I am sitting at my desk in Washington D.C. right now, preparing, finally, to relocate across the country to Los Angeles tomorrow in order to make this movie. I just finished composing a list on one of those long yellow legal pads of things I needed to remember to bring, and things I needed to remember to buy once I got there. As I reviewed the rather sizable two-column list, I started cataloging in my head the movie-related things I would need to do and think about between now and the time, god willing, this movie hits theaters. This new list dwarfed the others. I'm sitting here now, pondering for the first time, what it really means to be a producer.
"Producer" is one of those job titles, like "Assistant to/for ______ " here in D.C., that rings with importance and magnitude directly proportional to how little normal people understand about it. They are titles cloaked in mystery, held by people who tend to DO less than they can but exercise more authority than they have. Remember Scooter Libby? He was an Assistant to ______. Remember Dustin Hoffman's character in WAG THE DOG? He was a producer. A typical Hollywood, big studio producer.
I saw a matinée showing of WAG THE DOG in an empty theater on winter recess during my sophomore year at Berkeley, just days before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and Bill Clinton was inaugurated to his second term as President. I was (and continue to be) thoroughly entertained by the movie and, as an intellectually suspicious college student, I walked out of the theater with two questions. One, is presidential politics anything like that? And two, what does a producer actually do? By the time I got home, I'd decided the answers to those questions were "probably" and "not much." While I understood that Hoffman's character had lots of money and connections, the only decisions he made that produced anything creatively involved a calico kitten and a bunch of "ooh-aah" sounds. Sure, he corralled all these creative people and put them in a room together to, you know, CREATE STUFF, but how hard could that be? That couldn't be all a producer does? I remember thinking to myself, "I could do that."
Sitting here, mulling over my movie to-do list and remembering that day, I realize that the answers to my own rhetorical questions and bluster are "very," "it isn't," and "we'll see." Especially since this is an independent film on which Tucker and I are the primary creative forces behind every bit of content other than the stuff that applies specifically to the direction of actors and the execution of their craft. Whether it's the script or the content for the website or marketing ideas, Tucker and I are responsible for LITERALLY producing it. And of course, that's in addition to being responsible for business decisions, and putting the technical pieces together, and getting the right people in a room together; all in the service of making the best movie possible. We are producers in the former sense (with a lower case "p") and Producers in the WAG THE DOG sense (with an upper case "P").
Because we do not have the luxury of deep studio pockets and massive studio infrastructure, you can be sure that Tucker and I will not be Producers as they are typically conceived of. For this film to be as successful as we hope, we MUST do everything we can. For it to live up to our expectations artistically, we must exercise, when necessary, as much authority as we have (which, if you ask Tucker, is Full). It's at once both a daunting and exciting task. Can we pull it off? I guess...we'll see.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish packing.
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