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PRODUCERS’ NEW ROLE AS THE RANK AND FILE

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Times Arts Editor

The labor scene in Hollywood has been quiet since the Writers Guild strike was settled a few weeks ago.

But it is possibly a lull between storms. This week, contract talks, or at least some ritual throat-clearings, begin between management (the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, or AMPTP) and the dozens of local craft unions making up the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, or IATSE, which represents everyone from makeup artists to publicists.

Then, down the road apiece, are some talks that promise to be fascinating even beyond industry circles, because they’ll pit the major studios--the AMPTP again--against those legendary Hollywood figures, the producers, collected as the Producers Guild of America. It will be, in a real sense, the Producers versus the producers.

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The struggle of the Producers Guild, representing individual producers, to get a contract with the majors has been going on since 1968, with only partial and temporary success. The scenario has changed this time because in December the guild voted to affiliate with the powerful Western Conference of Teamsters. It was the guild’s hope that when the Teamsters talk, negotiators listen.

It sounds like a curious affiliation, although the Teamsters also represent teachers, pilots, doctors and computer technicians, among other professionals. The terms of affiliation appear to leave the guild with full control over its own affairs.

It seems fair to say that the root issue is both legal and philosophical. Who are producers and what is it they do, and are they supervisors (and thus ineligible to be treated as a labor union) or aren’t they?

The Producers Guild has been arguing for years that its members, or many of them, are caught in a kind of limbo, with no participation in corporate pension and welfare plans, but also with no guild pension and welfare plans, such as the Directors and Writers guilds and other unions have, substantially funded by industry contributions.

The producer of song and story is, like the agent, a creature of satire, given to fat cars, fat cigars and fat pinkie-finger diamonds. Unlike the agent’s, the producer’s role is unclear except that in film legend he cracks a merciless fiscal bullwhip over the backs of the sensitive and truly creative writers and other artistes.

The myth never had more than the most tenuous links to any observable reality, with the least creative producers taken as representative of the whole, which they weren’t. The most striking observable reality at the moment is that the president of the Producers Guild of America is a gifted and effective woman, Renee Valente, who started as secretary to David Susskind and worked her way through the ranks to become vice president for long-form television at Screen Gems. Independent since 1977, she’s been executive producer of the film “Loving Couples” and, for TV, “The Last Hurrah” and “Blind Ambition,” among other specials.

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What continues to be true is that producers are the most various and unlumpable of all the motion-picture occupational groups.

The producer may be an investor who carries the title as a courtesy. Other producers may be deal-makers who take the money and run and wouldn’t know a brute from an apple box. Or they may, in the tradition of Hal Wallis, Arthur Freed, Pandro Berman and a relatively small but significant population of great producers from the golden age of the studios, be genuinely creative film makers who pursue a notion from germinal idea to release prints, and who may hate cigars.

The coming talks between the AMPTP and the Teamsters-represented Producers Guild will begin at the beginning, with demands for a basic contract. The guild had a contract with Universal and Paramount from 1977 to 1981, but it expired when the other major members of the AMPTP refused to sign it.

What the Producers Guild, first organized in 1950, symbolizes in large part is the changing nature of the industry, and of the major studios. As the primary movie audience shrank under the competitive impact of television (in rounded terms, from 90 million tickets a week in 1946 to 20 million a week now), the studio rosters of contract producers, writers, technicians and performers shrank as well.

Hollywood has become to a large extent a free-lance, do-it-yourself, deal-to-deal town. Producers, who might once have spent their whole creative lives in the occasionally abrasive but generally well-cushioned atmospheres of Warners or Metro, have become independents, peddling from picture to picture and studio to studio.

Many of them do very nicely, thanks; no benefits, real or symbolic, will be required. But what is interesting about the guild’s drive for a contract is that, for some of the senior and well-off members, the goal is not dollars for themselves but, indeed, recognition for the dignity and importance of what it is that the independent producers do.

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The genuinely creative producer has seemed to me an endangered species in recent years; too many fugitive deal-makers, too few impassioned lovers of the end product.

To say it another way, it is noteworthy how often the current films that seem individual and admirable turn out to have had a strong producer or producers. David Puttnam’s “The Killing Fields,” like his “Chariots of Fire,” emphasizes the point, as do Saul Zaentz’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.” David Lean’s “A Passage to India” would have remained a futile dream without Richard Goodwin and John Brabourne.

Like many labor negotiations, the AMPTP-Producers Guild of America talks may well come to sound a series of technicalities and legal battles (centrally asking if producers are or aren’t supervisors). But the underlying truth involves a film industry that, for better and for worse, isn’t what it used to be, and producers who have always been more central to the creative process than the bad jokes would have you believe.

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