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"There's something incredibly anxiety producing about having no sort of road map and just hoping it will kind of emerge as a complete idea."

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"The difference between being on page two and page nothing is life and death."

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"That's the most important part of solving a problem, identifying it."

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"We both decided this was a story we had to tell and I think we would have done anything to make it happen."

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"Two minutes can be huge."

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"People don't have the grace to live their life in a good three act scenario."

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"There was a great burden on me to be as historically accurate as humanly possible."

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Reading today's Guardian extracts from Alastair Campbell's diaries and hearing over breakfast that Colin Firth had won a Golden Globe for playing King George VI I couldn't help thinking that the House of Windsor gets its share of good luck. Actually no; what it mostly gets is good advice from its elected governments and - when all else has failed - mostly takes it.

Campbell's account reinforces - and there is little reason to disbelieve him - the claim that in 1997 Tony Blair cajoled the Queen into showing public and prudent contrition over Princess Diana's death which - let's put it no stronger - she might not have felt at the time.

What is it about Hollywood and British royals that makes the awards panels go weak at the knee - or brain - when they see a well-made British costume drama? Helen Mirren has already won an Oscar for playing Elizabeth II - during the Di crisis - in The Queen. Very good, she was too despite her republican sympathies.

Judi Dench won one for playing the Queen's great namesake in Shakespeare in Love, though Nigel Hawthorne failed in The Madness of King George. Admittedly he was George III, not a US favourite, but it was a lovely film in which Mirren popped up again, this time playing Queen Charlotte. She called him "Mr King" in bed (and they had 18 children).

Fast forward to the sons of George V ("I was afraid of my father and will make sure my children are afraid of me") as portrayed in The King's Speech, which I saw on Saturday night when Mrs White refused to see Danny Boyle's 127 Hours. She has never quite recovered her cinema nerve after being terrified by John Boorman's Deliverance in 1972.

I enjoyed it. It's a nice, intelligent, easy-on-the-eye nostalgic romp to a time in history which didn't quite exist, but it deserves all the starred GCSEs Peter Bradshaw's review gave it. There are scenes that are poignant, funny or both.

There has been some debate about the historical accuracy of David Seidler's script in which the quirky Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), helps modify the Duke of York and future king's stammer, as well as about Tom Hooper's wider direction.

In terms of tone and appearance I'd say the film looked beautiful but behaved as if the Murdoch press had been throwing rocks at the royals for 50 years longer than is the case. The absence of deference, stifling and awful though it must have been, is inherently wrong.

So I would need evidence that therapist and patient were on "Lionel" and "Bertie" terms. And royal dukes, monarchs and their spouses/squeezes did not wander around London in taxis unsupervised or use creaky Harley St lifts alone - any more than they do now except (so it is said) when Di gave her minders a slip.

But that's a quibble, and every age reinvents the past in its own image, which is why Jesus never looks much like Woody Allen in the stained glass windows. My complaint is with the politics. Why do two chaps striving for accuracy - and often achieving it - take such pointless liberties for the sake of simplification?

Winston Churchill is the crucial figure here. As you may have read you will get no hint from the movie that Churchill - the only British politician of the period whom most audiences remember - did himself immense political harm by backing Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson against Stanley Baldwin's government's insistence that they could not marry and retain the throne.

Baldwin was right, as he usually was in his tussles with Churchill in the 20s and 30s - think the General Strike of 1926, think the Indian independence question - but even on the one where he was wrong the facts are pointlessly distorted so that he is presented as conceding that "Churchill was right" as early as 1937 when he hands over to Neville Chamberlain.

It's not only wrong, it's silly, though it happens all the time. Watching Casablanca (again) over Christmas for a visitor who hadn't seen it I noticed in that brilliant script a previously unspotted flaw: Captain Renault reminding his tiresome German colleague not to underestimate the Americans. "I was with them when they marched into Berlin in 1918."

Oh no, they didn't. It would have been better if they had done. Just so with the Baldwin/Chamberlain appeasement policy. If they'd recognised they'd got it wrong in 1937, who knows? No war and no need for that crucial King's Speech either? Churchill's folly over the abdication in 1936 helped mainstream Britain ignore his warnings against Hitler until he was virtually in the Old Kent Road. It would have been more interesting to be told.

This bit matters because it has a bearing on the Duke and Duchess (Helena Bonham Carter) of York - unexpectedly King and Queen - we are invited to believe in. Alas, as with Churchill, they weren't that good.

