A revealing guide to a career as a film producer written by acclaimed Hothouse author Boris Kachka and based on the real-life experiences of award-winning producers—required reading for anyone considering a path to this profession. At the center of every successful film is a producer. Producers bring films to life by orchestrating the major players—screenwriters, directors, talent, distributors, financiers—to create movie magic. Bestselling author and journalist Boris Kachka shadows award-winning producers Fred Berger and Michael London and emerging producer Siena Oberman as movies are pitched, financed, developed, shot, and released. Fly between Los Angeles and New York, with a stop in Utah at the Sundance Film Festival, for a candid look at this high-stakes profession. Learn how the industry has changed over the decades—from the heyday of studios to the reign of streaming platforms. Gain insight and wisdom from these masters’ years of experience producing films, from the indie darlings Sideways and Milk to Academy Award–winning blockbusters like La La Land . For all aspiring film producers, this is how the job is performed at the highest level. Boris Kachka in the author of Hothouse: The Art of Survival and the Survival of Art at America’s Most Celebrated Publishing House . He is the Books Editor at New York magazine, where he has also been a writer covering books, theater, film, and other cultural industries and personalities for many years. He has also contributed to the New York Times , GQ , Elle , T , and Condé Nast Traveler . He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and son. Chapter 1: Wait, What Does a Producer Do? 1 WAIT, WHAT DOES A PRODUCER DO? Like many film producers, Siena Oberman lives in Los Angeles but works and sleeps wherever she is needed. In early December 2019, that was the vicinity of Gravesend, an old Italian neighborhood in South Brooklyn that was the setting for a low-budget movie she spent months building from scratch, a transgressive—albeit cameo-packed—mob drama titled The Birthday Cake . Tackling her fourth film as a lead producer by age twenty-five, Oberman is definitely an outlier, roughly the same age as the assistants answering her hourly calls to the tax attorneys, movie-star agents, and private equity managers she needs to keep her project afloat. This particular project is a precarious one, a low-budget indie feature held aloft through foreign investment, tax credits, well-connected talent, and the tirelessness of Oberman, the wunderkind without whom none of it would have happened. One blustery day toward the end of the shoot, filming has been going on for a couple of hours by the time Oberman arrives on set—a stolid Italianate house (rented out by the production) on a modest block, distinguishable now by the noisy generator on the winter-brown patch of front lawn. It’s almost 11 a.m. Oberman would have arrived earlier, but she was waylaid by a tense phone call closing the remaining financing. Slight, angular, and shockingly calm—considering the freezing temperature, the thousand stressors, and the caffeine coursing through her—she doesn’t look like the most powerful person on the production. In fact, she is and she isn’t. There’s the talent. Val Kilmer, for example. There’s also Paul Sorvino, who’s been delayed after driving many hours into the city; even if he makes it later in the afternoon, the order of the shoot will have to be rearranged. There’s the writer/producer/actor team who first pitched the project, including rising star Shiloh Fernandez, musician Jimmy Giannopoulos (the film’s director), and filmmaker Raul Bermudez (a writer and producer), who called in enough favors to stud the cast with names that Oberman’s backers feel comfortable with (from Ashley Benson to Ewan McGregor). There are the international financiers—one whose money seems stuck in South America, or maybe the Isle of Man, without which Oberman can’t pay the crew. These financiers are technically producers too; some have creative input, some only bring money or connections to actors. Money is power, and power will get you a producer credit on a movie. But in order to produce a movie in the sense defined in this book, you need to take responsibility. No matter how powerful you are, you need to be in charge. You need to cajole the financiers; fill out the tax-credit forms; remind the first-time feature director to get enough camera angles; scan the past week’s footage for continuity because it snowed; procure money for marketing materials; find a cozy spot in the basement for your financiers so they can watch the shoot on monitors without getting in the way. These are the problems Oberman had this morning , before the Wi-Fi conked out, the fire alarm went off, the actors’ union delivered an ultimatum, a crew member’s temper flared over all the people on his set. When I asked Oberman, toward the end of the day, whether this was the typical way she allocate