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“The Streamers Have Eaten All the Bananas”: Behind Her Lens: Producers at the 27th SCAD Savannah Film Festival
Behind Her Lens: Producers Panel during the 27th SCAD Savannah Film Festival. (Photo by Derek White/Getty Images for SCAD) The 27th edition of the SCAD Savannah Film Festival boasted a number of unexpected bonuses this year. First there was the eclectic,“Hollywood meets indie” mashup guest list to accompany the stellar program (much of which had recently premiered at the top tier fests). Actors in town to pick up awards at the sold out screenings included Amy Adams, Pamela Anderson, Kieran Culkin, Colman Domingo, Natasha Lyonne, Demi Moore, Lupita Nyong’o and Sebastian Stan among others; while the producers and directors attending to nab honoraries ran the gamut from Jerry Bruckheimer, Kevin Costner and Jason Reitman, to Richard Linklater, RaMell Ross, Pablo Larraín, and Sir Steve McQueen. (Though admittedly, I wasn’t really starstruck until I spotted James Carville, in town for Matt Tyrnauer’s Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid, in the lobby of the Drayton Hotel on Halloween. Naturally costumed as James Carville, complete with striped shirt and running shoes.)
That said, it was the Behind Her Lens: Producers panel at the lovely Gutstein Gallery, perennially one of the highlights of the “largest university-run film festival in the world,” that far exceeded my expectations, particularly for providing a no holds barred assessment of the industry today. Moderated as always by SAGindie executive director Darrien Gipson (who may as well teach a course titled “The Art of Moderating Panels”), the participants included Joanna Calo (The Bear), Carla Hacken (Hell or High Water, Mr. Harrigan’s Phone), Laura Lewis (Mr. Malcolm’s List, Tell Me Lies), Alison Owen (Back to Black, Ghosts, Elizabeth), Heather Rae (Fancy Dance, Frozen River) and Daisy Ridley (Young Woman and the Sea, Magpie, Sometimes I Think About Dying).
First to address the turbulence in the business, Lewis launched the discussion by noting that Mr. Malcolm’s List was sold in 2019 with no elements attached. A producer certainly would need many more pieces in place now. Ridley, however, had a much easier time with this year’s Young Woman and the Sea, seeing how producer Jerry Bruckheimer was a tenacious force behind the project, even pushing hard for a limited theatrical release prior to streaming. Gipson then stressed to the audience, filled to capacity mostly with eager young SCAD students, that a producer needs “50-100 successes” before getting to the Oscar — and that just getting someone to look at your project is a “success.”
The moderator soon turned to Hacken to ask about making mid-budget movies. To which the Hell or High Water producer responded that she’d always just followed her tastes. The moment the studios turned away from green-lighting her type of film was when she decided to go independent. Mid-range now either has to be made for less or justify higher costs, she pointed out. Calo, as a writer-producer, added that she always works from the perspective of, “What needs to happen in order to produce this scene?” She noted that with both streaming and theatrical projects, “no one is making decisions on purpose.” Hacken then posited that it’s just as hard to make a streaming movie as one positioned for theatrical. Gipson emphatically agreed, and lamented that once upon a time “movies decided the budget, but now it’s the budget that decides the movie.”
Rae, long focused on bringing Native stories to the screen, admitted that her latest project Fancy Dance had faced numerous challenges on the road to distribution. The path is forever hard for underrepresented voices. Though there was a brief period of time — “post-Standing Rock, after George Floyd” — that created a “window of space.” “But those windows come in waves,” she reflected. Films that are “perceived as non-commercial” are always difficult to sell. To which Hacken added that the door for women has likewise been swiftly closing. Post-MeToo ever more men are nabbing the powerful jobs once again. Gipson wisely cautioned that, “Nothing is real until it hits the screen.”
Turning to Alison Owen, and her plethora of projects in development, the moderator was eager to know both how and why she juggled so many movies and TV shows. The veteran English producer (and SCAD Film Festival advisory board member) responded that in terms of film, her passion for a project, and seeing a path to making it, are her only requirements for signing on. But, she admitted, this doesn’t quite work for TV, another necessity to keep her company running. When it comes to shows she instead focuses on the latter requirement — and hires others who are head over heels for the work or the genre itself. “The streamers have eaten the business,” she sighed in frustration before surprisingly comparing her job as a producer to a banana hawker. It used to be she knew who bought what and how many they needed. Now she has absolutely no idea how decisions get made at opaque behemoths like Amazon or Netflix. “The streamers have eaten all the bananas.”
Gipson then invited Lewis to discuss Producers United, putting the conversation on track to end on a more hopeful, if not entirely happy, note. Lewis emphasized that the days of backend and overhead deals are over, a reality that prompted her and several colleagues to band together on a grand mission to make producing a sustainable career. Their two motivations were, “get paid for your work” and “get healthcare.” And since producers are the only industry players that don’t have a union, Producers United would be there to fight as a collective.
Hacken then bemoaned that lay people just don’t understand that when a film wraps, it’s not the end for the producer. (Ridley recounted actually bursting into tears after a wrap party, daunted by the prospect of the amount of work yet to come.) Calo lamented that writers often try to use a story producer credit simply as a way to get on set. Rae posited that there is this underlying structural tension, causing creatives to reach to producing in order to gain power, because the business is so unregulated. She argued that folks producing just to leverage a production credit is harmful to the industry at large. And that “protecting the degradation of the credit” is why joining forces to form organizations like Producers United is so crucial right now. After all, a race to the bottom is one that no artist wants to win.
Photo credit: (L-R) Darrien Gipson, Joanna Calo, Daisy Ridley, Alison Owen, Heather Rae, Carla Hacken and Laura Lewis speak onstage at the Behind Her Lens: Producers Panel during the 27th SCAD Savannah Film Festiva on October 28, 2024 in Savannah, Georgia. (Photo by Derek White/Getty Images for SCAD)