Harold Nicholson, the diplomat, MP and diarist, recorded that the duke was sporting (golf), decent and conscientious, but "just a snipe from the great Windsor marshes". The distinguished art critic, Kenneth (father of Alan) Clark, said of the new queen: "She is not much better than the kind of person one meets at country houses, and the king somewhat worse." The label "reactionary" was tied to her then - and stuck until she died in 2002.

Gosh. What satisfaction these two very superior highbrows must have felt writing such condescending sentences about the royal family!

It gets worse: "Thick" was the contemporary verdict at Dartmouth Royal Naval College. Bertie - later George - lacked the flashy, shallow, fast-taking charm of his older brother, the Prince of Wales, too.

How well suited to our own irresponsible, celeb era Edward VIII would have been though the tabloids would have been stretched explaining away his weakness for Hitler - even greater than their own in some cases. Edward was dangerous because he was also vain and proactive.

But Bertie isn't in the clear there either. As voters in the Oscar awards (can't think why) have reportedly been reminding via anonymous letters this past week, he opposed admission of Jewish refugees and had his secretary write to the foreign secretary about it. Plenty felt the same. They did not yet know what was coming.

Far from being a Churchillian, the king didn't like him. Why should he after the abdication fiasco? Even in 1940 he would have preferred Halifax as PM. Mistrust with the palace was mutual. They had all known each other for decades and, according to Andrew Roberts's book, Eminent Churchillians, Churchill thought George V pretty stupid too.

George VI backed Chamberlain to the point of breaking with protocol and allowing his prime minister to appear with him on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after Munich, having been persuaded not to go and meet him at Heston airport. In the film the scene of waving crowds in the Mall is transposed to September 1939 - hardly likely with German air raids already underway.

Does it matter when we watch a feelgood film? Not a lot, though, regardless of its intention, the film's impact is very royalist. That's not something I have much trouble with, taking the view that it saves a lot of time and trouble having an hereditary presidency instead of having to elect one.

The costs are modest - though the coalition has slyly got away with raising their money during the cuts - and the drama is often good fun, a royal soap indeed. Did you read this weekend that the traditional W & C monogram on the souvenir wedding plates is having to be reversed for reasons I don't have to explain even to my slowest critic here? Magic.

In any case, the core of the story told in The King's Speech is correct. Bullied, lacking confidence Bertie Windsor grew up under the shadow of dad and charismatic, selfish big brother with a sense of duty. Apparently he got out of sick bay in order to be at his post at the Battle of Jutland (1916) - where he might just have got killed.

He did have a stammer. He didn't want the job. He did stay in London during the Blitz, though the family often slipped off to Windsor at night. He did do his duty and, what with the strain and smoking, it carried him off at 56. She lived on another merry gin-enhanced 50 years, a powerful royal brand.

Not a bad human story though Colin Firth simply can't help being a much more commanding presence. The Golden Globe, he said in his acceptance speech, has staved off his mid-life crisis, what stands between Firth and a Harley Davidson. But I don't think the king would have said it.
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The King's Speech: Looking back to a time that didn't quite exist |Michael White

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Reading today's Guardian extracts from Alastair Campbell's diaries and hearing over breakfast that Colin Firth had won a Golden Globe for playing King George VI I couldn't help thinking that the House of Windsor gets its share of good luck.

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"If your own moral compass is broken there is the Sony legal department to help you out."

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"As a storyteller you're always looking for a problem to give to your character that the audience doesn't see a clear, easy solution.

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"In retrospect that was the biggest gift of it all, that we had all that time to reflect."

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A movie is made up of a thousand details. Take, for example, the "numb tongue" story in the coming comedy-drama, "The Kids Are All Right."

The story comes from co-writer and director Lisa Cholodenko's own mouth. "In my 20s," she says, "I had some weird episode, this weird stress reaction. I was going through some stressful stuff, and I lost feeling in my face, and in my tongue. So I went to a doctor. He said he didn't think I had MS or a brain tumor. He said, 'I think you're just stressed out.'"

A couple of decades passed, and there was Cholodenko, at her computer, revising her latest screenplay for the umpteenth time. "And I thought, well, the numb-tongue story ... that's a neurotic story, and one of the characters I'm writing is sort of neurotic. So I used it. I wove it into the story of how this couple met."

But later somebody, somewhere, told Cholodenko that the story - fictionalized as the instigation for a meeting between a doctor and a patient, lesbians and soon-to-be-lovers - was too much. Too gamey? Too lesbianic? Too something. She and co-writer Stuart Blumberg cut it from their screenplay.

