive, co-executive, associate, consulting, etc?

What on earth do these people do?

A few are entrepreneurs, raising money for a project under their control; a few are what the old Jewish village knew as "schtadlans", that is, intermediaries between the powerless (in this case, the film-maker), and the State (or Studio); the rest are clerks or clerk-sycophants.

For it has been said that "associate producer" is the title given to a secretary instead of a raise. (Cf State and Main, 2000.)

And we have the sycophants full stop. For the powerful producer who can drive but one Mercedes himself may employ or cause to be employed many to drive "their own" Mercedes in his livery.

Otherwise than expending that accrued leisure the great are insufficiently long-lived to display, what do producers "do"?

But as some Greek said, or should have said: "If it exists, it probably has a cause."

So let us assume somebody's brother-in-law showed up one day in the palmy pre-sound days of Hollywood, and his brother-in-law, a power on the lot or on the set, said: "People, this is Bob, and he is a producer." Bob was then entitled, under the family flag, to all the sex, drugs, booze and fun he could wrangle.

Time went by, and Bob stayed on. He, or another of his ilk, caught, stole, or otherwise achieved power in some niche in the industry, and, having learned a good trick, and thrived in its practice, he one day appointed footmen of his own.

These folk, in the manner of functionaries down through time, schemed to increase and consolidate power.

The film-makers were busy on the lot or on location, but our producers, like Jacob, stayed in the tents, free to wheedle, convince and extort position from and in the studio system. Soon all films had a producer, then two, and, today, count 'em, an average of seven in the head titles. Just as another entertainment industry has Keepers of the Keys, Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and so on, our American charade has co-, consulting, associate and supervising producers.

And, just as with you and your royalty, our ceremonial positions screen from the uninitiated gaze the empty throne. Thus placed they fight like blue blazes to justify and buttress their positions. What do they do between golf and shopping?

They watch while the lowly make bricks and suggest, at regular intervals, that the brick-makers begin to gather their own straw.

And they propound heresy.

They sell all parts of the pig but the squeal. And then they sell the squeal.

I have, with my own eyes, seen the following: a sign on the craft service (snack) table, near the end of filming, "Gum is for Principal Cast Members Only."

I have seen producers bill the movie salaries for their mistresses, their absent yes-man, for travel and lodging never used, for services never proffered, for inedible cast and crew meals charged off as gourmet fare, and so on, and so on.

I've seen, as have we all, theft, fraud, intimidation, malversation - and seen it with such regularity that its absence provokes not comment but mute wonder.

My favourite offence against the gods, however, is curiously benign, and is propounded not by the savage producer, but by the obtuse. To wit: "We are going about this the wrong way. Why don't we just go in a room, and analyse the most successful movies of all time, and then make that?"

This, to the film-maker, is heresy. It is enormity on the order of the resident of Munich suggesting that he thought they were summer camps.

What, the film-maker wonders, did or do you think we were doing all of these years, while you stole us blind - can you not have seen that we, the workers, were "working" like mad to solve, film by film, shot by shot, line by line, the problem you suggest a rational person could vanquish by simply "going in a room"?

Can it be, the film-makers whisper in awe, that These People have literally no idea what is going on on the set, in the writer's hovel, in the designer's workshop?

Is there no one home?

It is not that the inmates have taken over the asylum but that we have not done so, and that those with an exclusively mercantile bent have usurped, in their savagery, anything not riveted down; and, then, in their ignorance, the very prerogatives of the Gods.

For this desire to "go in a room" is, to the artist, heresy indeed. It is the reductio ad absurdum of "reality" programming: having determined that it's not necessary to pay either actors or writers, the producers additionally discover that it is not necessary even to fee the Gods - that insight, idiosyncrasy, inspiration and effort are the concerns of the weak and misguided craftsperson and artist.

Life on the set is pervaded by what the uninvolved might well view as superstition. It could also be called awe.

The presence of both the light and dark forces are felt constantly, and one's life and work are always felt beneath their thrall: the weather, illness, inspiration, traffic are understood in the full force of their capacity for caprice, and only the most fresh-minted neophyte would dare to mention these forces, let alone allude to their potential endorsement.

Time after time we have seen the high brought low by impertinence; and, having seen, have understood. Into this religious atmosphere, then, come our friends the Producers. They engage, in our enthused setting, in operations of a low, quotidian order (their name for it is "business"), and the various malfeasances listed above are seen as unfortunate but sadly inevitable incursions from a less-clean world.

But the exhortation to "go in a room" is not mere crime, but blasphemy. It is not sufficient to shake one's head, one must lower the eyes.

© David Mamet 2004.