The struggle of the modern hollywood producer was crystallized in a bit from this year’s Emmy awards.
Host Nate Bargatze opened the broadcast with an old-timey sketch spoofing the creation of the television set, in which he played an exaggerated version of real-life inventor Philo Farnsworth.
On a Frankenstein-esque laboratory set, Bargatze, flanked by “Saturday Night Live” players Bowen Yang and Mikey Day, predicted how a crude little box would come to captivate billions of viewers around the world. One of the “SNL” boys asked who would make the programming. Bargatze responded: “Actors, writers, directors and, most importantly, producers.” Day followed up, “And what does the producer do, sir?”
Bargatze stared into the camera and deadpanned, “Nobody knows!”
The punchline got a big laugh, as it has for decades when Hollywood feigns ignorance about the role of capital-P Producers. And yet the entertainment industry runs on their passion and drive. They are the often-unseen forces that find material, attach superstar talent, oversee all stages of production and assume the responsibility of delivering a film or series on time and on budget. For the past two and a half years, hundreds of producers have quietly banded together to stave off what they see as their own extinction, forming a group called Producers United and coining the term “career producer” as a preferred moniker. Jokes like Bargatze’s are simply starting to hit different.
“Years ago, our value and our function was never disrespected or questioned,” says Todd Black from the Vancouver set of Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning,” his 85th feature film as a producer. “Producers in the ’80s and somewhat in the ’90s were valued as a completely necessary tool. All of us start our projects through imagination, a script we’ve developed, something we wrought and delivered.”
Founded in June 2023, Producers United comprises some of the most successful figures in show business, including Adele Romanski (“Moonlight”), Grant Heslov (“Argo”), Barbara Broccoli (the James Bond franchise), Beau Flynn (Disney’s live-action “Moana”), Jeremy Kleiner and Dede Gardner (“12 Years a Slave”), Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson (“The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story”), Will Packer (“Girls Trip”), Tom Ackerley (“Barbie”) and Stacey Sher (“Erin Brockovich”).
Their goal is to demand basic rights and stop what they feel is the “slow degradation” of the services they provide. The initial asks that this collective of power players is pressing for from studios and top platforms is to provide health insurance while production is active; to accelerate the traditional timeline of producer compensation rather than waiting until the final product is delivered; and to address the proliferation of producer credits in TV and film by adhering to a Producers United checklist that spells out the job’s duties and responsibilities.
Technological advancements such as streaming and waves of mergers and acquisitions among media companies have rocked the traditional Hollywood ecosystem over the past 15 years. Consequently, Producers United members are finding it harder to make a living in the new world order. Their compensation is increasingly being slashed as movies and TV shows must be made on tighter budgets, and that’s if they’re lucky enough to get a project greenlit. As studios and streamers tighten belts, they’re making less content.
“There’s a posture of scarcity that everyone in the industry is feeling right now,” says Naomi Despres, producer of “India Sweets and Spices,” adding that “making a movie is harder than ever, especially the negotiations.”
There may be fewer films, but the ones that do get made have an ever-expanding list of people who claim to have produced them. Many major stars demand to be credited as producers (but perform no actual duties in that role), as do outside investors, who will put up the money for a movie in exchange for a shot at awards glory as a producer on a film whose set they may never have visited. The studios, in kind, see producers as menial labor when they’re the ones doing the heavy lifting, according to nearly three dozen producers interviewed for this piece.
“We protect the artistry and the artists, and we maintain the quality, and that’s our job,” Lorenzo di Bonaventura, a veteran producer of the “Transformers” films and many others and a former top executive at Warner Bros. Pictures. “What happens when we’re not here anymore?”
Bowen Yang, Nate Bargatze and Mikey Day perform the opening skit at the Emmy Awards on Sept. 14.
WireImage
While writers, actors and directors have unions to advocate on their behalf, producers do not have the same collective bargaining power. (Despite past attempts to unionize, the 74-year-old Producers Guild of America remains a trade association given its members are viewed as employers.) Producers United believes the future of its craft is nearing an inflection point from which it may not recover — especially as the labor contracts for other Hollywood unions are coming up for renewal next year. Leadership at Producers United told Variety that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA have signaled there will be increases in cash reserves that guarantee residuals for their members. That means indie producers will have to bear bonds for that cash — a move that could collapse that sector’s financial ecosystem. At the same time, producers are having to contend with the emergence of artificial intelligence, which seems poised to upend the business in profound ways.
“When the streaming services came in, we were sold a bill of goods. There were going to be more buyers, more films, more jobs and more eyeballs. What we didn’t see coming was the tech companies overpaying for talent and changing back-end models to gain market share,” says Jonathan Wang, the Oscar-winning producer of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” The result, Wang says, was “production leaving the U.S., empty back lots and empty movie theaters. With AI, we as producers are arbiters of this craft. We are positioned to understand the scale of the coming problem and the scale of the solutions.”