By this time Cholodenko was searching for financing, inching closer. Annette Bening and Julianne Moore had become attached to the project. Bening, Cholodenko says, was a dramaturgical fiend, asking all the right questions. During one script meeting, the actress urged her to reinstate the numb-tongue story. She liked it; it humanized her character, the sternest of the lot, and warmed her up. The tongue went back in. The film got made.

At its Sundance Film Festival world premiere, the waves of love started crashing in around Cholodenko and company. "The Kids Are All Right" charmed audiences, utterly. Focus Features paid nearly $5 million for it. And in a summer when descriptors such as "beguiling" and "moving" and "funny" haven't been used much, Cholodenko's third theatrical feature may turn out to be the seasonal highlight. And maybe the American film of 2010.

The story is all there in the film's trailers and coming attractions; what's less apparent from those snippets is the way Cholodenko blends humor and pathos and sends the audiences out on a satisfying high, having spent time with some rich and complicated characters. In Los Angeles, Nic (Bening), a doctor, lives with her longtime partner, Jules (Moore), who is starting a landscape design business. Privately, their teenage children, played by Mia Wasikowska ( "Alice in Wonderland") and Josh Hutcherson ("Journey to the Center of the Earth") contact their sperm-donor father, portrayed as an amiable, aging satyr by Mark Ruffalo.

What follows has the ring of melodrama - infidelity, betrayal, lies, secrets - but as in Cholodenko's previous theatrical features, "High Art" (1998) and "Laurel Canyon" (2002), the characters emerge as dimensional and honest.

"We really wanted to get this family right," co-writer Blumberg says. "We wanted a family that was wonderful and flawed and compelling, and that you really wanted to survive."

Actress Moore, a big fan of "High Art" ( Ally Sheedy and Radha Mitchell, falling together slowly in the drug-addled margins of the New York art world) and " Laurel Canyon" (an evocative slice of LA music-business denizens and their relations, starring Frances McDormand, Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale), read the "Kids" script several years ago and committed to it in a heartbeat.

Cholodenko, she says, "is interested in the ways people communicate and the nuances of behavior. Her movies are more about who we are, and how we fall in love with each other and who we choose to be with, than they are plot-oriented." All the same: With luck and some shrewd marketing, "The Kids Are All Right" has a chance to find a wide audience by indie standards.

Earlier this month Cholodenko conversed with a diverse audience - gay, straight, older, younger - after a promotional "Kids Are All Right" screening at the downtown AMC River East. (I was there to ask a few questions.) Cholodenko, both self-deprecating and sharp-witted about the challenge of getting the movie financed, brought out the audience's warmest, most protective instincts. "Just be proud of what you accomplished!" one woman said near the end of the discussion, beaming. Cholodenko smiled back.

"Wasn't that sweet?" Cholodenko said the next morning over coffee. "That's what I like about the Midwest. The people are just more available and straightforward, in a good way. That's a crass generalization, but when you blow in and out of town. ..."

She grew up in the Valley, one of three LA girls born to an elementary school principal mother and a graphic designer father. Cholodenko came out at age 16.

"It was fraught," she says, "because I was young. I had a girlfriend in 11th grade. It was a great love affair, but I was private about it, so that was difficult. But I had pretty cool parents. Still do. There was some hand-wringing, some difficult feelings. But my mom kind of outed me: 'I know you're in love with so-and-so; do you want to go see a therapist?' Not like: 'Go see a therapist so that you can change,' but more like: 'We care about you. And I can see that it's not easy.'"

Nine years ago, not long after relocating from New York to LA, Cholodenko connected with her current partner, composer and musician Wendy Melvoin, known fondly to Prince fans as one-half of Wendy & Lisa. Both Cholodenko and Melvoin are 46. By sperm donor, Cholodenko gave birth four years ago to a son, Calder.

"It's the same deal as the movie," she says, laughing. "We had an anonymous donor, and I believe and I hope he'll be available to meet my kid when he turns 18." The man they chose, she says, "went out of his way to say he was 'even-keeled.' Which we liked. Wendy and I are both kind of high-voltage, uber-sensitive people, and we felt that if we threw one more neurotic element into the mix. ..." She laughs. She's trying, she says, to raise a "solid citizen."

