The Producers

What's the deal? Where's the money? And what exactly do you do, anyway? Four producers in this year's film festival tell their stories.

by Sam Adams

JAMES SCHAMUS:
"It's a mixture of absolute humiliation on one hand… and total panic on the other."

It was a dream come true.

Richard Goldberg had spent three years of his life producing Surrender Dorothy, the creepy, Philadelphia-shot feature about a sexually obsessive busboy who transforms his junkie roommate into his conception of the ideal woman. He'd taken dangerous amounts of time off from his day job, gone with little sleep for days on end, and watched funding opportunities evaporate without a trace.

But here they were at Slamdance. Goldberg and Kevin DiNovis, Surrender Dorothy's writer, director, editor and co-star, had made it to the 1998 Slamdance Festival in Park City, UT, the bastard offshoot of the Sundance Film Festival that has acquired a legitimacy all its own. Dorothy's screenings had been enthusiastically received all week, and Goldberg recalls, "I could feel we were going to win. I didn't want to say anything to Kevin, but we'd been getting great reactions from the audience, and the morning of the announcement, the nervous twitches of a couple of Slamdance people just gave it away."

The announcement was made, and the moment had arrived: Surrender Dorothy had won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Dramatic Feature. Goldberg continues, "After the ceremony was over, I turned to Kevin and we both thanked each other. All of a sudden, people started crowding around him, and I started to get pushed further and further away. At this point, I can't even see him. I'm standing on the outskirts of this mass of people, and all of a sudden this girl turns to me and says, 'Isn't he talented?'"

He pauses for a second, recalling the moment, then shrugs. "That's producing."

—---

The producer sets a tone for the shoot, melding people into something between an elite fighting unit and an extended dysfunctional family.

As Dustin Hoffman's beleaguered Wag the Dog character pointed out, there is no Oscar for Best Producer. While directors and screenwriters, cinematographers and costume designers all get their due, producers are often overlooked, not least because no one seems to know exactly what a producer does. Hollywood producers, it's true, can take comfort in their studio expense accounts and million-dollar mansions, but for independent producers, such consolations are rare.

According to James Schamus, whose New York-based production company Good Machine has been bringing independent features into being since 1991, "A producer begs for money, and once the money comes in, he or she tries to organize a guerrilla army as quickly as possible to make the movie. It's a mixture of absolute humiliation on one hand, and, once you've succeeded, total panic on the other."

Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema director Phyllis Kaufman, who selected Good Machine for this year's Festival Spotlight, calls the company "a paradigm for where independent film is in the '90s. But unlike most independent producers, Schamus and partner Ted Hope have received a good deal of recognition for their efforts. Profiles in Variety and Details have applauded Schamus and Hope's exemplary list of credits, from the high-profile commercial success of movies like The Brothers McMullen and The Wedding Banquet to their ongoing commitment to funding the debut films of promising directors—three of which grace this year's festival: Arresting Gena, Love God and The Sticky Fingers of Time.

Still, for all the acclaim, Schamus and Hope cling fondly to their no-respect beginnings. The hold music at their New York offices is the soundtrack to The Producers, the 1968 farce about a pair of cash-strapped impresarios who resort to desperate, quasi-legal schemes to pay off their debts. "I had no skills other than being able to use a telephone when I came to New York," Schamus remembers, "but it turned out that dialing numbers and begging was a job not that many people were into at the time."

Good Machine has organized itself around the idea that, as Ted Hope sums up, "production is development.

"Studios spend millions of dollars developing scripts that never get made," he elaborates. "I'm willing to bank a lot of my future on the $200,000 film that teaches someone who I think has an immense amount of talent a few more things about how to handle a feature and develop a script. Two or three films later, that person could be another Ang Lee, and hopefully, we'll make that second or third film with them."

RICHARD GOLDBERG: "For the three weeks of production, Kevin [the writer/director] was the most annoying person I've ever known."

Although Raul Ruiz's The Golden Boat (1991) was the first production under the Good Machine banner, it was with the appearance in 1992 of Hal Hartley's Simple Men and Ang Lee's Pushing Hands that Good Machine really got under way. As with most producers, Schamus' and Hope's careers began with an attachment to a single filmmaker, and a conviction that his films had to be made. Hope produced Hal Hartley's first three films, and Schamus' long-running collaboration with Ang Lee involves not only producing or associate producing all of his movies, but writing the screenplays for two of them: last year's brilliant The Ice Storm, and the $30 million Ride with the Devil (with Skeet Ulrich and Jewel) now in production.

Similarly, Goldberg took on Surrender Dorothy because of a belief in the strength of DiNovis' writing: "Kevin would eventually have gotten into film, but if there was even a chance he was going to fail, I owed it to myself to help him." Jonathan Cohen, the son of Jefferson Bank president Betsy Cohen, formed Blue Guitar Film with fellow Philadelphian Jeffrey Clifford in order to help another local filmmaker, Estep Nagy, get his debut feature The Broken Giant off the ground. That experience led to a desire to produce full-time. "As we started to work on the project," Cohen thinks back, "I started to want to be a producer, and seek out other projects I wanted to be involved with." Cohen and Clifford next took on Jeffrey Hamburg's Safe Men, which premiered at Sundance this year and also found a spot in this year's PFWC. Festival director Kaufman just finished producing her first feature, Frogs for Snakes, for New York underground legend Amos Poe, which grew out of a pre-existing relationship formed when Kaufman was his agent.

