Some are symbolic indignities that have eroded the position of producer, and others are financial.
They make their case to Deadline, and they are persuasive.
Much of their motivation is for the next generation of producers.
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Click to see theentire list of producerswho will be pressing the case.
It has become difficult for veterans to make a living, they said.
Except the Career Producers who often are the catalysts for getting projects going in the first place.
Gestation of films and TV projects through development can stretch nine months or nine years.
The small sum paid is applied against an eventual fee that does not kick in until start of production.
Nowadays, producer fees have been increasingly capped, which makes the pot of gold elusive.
Business affairs executives dont ask the guild-repped writers, directors and others to cut fees.
Those added elements often are there to serve as advocates for stars and come aboard to protect their interests.
Producers Unitedis comprised of a group that call themselves Career Producers.
A few mentioned theRusttragedy where it seemed no one stepped in while missteps that led to tragedy were happening.
The Career Producers are often asked to cut their own fees to facilitate those additions.
They want those costs to be paid by the studios.
That money would be paid in equal advances of up to 10% of a Career Producers total fee.
In television, it would be an amount equal to the pool of non-writing EP fees for one episode.
Those funds will go against the eventual fee paid right before productions begin.
Were talking about basic American rights here.
You have a right to work and get paid for it, and you should have healthcare.
This is not bone breaking from a monetary point of view.
But its a huge step for the emerging producers.
It is hard to get anything in Hollywood without leverage particularly in a period of contraction.
Producers started out in Hollywood with guild protection.
Producers United is not looking to align with a labor union.
Systematically the business has changed so radically, that there has become a real degradation, he said.
Ive been fortunate to have an overhead deal, but studios have slashed the majority of those deals.
Those deals have primarily gone away.
Because, how many movies can you make over a period of time?
It can take years and years and years to make one indie or studio movie.
So everyone else is getting paid but not the producer, and that can go on for years.
Lastly, first dollar gross is now gone and backend language has been pushed so far back.
Those backends have become so diminished.
Throw in Covid, the strikes and you have fewer movies now, and bankruptcies at theater chains.
So now you have a really small percentage of hitting your backend.
So they have given out a lot of credits.
for compensate people for not compensating them.
Theyll say, ok youre a producer.
Over time it has led credit proliferation.
That led to the decoupling of the word from the work and the services provided, he said.
Theres no place where its written down, what that credit is intended to be given for.
So it gets bartered, frankly, because its free to give it away.
And the problem became, well, whos paying for that?
But we didnt hand out that credit in the first place.
So why arent they paying for it if theyre going to do that?
Misher believes thats why the establishment of the Career Producer title is important.
How do you define what the producer is?
And then theres always a bank that you have to manage.
Theres nuance to that.
Its not like a screenwriter who writes a screenplay, or an editor or a cinematographer.
You know what their jobs are.
This is why the producer has gotten to this place.
But if you had to distill it, we are responsible.
Were the people entrusted to manage the creative, and be responsible to the financials.
They hope the employers take that into account.
That is a personal guarantee, financially for all the residuals.
Just as importantly, the director and all the artisans and actors involved put themselves in our hands creatively.
I know the path for them would be more viable specifically with two of the issues here.
So I really want this for the people that are 10, 15 years behind us.
That could be from talent management to budget and everything in between.
That eroded in part because of the corporatization of…lets call it the buyer.
They do not see as much advantage in producers as we saw back in the day.
When it comes to really hard decisions, the studios have retreated.
Ill pick our dear friend, Paula Weinstein who passed away recently.
And we knew that she would alert us if there was a problem.
And I think thats where producers really protect studio executives.
We can see the problem living on the set, or wherever we are.
My personal point of view is I got 24 hours to solve a big problem.
If I cant figure it out by then, its time to bring the studio in.
That was the process.
Tendo Nagenda served in top exec posts at Disney and then Netflix, before branching into the producing game.
But ultimately the allowance of this as a profession to continue should also work in the studio favor.
This is an advance against something we hope theyre excited to pay for.
Even in total failure, Nagenda said.
Im going to use a hypothetical.
Lets pretend a producers fee is a million dollars and a top-end writers fee is a million.
The writer got a million dollars, whether that movie got made or not.
What were suggesting is the producer is going to get 10%, whether it gets made or not.
Its a big difference, and we have probably worked on it longer than that.
Im not saying worked harder, Im just saying longer.
So were not asking anywhere near what they have.
The benefits might be more profound in the indie space.
Hollywood has an originality problem, he said.
Those producers are disappearing.
Especially there, where producers are asked to cut already small fees or defer them.
That is very much the norm.
The idea that on top of that these people dont have healthcare, is deeply problematic.
Many within this group started in the independent space and then moved into the studio space.