Early drafts of "The Kids Are All Right," begun in 2004, featured a third act in which the family embarked on a river-rafting trip together. "That," Blumberg says, "was when we thought we might be getting a $13 million budget." She acknowledges her frustrations about how long it took to raise money for an extremely economical project - one that was shot in just three weeks.

A revised version of the script nearly got the green light in 2006. Then Cholodenko got pregnant and tabled the movie project for a while. Eventually, from three major investors including the French distributor UGC, she secured about $5 million, most of which went for the shoot, the rest for postproduction. "Indie films always take forever to finance, but particularly now," Moore observes.

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Lisa Cholodenko interview: The woman behind 'The Kids Are All Right'

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A movie is made up of a thousand details. Take, for example, the "numb tongue" story in the coming comedy-drama, "The Kids Are All Right." The story comes from co-writer and director Lisa Cholodenko's own mouth. "In my 20s," she says, "I had some weird episode, this weird stress reaction.

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"I came to Hollywood at 40, an age where any writer with any sense is thinking of leaving town."

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"What grabbed me was set against this very modern backdrop was a story that was as old as story telling itself."

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Movie Review | 'The Social Network'

Jesse Eisenberg in "The Social Network." Credit... Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

The Social Network

NYT Critic's Pick

Directed by David Fincher

Biography, Drama

PG-13

2 hours

What makes Mark Zuckerberg run? In "The Social Network," David Fincher's fleet, weirdly funny, exhilarating, alarming and fictionalized look at the man behind the social-media phenomenon Facebook - 500 million active users, oops, friends, and counting - Mark runs and he runs, sometimes in flip-flops and a hoodie, across Harvard Yard and straight at his first billion. Quick as a rabbit, sly as a fox, he is the geek who would be king or just Bill Gates. He's also the smartest guy in the room, and don't you forget it.

The first time you see Mark (Jesse Eisenberg, firing on all cylinders), he's 19 and wearing a hoodie stamped with the word Gap, as in the clothing giant, but, you know, also not. Eyes darting, he is yammering at his girlfriend, Erica (Rooney Mara), whose backhand has grown weary. As they swat the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's words at each other, the two partners quickly shift from offline friends to foes, a foreshadowing of the emotional storms to come. Soon Mark is back in his dorm, pounding on his keyboard and inadvertently sowing the seeds of Facebook, first by blogging about Erica and then by taking his anger out on the rest of Harvard's women, whose photos he downloads for cruel public sport: is she hot or not.

("The Social Network" opens the 48th New York Film Festival on Friday and opens in theaters next Friday.)

Although the names have remained the same, "The Social Network" is less of a biopic of the real Mr. Zuckerberg than a gloss on the boot-up, log-on, plug-in generation. You don't learn much about him other than the headlines, beginning with Facebook's less-than-humble start in 2003. Despite its insistently unsexy moving parts (software, algorithms), the movie is paced like a thriller, if one in which ideas, words and bank books blow up rather than cars. It's a resonant contemporary story about the new power elite and an older, familiar narrative of ambition, except instead of discovering his authentic self, Mark builds a database, turning his life - and ours - into zeroes and ones, which is what makes it also a story about the human soul.

The price of that ambition, at least as dramatized here, is borne by those around Mark, who remains a strategic cipher throughout: a Facebook page without a profile photo. Charmless and awkward in groups larger than one, he rarely breaks into a smile and, if memory serves, never says thank you. He seems wary at some moments, coolly calculating at others: when his eyes haven't gone dead, you can see him working all the angles. One of those angles, according to Mr. Sorkin's script, which follows the outline of "The Accidental Billionaires," Ben Mezrich's book about Facebook, was one of the site's co-founders, Eduardo Saverin (a very good Andrew Garfield), a fellow student of Mark's as well as his first big check writer and personal chump.

Eduardo strides in early, his collar turned up against the Cambridge winter, and quickly moves in on our sympathies, which Mr. Eisenberg, guided by his supremely confident director, never does. Mr. Garfield can sometimes wilt on screen as if in surrender, but here his character merely sways, held up by an essential decency that makes Eduardo so appealing and such a contrast to the sometimes appalling Mark. (When Mr. Eisenberg makes Mark's face go blank, the character seems scarily emptied out: it's a subtly great, at times unsettling, performance.) Mark might be the brains in this unlikely friendship, but Eduardo is its conscience and slowly bleeding heart. Though he knows better, he hangs on even after he's been cut loose.

