Waiting at a red for a green light

What does a movie producer really do?

Before you start with the jokes, the Producers Guild of America wants to have its say. This weekend, the PGA will present its first-ever Produced By Conference, an open-to-the-public (although sold out) gathering on the Sony Pictures lot with seminars on such topics as financing, digital rights, viral marketing and -- why not? -- private jets.

Ahead of the three-day conference, four experienced producers discussed the challenges they face in these turbulent times when studios are cutting producer deals and taking fewer risks. Our panel: Groundswell Films’ Michael London (“Sideways,” “Milk”), Lakeshore Entertainment’s Gary Lucchesi (“Underworld,” “Crank”), Marshall Herskovitz (“Blood Diamond,” “The Last Samurai”) and Gale Anne Hurd (“The Incredible Hulk,” “The Terminator”). Here are highlights:

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What does it say about your business when well-reviewed, star-filled adult dramas like “Duplicity” and “State of Play” don’t work?

London: I think there is something sobering about it. I think right now there is a premium on escapist material that makes people feel good. I don’t believe for a moment that adult movies are going away, but it definitely has given me pause.

Herskovitz: In the last 15 years there has been this very interesting opening up of the movie business because you could make films independently -- there were a lot of distributors, there were a lot of different ways to get a movie out there. That’s starting to shrink now, and now there’s starting to be a bottleneck in the distribution area. This happened to us last year with “Defiance.” We had independent financing, all we needed was a domestic distributor -- which was very hard to find.

London: My company has worked primarily in adult drama. And right now there is such an enormous challenge in getting studios to assign a distribution slot to a movie that they perceive as belonging to this shrinking market. It’s hard to give them a rationale to devote one of their precious eight or nine distribution slots to one of our movies instead of holding it back for a tent-pole, a comic-book, pre-sold franchise.

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Does that mean marketing is now more important than ever?

Hurd: Everything really is about marketing. What is going to get people to leave their homes to go see a film? The industry has changed. It used to be that a film didn’t need to have a huge Friday night, but now everyone looks at the grosses Saturday morning. And that determines a lot: “Well, that movie bombed, I’m not going to go see it.”

Lucchesi: I think the process of getting a green light is so complicated that you pretty much have to know who your audience is before you start shooting.

Herskovitz: The audience is inundated by inputs from the culture -- from television, online and films. Marketing has become so difficult -- to penetrate the clutter.

When studios are less willing to take risks, how does that affect you?

Lucchesi: When Universal greenlit “Duplicity” and “State of Play,” it also was greenlighting “Fast & Furious.” They didn’t know that one wasn’t going to work, that one was going to over-perform and another was going to under-perform. No one can read the future. But producers are the greatest optimists in the world. We are the people that find some material and actually imagine that it could be a movie.

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How has industry belt-tightening affected you?

Herskovitz: The studio belt-tightening has had a direct effect on many producers because they cut producer deals. Producers not only create but also nurture intellectual properties for the five, seven, 10 years it takes to get movies made. The studios have to cut their overhead, they have to deal with their bottom line. But in terms of the future, that army of producers that was creating new properties is going away.

If you begin to say, “The American film industry is starting to look less creative,” you have to look at the causes of that in a lot of different areas. And one of them could be that it’s really difficult now for creative people to get a movie made.

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Are there now more awkward conversations with actors about how they are not going to earn what they are used to?

Lucchesi: With the more art-type movies, it’s very easy to go to somebody and say, “We know you get X amount of dollars for your big studio movie, but this is a different animal, this is like you are doing Equity theater, and you’ve got to cut your price to do it.” Most people get that.

London: I think that everyone is so cognizant of the world we live in. I’m sure there’s a lot of agents who are unhappy about the fall in that pay scale, but anyone who’s got their eyes open recognizes that what’s important now is to keep working.

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Michael, you’re dependent on outside financing, and that money seems to be in jeopardy too.

London: From a business perspective, I’d like to have a successful business that rewards my investors and keeps my company afloat. But we’re in a culture now, a movie culture, where so little premium is placed on original ideas, as the studios veer more and more toward this notion of something that has a pre-sold element, whether it’s a comic book, or a remake of a movie or a television series..

Hurd: Look at “Slumdog Millionaire,” perhaps the most profitable film out there. If you start thinking, “Who is the audience for that?” It was clearly a struggle to get it made, and yet, if you had gambled on that film you would have the greatest return of any film last year.

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“Milk” won a couple of Oscars, but didn’t do all that well at the box office.

London: “Milk” bore a certain burden in terms of its seriousness and its themes, and its perception in terms of the audience that it spoke to. People are not going to want to stop going to see movies about grown-ups. They might be slightly different movies about grown-ups, they might not be $45-million movies about grown-ups, they may not be led by movie stars, but people are always going to want to see those good stories.

Herskovitz: There’s no doubt in anybody’s mind that some of the above-the-line people in this business have been overpaid for a very long time to the point where it was very deleterious for the business itself. In fact, the business model for movies, when you look at it from the outside, often looks a little bit crazy where you have a star making four or five times more profit on the movie than the studio did. The studio risked all the money and the star risked zero. That’s just not a sustainable model.

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Does that mean you’re having to spend more time trying figure out deals than work on scripts?

London: In the independent world, we have to do it ourselves, and that’s a nightmare. It’s just like the movie business has become this incredibly intricate house of cards with so many different elements.

Herskovitz: But let’s remember that no matter how odious it is, it’s a small part of the process.

Hurd: On the other hand, if you are too close to the process, you are blamed for having an actor unhappy with the compensation package. Then it’s your fault, not the person in business affairs.

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What are the things that take up your days that you would not have wasted more than a few minutes doing a few years ago?

Lucchesi: It’s the panning for gold that’s the hardest part -- you wade through a ton of material. You know, you don’t have pitches anymore, so you’ve got a lot of spec scripts and sometimes there might be a kernel of an idea in a spec script, even though it may not be completely well-written, that you feel is worth chasing.

Herskovitz: It is very difficult to pitch these days. I spent 20 years going in a room and telling stories, and making deals based on a story that I told. But we’re not in that business anymore. They don’t want to hear a pitch because they are not going to pay to have a script written.

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What makes you optimistic?

London: The indie world is not as healthy as we’d all like, but there is a huge wave of new directors that are creating a lot of excitement.

Herskovitz: There’s a huge diversity in the kinds of movies being made, and that allows for change to happen.

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It seems as if the studios care more about concepts than quality.

London: I think execution is king. I saw “Star Trek” last week -- I’m not in particular a tent-pole movie guy -- and I loved it.

Herskovitz: This notion that concept is king is already 25 years old. I think the audience is more discerning about it now. But there is a danger here that is analogous to the auto industry. More and more of the studios have placed their bets on these high-concept films, but there could be a moment where people just get tired of those films. My fear is the studios are essentially getting rid of the apparatus for creation of new content.

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john.horn@latimes.com