By India McCarty
Hollywood’s producers fight for fair recognition in an industry they say is increasingly working to shut them out.
“Years ago, our value and our function was never disrespected or questioned,” Todd Black, a seasoned producer with 85 credits under his belt, told Variety. “Producers in the ’80s and somewhat in the ’90s were valued as a completely necessary tool. All of us start our projects through imagination, a script we’ve developed, something we wrought and delivered.”
However, these days, producers struggle to make a living as budgets get slashed and major movie stars and industry execs demand producer credits.
“When the streaming services came in, we were sold a bill of goods. There were going to be more buyers, more films, more jobs and more eyeballs,” Jonathan Wang, who won an Oscar for producing EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE, explained. “What we didn’t see coming was the tech companies overpaying for talent and changing back-end models to gain market share.”
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Instead of prosperous times for the entertainment industry, Wang said, they’re now seeing “production leaving the U.S., empty back lots and empty movie theaters. With AI, we as producers are arbiters of this craft. We are positioned to understand the scale of the coming problem and the scale of the solutions.”
The producers aren’t going down without a fight, though. Founded in 2023, Producers United is an organization “advocating for the sustainability of dedicated producing in film and television and to ensure its future,” per their website.
“The collective is organized around tangible activations enabling studios, streamers, networks, financiers, agencies, unions and our creative collaborators to become partners in correcting the systemic degradation of career producing,” the organization’s website continued. “The collective seeks fair treatment, wages and accreditation for Career Producers, as well as much needed pathways for the next generation of Career Producers to establish sustainable careers.”
Complicating producers’ fight for recognition and proper compensation in the industry? The fact that most people aren’t entirely aware of what they do. During an episode of the “Daily Variety” podcast, Producers United members Wang and Laura Lewis explained the importance of their job to a movie or TV set.
“We’re the ones responsible for liaising with the department heads, whether that’s makeup, costume, hair, editing — but also we have to look out for the on the flip side, the director and the writer and their vision, too,” Lewis said. “So we’re literally the middleman between all of those departments.”
Wang added, “The career producer’s job is to look at the holistic health of a set and its production as a business, as an entity. So that is translating creative vision not only from a budgetary standpoint into a real, instantiated into the world kind of standpoint.”
And it’s not just keeping the production moving from day to day; Producers United member Barbara Broccoli told Variety, “Career producers are the guardians of narrative integrity and emotional truth. When the producer’s hand is diminished, quality suffers, and the audience feels this loss.”
Streaming has shaken Hollywood up, no matter what facet of the industry someone is working in, but it looks like producers have finally had enough and are ready to fight for their careers.
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