Producers on the secret art of producing

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It’s not easy being a movie producer. Just ask any producer and they’ll tell you about it. The studios are getting rid of most of their producer deals. The outside investment money is drying up. The media are always joking about why movies have 15 credited producers, half of them someone’s manager, brother-in-law or dry cleaner. But I have a soft spot for the profession, perhaps because it’s so much like my own; in fact, a number of talented producers, including Michael London, Marc Abraham and David Friendly, all started out as journalists. Like a reporter, a producer looks for a good story, figures out why it’s a good story, sells the story -- to a skeptical studio exec instead of a gruff editor -- and then doggedly nags someone into writing it (instead of, in my case, having to nag myself).

I had the pleasure of spending this weekend with five gifted producers at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where each year I host a panel discussion about the art of producing. (Variety has a nice post about a similar panel on the art of screenwriting, hosted by Anne Thompson.) Our panel was remarkably diverse, featuring Dan Jinks (‘Milk’), Christian Colson (‘Slumdog Millionaire’), Jim Morris (‘Wall-E’), Charles Roven (‘The Dark Knight’) and Neda Armian (‘Rachel Getting Married’). What I found most fascinating was that the fivesome, blissfully away from the awards circuit for a day, seemed so genuinely curious about one another’s experiences, problem-solving challenges and work processes.

Even though they all inhabit seemingly different worlds, with Morris coming from state-of-the-art visual effects (he ran ILM and Skywalker Sound for George Lucas before becoming Pixar’s production chief) while Armian splits her time between low-budget features and documentaries, they cross paths creatively all the time. Discussing ‘Milk’s’ wonderful vérité portrait of 1970s San Francisco, Jinks heaped accolades on the brilliant cinematography of Harris Savides, who has shot a host of Gus Van Sant films. But as Morris explained Saturday, Savides has another huge fan -- ‘Wall-E’ director Andrew Stanton, who was so obsessed with the look of another Van Sant film that Savides had shot that he insisted on tracking down Savides to hear how he did it, knowing that he wanted to reflect some of that visual style in ‘Wall-E.’ At the time, Savides was shooting ‘Zodiac’ for David Fincher, who had been an assistant matte cameraman for ILM back in the 1980s, where he’d first met Morris. So Morris and Stanton trooped down to the ‘Zodiac’ set, where they got an earful of advice from Savides and Fincher as well.

You see, sometimes if you ask the right dumb question (‘Why did David Fincher have a special thanks on ‘Wall-E?’), you learn plenty. It turns out that nearly everyone on the panel had taken a relatively circuitous path to producer-dom. Colson, who is British, got his start running development for Harvey Weinstein in Miramax’s London office. Roven has become something of a quintessential Hollywood producer -- he arrived armed with not one, but two, cellphones, one of which kept chirping during the panel, no doubt with vital ‘Dark Knight’ DVD-sales updates. But he started out working on a horse ranch in Central California, where he became pals with a bunch of stuntmen, one of whom got him a job as an extra on ‘Hawaii 5-0.’ Armian made her first student film when she was 12 years old. After going to college at Philadelphia’s Temple University, she landed her first job working as directorJonathan Demme’s assistant on ‘Philadelphia.’

Everyone had colorful tales to tell, whether it was Jinks recalling that when Diego Luna met with Van Sant, desperate to be in ‘Milk,’ the actor ended up sitting in Jinks’ lap (‘Needless to say,’ Jinks said, without missing a beat, ‘he got the part’) or Armian, who recalled the phone call she got from Demme after Anne Hathaway had nailed her audition for ‘Rachel Getting Married.’ ‘Neda,’ Demme told her, ‘she just went from first choice to only choice.’ Of course, most of the time, the producer is in the trenches, doing the dogged work that often goes unnoticed or unremembered. When I somewhat naively asked Colson whether it was a more profound experience making a film in Mumbai, surrounded by extreme chaos and poverty, than being on location in congenial Toronto, he responded with a good-natured shrug: ‘Actually, I spent most of my time in the production office on the telephone.’

This got an appreciative laugh from Colson’s peers, who no doubt suspect, judging from the way things are going on the awards circuit, that Colson will get his moment in the sun in a few weeks. After all, bounding up on stage to accept the Oscar statuette for best picture, producers suddenly look like they have the most glamorous job in the world.