PRODUCERS AND THE PRODUCTION OFFICE

Job Overview

The executive producer is ultimately responsible for getting the production made. Duties include hiring the above-the-line personnel and crew, overseeing the budget, and making key decisions involving the production.

“There are a lot of titles that get thrown around,” says executive producer Alan Blomquist. “I've been called a co-producer, an executive producer, and sometimes the line producer. In television, I would be called the producer and the person who created the show would be called the executive producer. In features, it seems to be the opposite: the person who sells the concept to the studio and raises the money is called the producer, and the person they hire to actually make the movie is called the executive producer.

“In layman's parlance, I'm the general contractor,” he adds. “I build the house. The screenwriter is the architect, the producer is the developer who raises the money, and I'm the guy that they give the money and the architect's plans to and ask: ‘How much is it going to cost? How long is it going to take? How many people do we have to hire?’ I make sure they don't buy too much lumber, and that the permits from the building inspector are signed off before the roof goes on. I'm literally the realizer.”

“Once the deal has been set for the movie,” explains executive producer Neil Machlis, “the studio hires me and I hire everybody else. Then away we go.”

Special Skills

An executive producer must be a good businessperson, a leader, and have strong people skills. “It's a people business,” says Machlis. “You have to be able to get along with people. You have to be able to see what makes people tick. You also need an understanding of decision making, and be able to think on your feet and make the right decision when things are tough.” Executive producers must also be creative problem solvers. For Cider House Rules, Blomquist explains, “I had to learn about apple farming and how to keep the apples on the trees longer than they normally stay, because we needed to film late in the season.”

Advice for Someone Seeking This Job

Blomquist suggests getting on set as a production assistant or intern and observing what everyone does, then determine what you want to do and map your path. “If you want to be a costume designer, design things and go and work on smaller movies as a designer. If you want to be a prop person, work only in the art department.” Once you know what it is you want to do, commit to work only in that area. Too many people take jobs in areas they are not interested in, just to make money. Before long, they get typecast in the role of a production assistant or grip, when what they really want to do is produce or direct. “They wake up and it's three or four years later and they are a fill-in-the-blank, because that's what they get identified as.

“Get on a set. Observe. Then take what you've learned and put it into practice. Go schedule a movie, even if it is in the abstract. Get a script and break it down into a production board. There are computer programs for all of this stuff that will help, but they don't do the thinking for you. You have to think. You can't shoot nights and then [shoot] the next day, because the crew can't finish at 6 a.m. and start back at 7 a.m. so, if you go from nights to day, you're going to lose an entire shooting day. You have to shoot Friday night into Saturday so people have the weekend to turn around, and you can start [shooting] days again on Monday.”

Unless you have enough money to finance a production yourself, you will not start out as a producer. Get on set as a production assistant and strive to get in the director's guild so you can work as an assistant director (AD), then make the leap into producing. Or go into locations and work into production management, then into producing.

“Do anything you can to learn as much as you can about all different facets of the filmmaking process,” says Machlis. “Experience as much as you can and make sure you have great people skills.”

“You're interviewing for a job everyday you're working,” says executive producer Duncan Henderson. “What you really want to do is make sure that whoever you're working for feels that they would hire you again or would recommend you.”

Professional Profile: Alan C. Blomquist, Executive Producer

Growing up in Boston, the son of a fire chief father and a nurse mother, Alan Blomquist knew nothing about the movie business. His only early view of the industry came when he was 15 and worked as a caddy on the golf course where Norman Jewison was directing Steve McQueen in a scene from The Thomas Crown Affair.

He attended the University of Michigan, with plans to become a chemical engineer, but discovered he hated engineering school and dropped out. He then enrolled in pre-med for a semester, then dropped out again to spend time figuring out what career he really wanted to pursue. “I always liked going to movies, but I didn't know anything about making them.” For laughs, he enrolled in an 8mm film class at night, while working days as a carpenter, building and remodeling houses, and discovered he loved making movies.

He returned to school and earned a bachelor's degree in general studies with an emphasis in film. He continued to work as a carpenter in the Ann Arbor area until his partner decided to return to school, forcing Blomquist to make a decision about his future. “I decided it was time to either get serious about the building business or, if I was going to go to Hollywood, I should go.” In 1977, he sold the business, packed up his belongings, and moved to Los Angeles, not knowing a soul.

His first job was selling tickets at a revival movie theater, where he could see movies for free. He was able to get work as a carpenter on movie sets, but realized very quickly that the job was far removed from the action. “They never see the actors or the director or the camera. They build the sets, and then the actors, director, and camera come in and film while they're gone; then they come back and take the set down.”

To get on set, Blomquist worked as a grip on nonunion and low budget productions. “If you had any ambition and smarts, it was easy to move up, because there were a lot of people that just sort of showed up. So very quickly I became the key grip.”

The job afforded Blomquist the opportunity to survey the business. Initially, he determined that he wanted to be an assistant director, “because they were the one that ran the set. That seemed like a really fun place to be, in the center of a hurricane.” Ultimately, he realized that he wanted to produce.

