The question every producer gets constantly outside of Hollywood is the most basic one, "What does a producer do exactly?"
The best elevator summary I've ever heard to describe what a producer's job is this: "A producer finds all the elements of a movie separated and apart from one another, and brings them together to form the movie. They are responsible for every step of the process, thus they 'produce' the movie."
This will be a series of posts, making up many parts, that lays out in general what a producer does. This entire blog is about my experience making the movie, but I thought that this series of posts will help give a broader picture of what producers as a group do to the people who aren't familiar with Hollywood. Without a doubt, I will leave some things out or get some things wrong, and even though I am a movie producer, I do not hold myself out as the end-all expert in this area. I am just a guy who is currently producing his first movie, and who has figured out a few things. If you really want to know EVERYTHING about being a producer, I would recommend two things:
1. Do the job. Nothing teaches like experience.
2. Read about it in these three books, Independent Film Producer's Survival Guide, Independent Feature Film Production, and maybe this one, The Movie Business Book or this article gives a short and concise understanding (make sure to check out the articles at the bottom that go into more depth on indie producers).
What Does A Producer Do, Part 1: From Concept To Script
You will hear people argue this back and forth, but to me it is obvious: EVERYTHING in the movie business starts not with the movie stars, but with the script. But the thing is, scripts don't just materialize out of nowhere; at some point someone has to take a vague concept or idea and make it into a finished script. Sometimes a screenwriter does that on his or her own, and writes a spec script. But that doesn't happen as much as you'd think. Usually, that is the job of the producer: Find a new or exciting concept, and turn it into a usable script.
Most of the big names you know as movie producers--Jerry Bruckheimer, Brian Graser, Scott Rudin--are not writers, or really even creatives in any reasonable definition of the word. They are deal makers, putting elements together to create a movie. And the first part of that process is finding the concept. What generally will happen is they will find some great idea for a movie, and then hire a screenwriter to turn it into a script. The idea can come from anywhere; the producer him or herself, a short story in the New Yorker, an idea outlined on a cocktail napkin, a book or a blog or even a video game or amusement park ride. Any concept or idea that could conceivably be told as a story in the visual medium in about two hours can become the underlying material for a movie.
A producer will then buy the rights to the story from the author--it's called optioning--and take the story and give it to an accomplished screenwriter to turn into a usable movie script, or sell it to a studio with themselves attached to produce, and the studio will then pay a screenwriter to create a script (there are very very few producer/screenwriters in Hollywood, though it is common in TV).
This can be a very expensive process. Books routinely sell the movie rights for seven figure sums, and the script fees for an A List screenwriter can be well over a million dollars. At this point, the producer (or studio, depending on the situation) can be out a lot of money, all before the script is done.
This isn't the only way to do it, of course. A producer can get a screenwriter to do a script on spec, for a percentage of the backend. Or the author of the concept can develop the material himself, and the become his own producer. This is basically what happened with me and Max Wong.
She found my site in 2002, emailed me, and we struck up a conversation. Over the next five years, she walked me through the development process, first in TV, then in film, helping Nils and I to first craft a TV show concept and show bible, then helped us not only learn how to write a screenplay, but walked us through all of the first eight or nine drafts. This ended up resulting in a finished script (with the help of a few others along the way that will be discussed later).
I went this way--as opposed to optioning my book to a producer or studio--for several reasons, the first being that I didn't trust anyone else to write a script about my material better than me. Hollywood has been dicking up great books for a century, and I don't trust them to get mine right.
But more importantly, I looked around and saw a major opportunity. Most writers are scared of their own shadows, desperate for a job and willing to take any abuse heaped on them. They are at the bottom of the social pyramid in Hollywood, because the prevailing logic is that stars drive movies, not material. The writers themselves buy into that bullshit as much or more than anyone. But it's just that--complete bullshit. Great scripts drive movies, so why should I not leverage my material and script into me producing my own movies? Why should I take my material--which I know is awesome and I know could be made into a huge franchise--and sell it to a studio or a producer for pennies, and then watch them make it into a turd sandwich? Or even worse, watch them make it well and take home all the money? I was reminded of this quote by Marianne Williamson, "Maturity includes the recognition that no one is going to see anything in us that we don't see in ourselves. Stop waiting for a producer. Produce yourself."
It was from this line of thought that I took my concept and developed it into a script with Nils writing with me, and Max Wong helping me. But instead of Max optioning my material and owning it, I kept all the rights and just let her attach in exchange for her script and concept notes and general Hollywood help. In effect, I became my own producer, I assumed all of the risk myself, and took the concept to script myself, and as a result, Nils and I own the script and we get to produce the movie.
Next entry in the series (the posts won't be all in a row) deals with connecting creatives--directors, actors, etc--with the script.
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