IDblog: Producer or director? Or both?

Producer or director? Or both?

I probably should reply via comment, but I think it'd look cheesy to pile up the "recent comments" area on the right with my added noise, so heck, why not a new entry? Warning: if you hate quibbling about titles, stop reading now!

In response to one of yesterday's entries, Eric Scheid (who maintains the most excellent IAwiki) wrote:

"an integrator who brings disciplines together to create an excellent [..] solution?"

In the film world, this sounds more like a producer than a director.

Okay, first of all, I'd admit that my understanding of film is definitely not sophisticated. But when you talk about great films, which comes to mind first? Who the producer is? Or who the director is? The two may work very closely together, but when I think about major artistic contributions (read experience), I think director.

You're certainly right that a producer is ultimately responsible for solutions. And the Producers Guild agrees that this includes creative responsibility. But I've always presumed that producers tended to be more business focused (controlling the money), while directors were the more creative focused (controlling the vision).

I'm not totally off the mark, as this page (which I found via this Google search) explains:

[Producers] often act in a supervisory capacity (see next paragraph), but on most projects will maintain a low profile, ceding major artistic decisions to the director. Instead, the producer is there as a technical and logistical problem-solver, making practical and procedural decisions so the director is free to focus on the creative work of actually making the film.

So maybe the real answer is that both producers and directors bring together disciplines to create excellent movies (or information products). The question then is: which of these two roles would you rather have? Being the logistical problem-solver? Or the creative? Seems very yin/yang.

06:09 PM | linkme | home

Comments

> Okay, first of all, I'd admit that my understanding of film is definitely not sophisticated. But when you talk about great films, which comes to mind first? Who the producer is? Or who the director is? The two may work very closely together, but when I think about major artistic contributions (read experience), I think director.

Actually, for what it's worth, it depends as much on the period as anything. In the heyday of the "studio system", the producer was god, and the director was a lowly hireling; a producer might go through two or three during a movie. Everyone knew that Gone With the Wind was a Selznick film. This really reflected the attitude that a Hollywood film was a mass-produced product, and the people working on it (the parts) were pretty much interchangable (even if you couldn't switch leading ladies midway through filming). Later, after court rulings broke up the studio system as it had existed, there emerged the idea of commercial film as an artform, and the director as the head artist, the chief creative visionary, and the producer as little more than a facilitator. What the implications of this might be in a new media environment, I'm not going to guess.

-- Posted by on August 6, 2003 12:42 PM