‘Crash’ producers collide with new rule

Mark R. Harris has a question.

As one of the six credited producers of this year’s Oscar-nominated best picture “Crash,” is Harris actually invited to the Academy Awards?

“I have no idea if I am or not,” Harris said Tuesday, not long after “Crash” collected six nominations, in a tie for the second most nods behind “Brokeback Mountain.”

His predicament springs from a new Academy Awards rule, which allows the Producers Guild of America to determine a film’s final producer credits. While six people were listed in the “Crash” credits as having produced the drama, the PGA said that only two people -- Cathy Schulman and writer-director Paul Haggis -- fulfilled its producer requirements.

The ruling means that four “Crash” producers, Harris and costar Don Cheadle among them, won’t be able to bask in what is arguably the biggest night in the career of a Hollywood producer -- that moment in the Oscars when the envelope is opened, the Academy Award for best picture is announced and the film’s producers take the stage, mugging for the cameras, hoisting their Oscar statuettes in the air and thanking everyone nobody ever heard of.

But short of crashing the ceremonies, Harris, Cheadle, financier Bob Yari and co-writer Bobby Moresco -- whom the PGA determined did not make sufficient contributions to earn a producing credit -- all will be onlookers on the big night.

A spokesman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said that only nominees will be invited to the Academy Awards. Tickets for purchase are available for a limited number of academy members.

“I feel great that we won,” said Harris, who served as a manager to Haggis. “I’m overjoyed. But I’m not thrilled that my name is not there as a producer.”

Haggis praised all the producers but declined to address the controversy.

“Bob Yari stepped forward when no one else would and Cathy Schulman held on to the script and kept fighting until we got it done,” Haggis said Tuesday. “Mark Harris is the one who took the film and shopped it all around and got turned down everywhere in town but kept going and going and going. And thank God for Don Cheadle, who came along early on.”

Even though a majority of the “Crash” producers have been pushed aside, there is enormous pressure on them not to hurt the chances of the small, independent film by launching a public fight over the PGA’s ruling.

“This is not a vanity award, not for any of us,” Harris said. “It takes a village to raise a child. In the independent world, it takes a group of producers to make a movie. In the studio system, they have all the money, so you go to them and they finance it. But not in the independent world.... In our case, everybody had a significant amount of things they did to make this film happen.”

This is the first year that the academy is using the guild’s decision to determine who is eligible to receive the best picture Oscar. The academy enlisted the PGA to resolve producer credits following last year’s nominations, when three of the five best picture nominees had not settled on producer credits by the morning of the Oscar nomination announcements.

The academy earlier had adopted a rule that no more than three producers would be allowed to accept an award on Oscar night, a move sparked by the spectacle of a flotilla of producers rushing the stage to accept “Shakespeare in Love’s” best picture prize in 1999.