For movie producers, is it the end of the world as they know it?
You could get that impression on the 20th Century Fox lot over the weekend, when the Producers Guild of America attracted 1,100 of its members and guests to the guild’s second Produced By Conference, two days of panels, interviews, seminars and mentoring sessions during which the cold realities of production in today’s climate were hammered home:
Things have changed.
Studios are harder to deal with than they used to be.
Money is scarce.
Nobody wants original ideas.
Certainly, the sessions also brought success stories and constructive advice and words of encouragement. But one of the common themes running through the weekend was clear: producing a movie was never easy, and now it’s getting harder.
“The paradox right now,” said Marshall Herskovitz, the outgoing president of the PGA, “is that there’s less opportunity than ever before, but you can make a great movie for nothing. The tools exist to make a movie more cheaply than you ever could before, but it’s harder to break into the business.”
When asked about his low point in Hollywood, Larry Gordon, a 50-year veteran who once headed Fox and went on to produce “Die Hard,” “48 Hrs.,” “Field of Dreams” and many more, was blunt.
“Now,” he told the audience at the “Producing Blockbusters” panel. “I feel like a whipped puppy.”
(From left: Larry Gordon, Douglas Wick, Bruce Cohen and David Picker at the Produced By Conference. Photo by Michael Quinn Martin.)
His litany of complaints: studio interference is increasing; they seldom support the producer in creative conflicts; they want franchises, not fresh ideas; and in general they don’t respect the filmmakers.
“You always start out every movie thinking that it’ll be the greatest movie ever made,” said Douglas Wick (“Gladiator,” “Working Girl”) on a “Creative Alchemy” panel. “By the end, you’re just hoping to crawl across the finish line and not get sued or lose your relationship with the studio.”
For Gordon, that relationship appears to be in tatters. “Every time you make a movie, you get treated badly,” he said. “When Dick [Zanuck] ran this studio, and I think when I ran the studio, we treated people a little better than they do now.” He paused. “Let’s be frank: a lot better.”
Gordon didn’t mention movies by name, but he said he’d had “really bad experiences” on his last two or three films. (He may or may not have been talking about “Watchmen” and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army.”)
“I want to be treated with respect, and I think I deserve it,” he said. “That gets me branded as difficult. And I’ve just about had enough.”
He shook his head. “Do you think it means anything when you’re so furious at the studio that you hope your own movie fails?”
Producer Mark Johnson (“Rain Man,” “The Little Princess,” “The Chronicles of Narnia”), who was on the same panel, didn’t go quite that far – but he did bemoan the fact that Hollywood increasingly has a tunnel-vision focus on unoriginal, tentpole-type films, which he said that affected the way he viewed the recent downturn in domestic boxoffice.