In the Hollywood of yore, producers were seen as fat cats. It’s an archetype synonymous with images of Robert Evans in a barely buttoned Yves Saint Laurent shirt and oversize square-frame glasses — or the OG nepo baby Richard D. Zanuck, who helped launch Steven Spielberg in the ’70s as the producer of “Jaws” and “The Sugarland Express” after brief runs as an executive at Fox and Warner Bros. Today’s career producers say this depiction has haunted them in the four decades since Evans and Zanuck loomed large over the town. Make no mistake: There are still mogul-producers, such as Jerry Bruckheimer, Brian Grazer, Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. But even many of these figures no longer enjoy the rich overall deals they used to command, to say nothing of the luxurious back-lot bungalows that once housed their huge staffs. Hardly anyone in Producers United rents office space; instead, most work from home. Only 5.2% of the roughly 300 members has an overall deal in place.
Health care for career producers has been a relatively easy get for Producers United. HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures and Universal Pictures were among the first major industry employers to agree to the terms of Producers United’s first basic rights campaign. On the film side, the cost of that health care is about $35,000 for big-budget productions and about $8,000 for an indie film. Amazon Studios and Sony Pictures are the only buyers who’ve not agreed to this ask. (One Sony insider says producer health care contributions are considered on a case-by-case basis.)
Getting by as a career producer is a different struggle, one that has left a void of mentorship and tends to impact younger and diverse voices. “People have to be financially independent to be able to be a producer,” says Jennifer Todd, a producer who broke out with the Austin Powers franchise and “Memento” from Christopher Nolan. “The studios used to make deals with producers so they could have a living while they developed projects. Now? Almost all those deals are with talent, actors or directors. That’s a big shift, because [it signals] they don’t need someone doing the actual job of a career producer.”
Up-and-coming producer Stephen Love (“They Cloned Tyrone”) was supporting himself as a rideshare driver only two years ago, despite having projects set up and produced at multiple studios. A mentor once warned him, “You’re getting into a rich man’s sport.” He’s since diversified his income by building an advertising production outfit to sustain him between films. Love’s story of hustle and hardship is only becoming more commonplace.
“The thing that has happened in film has a lot of overlap with what’s happening in television,” says Sarah Schechter, partner with prolific producer Greg Berlanti in Berlanti Productions. “[Producing] TV was never as good a deal as a movie, but it was much faster — there were more episodes, and they were at a faster cadence, right? But now we’re talking about six to eight episodes [per season] that take three to five years. So that producer is oftentimes there at the very beginning, and they are truly the last person to get paid. That’s very hard to sustain as a job.”
So the role of the career producer has quickly shifted from entrepreneur and studio partner to laborer. Streaming eliminated back-end profit participation — money producers once used to fund overhead and development, and to hire and train other producers. The contraction of the studio film business over the past decade and the shift toward TV series with fewer episodes and longer lag time between seasons add up to producers often going months without seeing a penny.
Here’s some math that might fit on a Musso & Frank cocktail napkin: Producers commit years of unpaid labor to cultivating ideas and manifesting them into film and TV shows (paying screenwriters out of pocket, optioning books and magazine articles, buying out viral social media accounts). At the point a movie is set up with any of the mainstream buyers, producers are paid a development fee — a flat rate of $25,000, a figure that was set in 1971 and hasn’t changed in six decades. Most producers say this fee has become symbolic and is generally hard to collect. Half of that is payable at the time of commencement, with the other half reserved for “abandonment” — that is, it’s a parting payment if a project is effectively canceled. (Fun fact: Per multiple members of Producers United, not a single studio has engaged in abandonment since the mid-aughts, when Paramount Pictures disastrously let the rights to “The Twilight Saga” books lapse. Those five film adaptations grossed more than $3 billion worldwide for another distributor, Summit Entertainment.)
Setting up a project entails a producer transferring all rights to their source material to the buyer. Their real compensation is a “producer’s fee” — an agreed-upon sum paid for all services rendered, which is based on experience, achieving certain metrics of success (like reaching box office or ratings benchmarks) and any accolades a project receives. The producer’s fee is parsed out in stages, beginning eight weeks before production starts and wrapping up after delivery.
But because the career producers have no union, they say, their credits and fees are vulnerable to being gutted by studios and financiers — as well as straight-up pirate behavior from talent (wittingly or unwittingly) and their representatives, who take money that had been allocated for producers. The career producers’ work has not gone unnoticed, especially by IATSE — the powerful union representing craft, technical staff and crew — which has had an eye on the growth of this new collective.
