At this month’s Producers Guild of America "Produced By Conference", a distinguished group of filmmakers tackled the question "Do producers bring anything to the creative process?"
Maybe it doesn't apply to every producer, but these gentlemen bring a lot. David Pickler, former CEO or United Artists and producer of Lenny, The Man with Two Brains, and The Crucible, led the “Creative Alchemy” discussion. The panel members who shared their move-land “war stories” included Lawrence Gordon (Die Hard, Field of Dreams, The Rocketeer), Douglas Wick (Wolf, Stuart Little, Memoirs of a Geisha) and Bruce Cohen (American Beauty, Big Fish, Pushing Daisies).
Participants agreed that there are two major areas, beyond the day-to-day business aspects of movie making, where producers contribute. The first is handling the unexpected – sometimes to the extent of saving the project from destruction.
Douglas Wick said that he saw the producer’s main job as holding it all together and solving every conceivable problem. “One day I got a call that only one of the
two animal actors, cats, could come in for the shooting.” he recalled. “It seems the cat's ass was about to fall off. No, really, there is a condition resulting from stress which causes cats anuses to swell up. So there I was on the phone with a veterinarian figuring out what to do about a cat’s ass”.
That wasn’t the only animal challenge Wick had to deal with. The very first movie he worked on was Alan J. Pakula’s award winning Comes a Horseman (1978) with James Caan and Jane Fonda.
Wick explained that they had a scene where they needed a cattle stampede. “We were shooting day-for-night so we needed a clear sky”, he said. “We had the cattle on the hill with the wranglers behind them. We sat there all day waiting for the clouds to go away so we could shoot.
“Finally, in the late afternoon, the skies cleared. The director yelled ‘Action’. The wranglers set off all kinds of loud noises and explosions. The cattle started down hill, and then two of them dropped dead from heart attacks. We had gotten the wrong kind of cattle. They were very sedentary and couldn’t take the excitement. I had to get tougher cows.”
Not all producer problems are the four footed variety. Most efforts producers make to save a project involve people and money.
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