Producing a Novel
Those of you who’ve been faithfully reading this blog know that I was out in LA for a couple of months this past winter. I was working on a couple of screenplay ideas, but I also was trying to understand the role of television or film producer, a job which, for some reason or another was absolutely unfathomable to me. I asked everyone I knew who was even slightly related to the industry what it is a producer actually does. I got such a slew of ambiguous answers that I finally took a very specific approach – You’re a producer of film or television programming. You get up in the morning, shower, shave, the usual. You have breakfast, kiss the wife goodbye, you arrive at last at the office and you do… what?
No one could tell me. They had lots of things to say, like “I spend a lot of time in development meetings.” Or “I make a lot of phone calls.”
Great, you’re on the phone. Talking to whom?
I’ve heard it said that anyone with a phone and a business card can call themselves a producer. That still doesn’t tell me what specific tasks are involved.
I know what a bar owner does to make his business work; you order beer, you set up an inviting room, you hire attractive people and they sell that beer at a mark up. It’s not rocket science. I understand what it takes to be a published writer; you write something and then you knock on every door you can find until someone sends you a check. I know, more or less, how actors and directors and the assorted support personnel in the film industry do their jobs; that is, once they find one. But I could never get a solid answer to tell me what a producer does to earn his title. Does that mean I’m dense? Quite probably. But the thing is, none of these producers ever themselves gave me a really satisfactory answer.
Well, it took a while, but I finally figured it out. The people I asked were vague because there is no one answer, you can’t say – do A and B and C and you’re a producer. A producer’s job isn’t defined in stages, it’s not like acquiring a medical degree, there are no tests to pass. A person becomes a producer simply by doing one thing: whatever it takes to get a production from concept to finished product. The job is exactly what it says. Producers produce.
The reason that producing is so much more complicated than other show business jobs is that it is so many jobs. And the Producer’s Guild has done itself no small disservice by handing out producing credits left and right for anyone even tangentially involved in the creation of a film. Pay attention the next time you watch a movie. Count how many producers there are. Chances are there are a lot of them, and some of them did nothing more than make a phone call that put one person next to someone else who could help move the project along. Maybe that was an important phone call, sure, but was that person really a producer?
Really I don’t care about how anyone goes about getting a producer credit. That’s not why I’m writing this. If you can get one, good for you. The whole thing illustrates how distorted the process of making movies has become, in part so that the rest of the world won’t see how basic the concept really is. Granted, movie making has become incredibly complex, involving hundreds of people, because of the technology involved. But at heart, it’s really just a story told with a camera. You don’t need to be George Lucas to pull that off, even if he does some really cool things with his studio resources.
I’m writing about producing because it’s key to how I’m starting to look at myself as a writer. Any successful writer isn’t just a keyboard and an idea. There are ten thousand great stories, lying around in various desk drawers, that will never see the light of day, because the author lacked the follow through. And many more than that in someone’s head, someone who has given up on ever writing them down at all.
What makes a writer a successful writer is being able to make a living with the craft he has chosen. And that means wearing many hats. It’s not enough to write the story, you have to sell it too. In many ways a beginning writer does what a Hollywood producer does in trying to sell a story. A writer does whatever it takes to get his story in front of people who can publish it, and then, after it’s published, he has to keep pushing – keep writing new material, looking for new opportunities and shepherding the old ones along. It takes a lot of those separate tasks, all bundled together to make a complete career.
So I’m thinking of myself less as a writer and more as a producer. I’m producing my first novel. I’ve produced a number of projects that I’ve seen through to publication. That feels closer to what I think of when I think about making this whole thing work.
And writers have an added bonus; Thank God – we need it. As a writer, once you’ve successfully produced something, there’s something that’s uniquely yours to show for the effort. Not just simply your name rolling up the screen while the audience is dusting popcorn off their laps and flocking to the exits. But the job is much more than just crafting pretty sentences, that’s for sure. Producing credits are a dime a dozen. Writing credits are a harder to come by. But writing and producing, even for a novelist, that’s what ties it all together. So I’m a producer. I’ve got a phone and a business card. I’ve even got a degree, a website and an office. But that’s not what sets a producer apart from the rest of the crowd. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. It’s time to produce.
— Ric Hess, Apr 17, 04:35 PM