The plot thickens after Erica dumps Mark, and he meets a pair of near-comically-perfect supermen, the identical twins and future Olympic rowers Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. (An amusing Armie Hammer plays both brothers with wit and the aid of different hairstyles, special effects and a body double.) The Winklevosses emerge as unlikely objects of Mark's interest and, much like Erica, his eventual contempt. The twins and their friend Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), have a Web site idea and need Mark's programming help. They'll pay (and how!), but the gig, they grandly explain, will also rehabilitate Mark's reputation on campus after the hot/not scandal, a patronizing moment that echoes Mark's breakup with Erica. "You'd do that for me?" he asks the twins flatly, recycling a line Erica once used on him.

The conspicuous paradox that "The Social Network" plays with is that the world's most popular social networking Web site was created by a man with excruciatingly, almost pathologically poor, people skills. The benign view of Facebook is that it creates "a community," a sense of intimacy, which is of course one reason it also creeps out some of its critics. As the virtual-reality visionary Jaron Lanier puts it bluntly in his manifesto "You Are Not a Gadget," Facebook also reduces life to a database. In "The Social Network," a character lashes out at both Mark and "the angry" who haunt the Internet, but Mr. Lanier takes the view that it's fear that drives the idolizers of what he calls the "new strain of gadget fetishism."

Beyond the obvious (money, sex, fame) it's hard to know what truly pushes Mark, whose personality emerges in furtive smiles, gushes of words and painful pauses. Eventually everyone does pay: the Winklevosses, Eduardo, even Mark. The filmmakers have their ideas about who did what to whom, but they don't try to fill in all the blanks or, worse, soften Mark's edges with a Psych 101 back story. You see what turns him on: software, revenge and, in several lightly comic and darkly foreboding scenes, Sean Parker, the flamboyant co-creator of Napster, who's played by Justin Timberlake as a jittery seducer. Sean oozes into Mark's life for a piece of the action and instantly dazzles the younger man with his bad-boy ways (coke and Champagne for everyone!), sexy dates and big, brash talk of riches.

Shooting in digital and working with the cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, Mr. Fincher turns down the lights and tamps down his visual style, deploying fewer special-effects sleights of hand than he did in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," with its wizened and baby Brad Pitt, while also maintaining the familiar Fincher atmosphere of dread. Harvard has rarely been represented to such dolorous effect as in "The Social Network," where even the colors seem leached of joy. A restrained, somber palette and the shallow depth of field express the limits of Mark's world, while the rapid, seamless cutting among different times and spaces - scenes of him creating Facebook are woven together with scenes of him in separate depositions - evokes the speed of his success, giving the narrative terrific momentum.

Mr. Fincher pointedly abandons his smudged browns for a gauzily lighted sequence of the twins rowing at a tony British club that, with the edges of the image blurred and movements slowed, looks like a dream. This is a world of rarefied privilege in which men still wear straw boaters, and royalty blathers within earshot. Mark isn't invited, not because he's poor (he isn't), but because this is a closed, self-reproducing system built on exclusivity and other entitlements, including privacy. (The movie refers to Mark's being Jewish, and the twins look as if they crewed for the Hitler Youth, but that's just part of the mix.) Mark doesn't breach this citadel, he sidesteps it entirely by becoming one of the new information elite for whom data is power and who, depending on your view of the Internet, rallies the online mob behind him.

"The Social Network" takes place in the recognizable here and now, though there are moments when it has the flavor of science fiction (it would make a nice double bill with "The Matrix") even as it evokes 19th-century narratives of ambition. ("To be young, to have a thirst for society, to be hungry for a woman," Balzac writes in "Le Père Goriot.") The movie opens with a couple in a crowded college bar and ends with a man alone in a room repeatedly hitting refresh on his laptop. In between, Mr. Fincher and Mr. Sorkin offer up a creation story for the digital age and something of a morality tale, one driven by desire, marked by triumph, tainted by betrayal and inspired by the new gospel: the geek shall inherit the earth.
"The Social Network" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). The usual college high jinks, drugs, drinking and semi-naked women. THE SOCIAL NETWORK The film, to be shown on Friday on the opening night of the 48th New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, opens nationally next Friday.

Directed by David Fincher; written by Aaron Sorkin, based on the book "The Accidental Billionaires," by Ben Mezrich; director of photography, Jeff Cronenweth; edited by Angus Wall and Kirk Baxter; music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; costumes by Jacqueline West; produced by Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael De Luca and Cean Chaffin; released by Columbia Pictures. At 6 and 9 p.m. at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center. Running time: 2 hours.