It is IATSE’s insurance fund that career producers have requested the studios and streamers pay into on their behalf. But in contrast to union plans for actors, writers and directors, the Producers United ask is not for year-round coverage but rather for the time frame that encompasses all production phases. “We believe that all entertainment workers deserve to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace — career producers are no different. IATSE has watched with interest as these workers have organized and begun to advocate for fair treatment,” says Mike Miller, department director of IATSE’s Motion Picture & Television Production.
The next fight to be waged is against “credit proliferation” — which will take more space than the back of a cocktail napkin to explain. What it means, and why it has happened, reads like a manifesto of why the producers are aggrieved and joining forces.
It’s here they face an unpleasant reality: The talent managers, actors and financiers they rely on to get films across the finish line are cutting into their fees. While some actors, such as Warren Beatty and Reese Witherspoon, historically have also been skilled producers, nowadays many receive their credits “way upstream” in deals between their agents and studios, says Producers United.
Yet there’s been something of an actor-producer renaissance in recent years. Wang attributes this, in part, to the fact that sets have not historically been the safest for some talent, so actors have stepped up to maintain integrity for fellow performers. To say nothing of the fact that A-listers have become some of the most-followed people on earth on social platforms, giving them marketing powers beyond the scope of studios. Wall Street also backed the celebrification of the average production company. Look at Candle Media’s 2021 investment in Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine, which brought that shop to an eye-popping $1 billion valuation, or the heated courting of LeBron James’ SpringHill Co., which wound up with an overall deal at Universal.
Producers United is quick to say that there are capable producers who are also actors, but many take credits as trophies — typically brokered by reps or offered up by weary business affairs executives looking to get contracts closed fast — with no intention of doing the work.
“Nowadays, talent comes in as a producer and they’ve got a best friend or a cousin or a spouse that’s running their company. Should I have to share my fee if I’m the only one producing the movie?” says one Producers United member who asked to remain anonymous.
The concept of credit proliferation broke into public awareness in January with the announcement of last year’s Academy Award nominees for best picture — an award that is given to a film’s producers. Five of the 10 nominees had “TBD” in place of names, as eligibility for the prize was still being determined by the Academy and PGA. (Those films were “Emilia Pérez,” “Nickel Boys,” “I’m Still Here,” “The Substance” and “The Brutalist.”)
Cathy Schulman, chair of Producers United, was incredulous. In an op-ed published shortly after the nominations were unveiled, she asked bluntly: “Did five of the films eligible for the top film prize in the world produce themselves? Of course not.” Examples abound in the current awards season. Gus Van Sant’s latest film, “Dead Man’s Wire,” has 93 credited producers, 13 of whom are listed as capital-P Producers.
Having a big star above the title is a large part of the reason why people buy tickets to a movie or decide to watch a show. Megastars like Tom Cruise and Margot Robbie have often wound up producing their own work, but a significant shift arrived with the streamers. Apple, Amazon and Netflix were so desperate to lock up top talent that they became even more liberal with giving actors producer credits to go along with their perks and paydays. The hangover, Producers United argues, is that many performers feel entitled to a producer credit, suggesting their very involvement propels a project forward.
Leadership at Producers United say that all major talent agencies they met with when they started out agreed that negotiating producer credits for star clients is now an industry standard. Some actors aren’t even aware. A 2018 interview with Natalie Portman, on the press tour for Brady Corbet’s “Vox Lux,” saw the actress learn in real time that she was an executive producer on the project. “That’s awesome,” Portman told one outlet. “I guess that’s something my agents added in and I didn’t realize.” [In later years, Portman would go on to form MountainA, which produced “May December” and this year’s “Arco”]
Industry insiders were equally stunned to see Scarlett Johansson reject a producer credit on 2025’s “Thunderbolts” from Marvel Studios. “I asked to have my credit removed because I wasn’t involved,” Johansson revealed this year, disclosing she’d gotten the credit in the first place because of a previous contract.
It may be too late to fundamentally change the status quo. But Producers United has drawn up a checklist of tangible producing duties talent must fulfill if they want the credit — including being present on location during preproduction, sharing budgetary responsibility and even vetting key department heads. Another solution the group is exploring is enlisting wide industry support to return the luster of the “executive producer” credit, which denotes importance to a project’s existence but does not raid the core producer fee.
If the career producer does not have a path to survival, says Producers United, the biggest casualty will be the consumer. Take it from one of the most successful franchise film producers in the medium’s history.
“Career producers are the guardians of narrative integrity and emotional truth,” says Producers United member Broccoli, who just handed custody of the James Bond franchise to Amazon MGM after 11 films. “When the producer’s hand is diminished, quality suffers, and the audience feels this loss.”