With no financial burdens, no relationship commitments, and the minimal living expense of a low rent house shared with two other grips, Blomquist felt free to take the first step toward becoming an assistant director: stop working as a grip. For the next year and a half, he supported himself through carpentry while trying to find an assistant director job. “Eventually I got somebody to hire me for free … they were exploiting me for my labor and I was exploiting them for the opportunity.”

Blomquist researched contracts from the various guilds and unions, then learned the job of an AD while doing it. “I got a copy of all the contracts—IATSE, SAG, DGA, whatever—and read them with a highlighter pen. I studied them like I was taking a class. I learned all the rules and then went out and tried to put them into practice, knowing what I knew about how a set ran. I made a lot of mistakes, but I got one job. Then somebody recommended me and I got a second job … So my résumé says, ‘assistant director; assistant director; additional experience: key grip; key grip; key grip.’ Over time, the grip work fell off the résumé and I only had assistant director [credits].”

He next set his sights on becoming a production manager, initially working on nonunion pictures. In 1980, on the recommendation of crew members he had previously worked with, Blomquist received a call asking him to take over a picture called Breach of Contract, then shooting in San Francisco. The previous production manager had been fired and they had been unable to find a replacement. The catch was that Blomquist would have to join the Directors Guild of America (DGA), something he had been trying to do for three or four years. “They have a test every year for their training program. Twenty-five hundred people apply and twenty-five get picked. Being a white male, I never qualified. I was desperate to get into the Directors Guild.”

Blomquist arrived in San Francisco to discover that the picture's $750,000 budget was already spent, but filming was only halfway finished. “I had to figure out how to get the movie done with whatever money they were still raising, and get them to the finish line.”

Once he was admitted to the director's guild, Blomquist was informed that he needed to work 400 days outside of Los Angeles to get on the roster. He earned the required days during the next year and a half, working on whatever projects he could find. Once the specified time was completed, he worked on a variety of television and low budget productions, until a friend called to ask for his assistance on the PBS movie Lone Star Kid. One of the ADs on the picture had worked for Taylor Hackford on An Officer and a Gentleman, and recommended Blomquist for a low budget film called La Bamba.

La Bamba was made for $6 million and earned more than $60 million, its success propelling Blomquist to another level in his career. When it wrapped, he worked on the series Sledgehammer and other projects, until Hackford was ready to begin production on the $25 million picture Everybody's All American. For it, Blomquist was asked to co-produce, and serve as both line producer and production manager.

“It was a huge leap. I was in really, really deep water. In those times you either sink or swim, and I happened to swim.” Blomquist called on a friend who was also a production manager, who talked him through the budget. “I had worked on a low budget movie, so the budget was maybe twenty pages long. On a $25 million movie the budget was 120 pages. Everything was inflated. I was completely adrift. He sat me down and explained, ‘It's all the same categories. There are more entries, because there are more people and there is more money to spend, but it's the same process.’ You're building an apartment building instead of a single family house.

“Basically, I reinvented myself two or three times. The biggest reinvention was from being a grip to assistant director to becoming a production manager. Then going from production manager to producer were two big leaps. One was sort of by my own sheer force of will, and the other one because Taylor Hackford saw something in me and gave me an opportunity when he didn't have to. He could have hired somebody who had lots of experience and credits. Instead, he said, ‘This is the guy I want to do it,’ and Warner Brothers went along.”

With two successful big films under his belt, Blomquist's career continued from one feature to another, including Of Mice and Men, Vanishing Point, and What Dreams May Come.

“On What Dreams May Come, there was a ship graveyard scene written into the script. While location scouting one day, we saw this scrapped aircraft carrier belonging to the U.S. Navy that had been mothballed and left sitting at a pier in San Francisco for twenty years. It had been decommissioned and was rusted and rotting in place.” After discovering who owned the ship, Blomquist was eventually able to persuade the various agencies involved to allow him access. “We built a huge set around the aircraft carrier that basically cost us nothing. The set cost some money, but the aircraft carrier was free. Those are the kinds of things that are grist for my mill. I just love it.”

Blomquist's association with director Lasse Hallstrom began on What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and continued on to The Cider House Rules and Chocolat. Having just completed nearly a year on location, working on Chocolat, he chose to turn down Shipping News in order to spend more time with his family.

“For Gilbert Grape, we actually burned down a house. In the movie, the woman dies and they set the house on fire as a funeral pyre.” They considered building a set to burn down, or creating the effect in post, until Blomquist found the perfect house. “It was 150 years old, one of those places in Texas that you drive by and it looks like a haunted house with no window glass, because kids have broken it over the years.” Long since abandoned, the farmer who owned the house thought it too expensive to tear down, so he farmed around it. He agreed to sell the house for $5,000 and allow the production to burn it down, if they would agree to haul the remnants away. “That was a huge saving to us, because anything we constructed would have cost a lot more—and it looked great in the movie. That's ultimately what it's about. I have two jobs: the budget and the art. My job is about art meeting commerce.”