WITH: Jesse Eisenberg (Mark Zuckerberg), Andrew Garfield (Eduardo Saverin), Justin Timberlake (Sean Parker), Armie Hammer (Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss), Max Minghella (Divya Narendra), Josh Pence (Tyler Winklevoss), Rooney Mara (Erica Albright), Brenda Song (Christy), Rashida Jones (Marylin Delpy), John Getz (Sy), David Selby (Gage), Denise Grayson (Gretchen), Douglas Urbanski (Larry Summers), Aaron Sorkin (Ad Executive) and James Shanklin (Prince Albert).

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Millions of Friends, but Not Very Popular

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Movie Review | 'The Social Network' The Social Network NYT Critic's Pick Directed by David Fincher Biography, Drama PG-13 2 hours What makes Mark Zuckerberg run?

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"Every film has it's own life."

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"You are ultimately the adult in the room in a wonderful fantasy world that is a movie set."

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Of all the jobs in film that we've covered so far, there's one in particular that seems to cause a lot of confusion. Namely, we're talking about film producers.
And it's not hard to see why the job title causes so much confusion. Such is vagueness of the term 'producer' that we've even met film producers who have struggled themselves to describe the job in a few concise sentences.

So as much as trying to define the term 'film producer' is akin to successfully nailing jelly to a wall, today we're going to do just that and definitively explore:

From the off, we can state that a producer wears many different hats during the course of a movie's completion (and it's for that reason that it's tricky to sum up in just a few words.) That said, there are two hugely essential parts of the process that the producer nearly always takes sole care of:

Development: Long before pre-production can start, there naturally needs to be something to produce! It's up to the producer to find and discover a story worth committing to celluloid- a property that they own -whether it comes in the form of an original screenplay, a novel that's ripe for adaptation, or even the life story or personal tale from an interesting subject.

Of course, it's not as easy as just reading a book, thinking "that'd make a good film," then assembling the crew. A producer must initiate and enter into negotiations with whoever's responsible for the source material, with the ultimate aim being to acquire the rights on their terms.

Financing: Once the film rights have been bought, the monetary fun doesn't stop there. Producers are the ones who pitch the movie to studios (or their employer) in the hopes of securing financing, and thereafter managing said finances throughout the life of the production to make sure everything is delivered on time and on budget.

Even once the movie is in the can, the financing duties still aren't over. Distribution of the final product also needs to be sorted out, and that's squarely in the remit of the producer.

So A Producer Handles the Cash, Basically?

Not quite! It's a large part of the job of being a film producer, but depending on personal style, he or she may get personally involved with a number of tasks.

The hiring of the director and screenwriting staff is nearly always handled by the producer, but from here things depart from the conventional. Depending on the scale of the project, the producer may wish to get involved with hand-selecting any or all members of team.

Sometimes, however, that is left in the care of the director. On multi-million dollar productions, practicality may dictate that a hierarchy of producers are required that the executive producer can delegate to. From top to bottom, the chain of command runs:

Executive Producer

Co-executive Producer

Line Producer

Supervising Producer

Producer

Co-producer

Coordinating Producer

Consulting Producer

Associate Producer

Segment Producer

Field Producer

Edit Producer

Post Producer

How much the executive producer passes down the chain varies from movie to movie, but to make matters more complicated, the individual producer titles listed above also come with separate duties-for instance, a coordinating producer will organize scheduling and the division of labor, while a supervising producer may have a big hand in script rewrites and the edit producer will oversee post-production.

So Production Staff are Like Management?

It's not quite as simple as that. While producers generally have the final say on anything they decide to get involved in, more often than not a good producer will hire professionals that can do their respective jobs without supervision so that they can focus on the bigger picture.
But as we all know, the creation process behind filmmaking is a very fluid one and subject to change at any given moment. Sometimes, you've got to put the finance book down, roll your sleeves up, and get your hands dirty.

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Of all the jobs in film that we've covered so far, there's one in particular that seems to cause a lot of confusion. Namely, we're talking about film producers. And it's not hard to see why the job title causes so much confusion.

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"He found an entry point into the material that really mattered to him."

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"What moves you is something you relate to."

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"This country has always been a studio system, where as in Europe it has always been independent film makers and never a studio system."

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"Isn't it annoying? They pop out of the woodwork and tell you what you got wrong."

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Michael Lewis's book-turned-movie made a legend out of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane. But does his record match the hype?

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"We always have a finite amount of money."