One thing everyone agrees on is that until you've produced your first movie, you have no idea what the job is like. "Had I known what I was getting into," Goldberg says with a rueful smile, "I would have thought about it a lot more. I told Kevin I could come up with a couple of thousand here and there, take a small part in the movie and help him get this"—he laughs—"'one-year project' off the ground." Even Kaufman, who had worked as legal counsel and production finance coordinator for several productions, wasn't totally prepared. "I had looked at filmmaking from a few different vantage points, but until you're on location, I don't think you really know what you're in for."

TED HOPE:
"There's a kind of budget fetishism that's sprung up around independent movies, where what a movie cost often gets more attention than what it's about."

Like any other enterprise involving large numbers of people, a movie starts with the search for financing. Even if they can't pull money out of a hat, more experienced hands like Schamus and Hope at least know where to start looking. But for first-timers, the quest for funds can delay productions for years. The Surrender Dorothy crew spent months waiting for offers of assistance to turn into cash, only to end up back where they'd started. "We learned," Goldberg says, "the best way to make it was to go ahead with what we had." (Not to say the production didn't have its benefactors, including TLA Video's Ray Murray, "our angel" Clifford Mumm, and an "elderly conservative" relative of Goldberg's who still thinks the movie is about "a guy who can't get himself a girlfriend.")

Goldberg won't say how much money was needed to complete Surrender Dorothy, although he will allow that it was "proudly" under $1 million. In fact, despite the common perception that producers only talk about money, independent producers are often reluctant to reveal budgets for their movies. For a project like Surrender Dorothy, which is currently searching for a distribution deal, budgetary secrecy is a strategic matter, since once distributors hear a number attached to a film's "worth," it can be difficult to persuade them to offer more. Ted Hope also sticks to the "under a million" line, although for more philosophical reasons: "There's a kind of budget fetishism that's sprung up around independent movies, where what a movie cost often gets more attention than what it's about. I hope people will watch our films because of how good they are, and not how little or how much they cost."

Once financing is secured—although, as any producer knows, "secure" is a relative term—and production begins, the producer's most important job is setting a tone for the shoot, melding anywhere from a dozen to several hundred people into something between an elite fighting unit and an extended dysfunctional family. "I'm a real believer that process—attitude, working conditions, the way you treat people—highly influences what the final product is," Hope says. "Part of getting the director's vision on screen is creating the atmosphere around the production."

Part of creating that atmosphere is keeping the director happy, which isn't always easy. Goldberg recalls the Surrender Dorothy shoot in the summer of 1995: "For the three weeks of production, Kevin was the most annoying person I've ever known. He was acting, directing, looking after his script, and he just couldn't know about certain things." Once, a critical shoot scheduled at the Middle East Restaurant in Old City almost had to be scrapped at the last minute because of miscommunication between the owners, the Tayoun brothers. Seventy-five extras and a crew of 25 were nearly sent packing. Another time, Goldberg had to fend off a threatening Amblin rep who insisted that Steven Spielberg's company already owned the rights to the picture's title. "It was frustrating at the time, because a lot of crap came up, and although we were partners, I couldn't tell him anything. I just kept saying to myself, 'This is my job.'"

Phyllis Kaufman: "It's the one thing that, no matter how much of a control freak you are, you can't accomplish on your own."

Perhaps one of the reasons it's so hard to define a producer's job is that, when all's said and done, a producer's job is to do whatever needs to be done. "I hate to say it," Goldberg goes on, "but at this level producer is like a glorified gofer. Everybody listens to you because they think you have some sort of power over something, but I did worse work than anyone. If the grips or the gaffers were beginning to question whether they should work with me, I got in there and worked with them. I had to be whatever they wanted me to be." Put simply, the producer's job is to keep everybody happy, because making a film is, as Kaufman puts it, "the ultimate collaborative experience. It's the one thing that, no matter how much of a control freak you are, you can't accomplish on your own."

For a producer, the reward is not the feature interview or the audience's acclaim, but the experience of making the film, and the finished product. In fact, says Kaufman, "If people don't know that much about you, it's usually because you've done a good job. You've brought the film in on time and on budget. There's nothing really remarkable except that everyone really enjoyed working together."

Kaufman notes that just this year, the Independent Spirit Awards starting giving the Best Picture award to the film's producers, which may be a sign that independent producers are finally starting to get the respect and attention they deserve. But for the most part, independent producers find comfort in the accomplishment of finishing a film, and helping to realize a director's vision. "In 20 years," says Hope, "I hope people look back and say, 'Oh my God, Good Machine made first films with all these great directors!'" Cohen, who for a neophyte sounds like industry vets with 10 times his experience, sums it up: "Your legacy is the film."

—---

CLEANING UP IS
A DRAG: Kevin
DiNovis in
Surrender Dorothy

"After we won the award," Goldberg concludes, "they handed us a trophy and a check. I started teasing Kevin. 'We won for Best Picture, right?'

"He said, 'Grand Jury Award, Best Dramatic Feature, right.'

"'Well, doesn't the producer keep the Best Picture Award? Isn't that how it is at the Oscars?'

"He sort of sadly agreed, and he handed over the trophy. I carried it around in my pocket for the night, and at the end of the night, I gave him the trophy and he gave me the check.

"I tore the pocket."

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