Between working on hired jobs, Blomquist works on projects he has created, optioned, or read about. Those include shooting a “Blue Collar Comedy Tour,” similar to The Original Kings of Comedy, but with redneck comics such as Jeff Foxworthy. “Mostly I'm a gun for hire. Other people sell their ideas and hire me to realize them.”

Professional Profile: Duncan Henderson, Executive Producer

“I grew up in the shadow of MGM,” says Duncan Henderson, “but I never considered working in the motion picture business.” Instead, he pursued finance, earning a bachelor's degree in economics from UCLA and a master's in finance from USC, and then became a successful stockbroker. At age 29, he decided he did not want to spend the rest of his life working in the financial world and determined to make a career change. Having always loved movies, he began investigating filmmaking. Discovering the assistant director's training program offered through the DGA, he applied.

“You come in as a trainee. For me that was a huge cut in salary—I think I worked for $120 a week—if I hadn't been able to save up money in my previous occupation, it would have been impossible … I looked at it as they were giving me a stipend to be educated.”

The training program afforded Henderson an opportunity to attend seminars to hear experts in the field speak, and to gain actual hands-on experience working on film and television productions. “You were assigned to shows and it was the luck of the draw that I got to work for some really, really good people. Afterwards, those people went on to work elsewhere and they wanted to hire me because they felt I'd done a good job.”

An early career break came working as second assistant director under William Beasley on American Gigolo. “I consider Bill one of the great assistant directors. He was a good teacher and a good friend.” As Beasley went from show to show, he hired Henderson to work with him on Halloween II, Staying Alive, The Star Chamber, Racing with the Moon, and The Man with One Red Shoe. When it came time for Henderson to make the leap from second to first AD in the early 1980s, it was through the recommendation of Beasley.

Producer James Brubaker was another champion of Henderson's career early on and became influential in his moving up from trainee to second AD, to first AD, and then to production manager. “The real hard thing in this business is to make a change from one category to the next. You have to have somebody willing to say, ‘I think he could do this job.’ … Jim thought I had potential and kept moving me up.” Henderson worked with Brubaker on several pictures including Staying Alive, Rhinestone, and Cobra.

Racing with the Moon's unit production manager (UPM) Art Levinson was another person who recognized Henderson's potential early on. “When I was a brand new second, Art would give me the budgets to go over so I could learn that part of the business. He was very helpful to me.”

By the mid-1980s, Henderson was working as a unit production manager, associate producer, and line producer. In the late 1980s, he served as UPM and associate producer of Dead Poets Society, directed by Peter Weir, and went on to work with him as a co-producer of Green Card, and executive producer of Master and Commander. He has executive produced two Wolfgang Petersen films, Outbreak and The Perfect Storm, and two Chris Columbus pictures, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Professional Profile: Neil Machlis, Executive Producer

New York native Neil Machlis was working toward his master's degree in investment finance at American University in Washington, D.C., when he first discovered filmmaking. A visit to brother-in-law Roger Rothstein on the set of Paper Lion facilitated Machlis working on the film during semester break. He learned the business from the ground up, starting as a production assistant, making photocopies and running errands.

After returning to Washington, Machlis looked up production companies in the Yellow Pages and found a small film company that specialized in industrial shorts and political commercial spots. Again, he accepted an entry-level job serving as a production assistant. “I would go in every day and do whatever needed to be done: I did some negative matching, I swept floors, I ran errands, I took film to the lab. I did everything.”

His first location job was covering the 1968 Democratic Convention, held in Chicago. “Being in Chicago as a part of history was terrific. We were filming senators on a newsreel-type system. The senators would then send the film back to their home state television stations.”

Education was put on hold when Machlis was called up to active duty in the National Guard. Once released, he returned to New York to pursue filmmaking as a career. At the time, the Directors Guild was starting a training program. He took the admission test and was one of ten accepted out of approximately 1500 applicants.

Machlis almost immediately began working as a trainee, often hired by Rothstein, who was then a production manager. “I was lucky to have him. He taught me a lot about the business. He was very well-respected in this field.” Machlis moved up to second AD, and then to unit production manager.

He relocated from New York to California in 1976. “There were some big union problems in New York and the business really slowed down. There was a large movement of personnel [from] New York to California, because the work originated there.” His first big feature after the move was Grease. “That was such a successful film; a good movie to have on your résumé.”

Machlis progressed from unit production manager to associate producer, and by the late 1980s, he was executive producing some the screen's most successful films, such as: Planes, Trains & Automobiles; Postcards from the Edge; Wolf; I.Q.; The Birdcage; Primary Colors; Bedazzled; Dr. Dolittle 2; and The First $20 Million.

“I worked on six movies with Mike Nichols, so I had the benefit of working with some great talents along the way.” Machlis is currently executive producing The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest.