EXCLUSIVE: Positioned just before the final voting begins for Best Picture, The Producers Guild of America Awards have long been an important indicator of what’s to come. Aside from evaluating who is eligible to accept the top Oscar, the PGA navigates industry turbulence on behalf of those producers who are the catalysts for films and TV shows. PGA Presidents Stephanie Allain and Donald DeLine, and CEO Susan Sprung discuss strides made by the PGA over the past year, and the goals ahead.
DEADLINE: PGA Awards are tomorrow night. What accomplishments are you sparked about?
SUSAN SPRUNG: Last year, our big announcement was our healthcare initiative and we spent that year inviting production companies to sign on to the initiative and saw the benefits of producers being covered for healthcare during shooting. We have over 30 companies, big companies that have signed on, and the idea is just to really normalize the notion that producers should be covered while making movies. I think it’s working. We’re encouraging people to put a line item on their budgets for any producer who is working full time, who is not covered by a union, a spouse or any other kind of healthcare plan. And we haven’t gotten much pushback. I think people are saying yes. That was one of the big achievements of this past year.
When it was determined that we couldn’t be a collective bargaining agreement in 1985, what the PGA got from the studios at the time was NPI [National Provider Identifier] insurance. But NPI insurance only covers for producing titles and it only covers projects in which you are an AMPTP signatory. The idea behind our healthcare initiative was to expand that to make sure every producer working full-time on a project — while they’re working full time — receives health insurance. And so you can satisfy that one of three ways. We’d love for everybody to get MPI insurance, but for folks who are ineligible, we ask that companies either put them on their own health insurance, which some of the companies we’ve spoken to do, and/or contribute a minimum of $3 and 33 cents an hour towards that producer’s health insurance. And on really, one of the first productions that did this was one of Stephanie’s movies. It’s Woman in the Yard, a Blumhouse film, and it comes out through Universal on March 25. What else did we do, guys?
STEPHANIE ALLAIN: The other huge thing that we did since last awards, we just finished a revision to our code of credits. We’re a nonprofit trade organization and about two years ago we did a restructure of the organization and drafted a new code of credits. We recognized in the Guild 32 unique credits across 12 different formats or silos, if you will. So for example, we have a lot of live event producers. When we were redrafting those credits, the person that’s producing the Grammy awards for instance came in and consulted with us and helped guide us for specifically what those producing roles should look like. We do an annual revision to our producers mark process. And when we finish that, we launched the producing as a job campaign, which I hope you’re aware of. And it is just about trying to address those who find the title of producer confusing. So we’re trying to educate the world on the fact that one producing is a job and exactly what that job is.
DEADLINE: I’ve written much in the past year about Producers United, an upstart group of producers who’ve also engaged studios in the name of improving pay and benefits for career producers. Are you or will you become allied with them?
DONALD DE LINE: By the way, many of those folks are also members of the PGA. They’re not mutually exclusive. So as I understand it, and you’ll have to talk to them, they are negotiating fees. The guild’s history is that we were sued and there was a court case and a resolution that said we are not permitted to be a collective bargaining agreement because we represent both supervisors and below the line folks. We’re not a union.
SPRUNG: We support any organization that can negotiate fees, because we ourselves cannot.
DE LINE: Rising tide lifts all boats, right? So we’re all for it. Those are all our friends and colleagues for many years, and it’s very supportive and collegial.
DEADLINE: They also said that studio brass has been sympathetic, maybe because all these people are former or future producers when they leave the executive suites. But why not align with a guild like Teamsters, which can negotiate financials?
ALLAIN: There are subsets of our members that have already done that. UPMs fall under the DGA; there are different groups that have dual membership. The tricky piece is, and there’s a whole legal history here, is the piece about supervisors and the fact that supervisors can’t unionize with the protection of the NLRB. So studios don’t have an obligation to talk to you.
DEADLINE: I’m sure numerous PGA members lost homes in the recent wildfires. How is PGA helping them? How many are there?
DE LINE: We don’t have statistics yet on the people, but we have started a fire fund with the Entertainment Community Fund, the umbrella that’s handling and administering it. But we already have raised money for this.
SPRUNG: We have over $442,000 committed to the fund. The weekend that the fires broke out, we had an emergency executive committee meeting. And what was decided was that we would allocate a percentage of the proceeds of the revenue from the PGA Awards, and reach out to members for anyone who could help. We worked through the Entertainment Community Fund, which is doing this free of any administrative fee. They’re handling all of the administration of money available to any member that has either lost their home or is displaced long term.
DE LINE: We are making this help easily and readily available. This is not a bureaucratic quagmire or a FEMA-like situation. We want our members to be able to access this that are in need. We have a couple of board members who lost their houses, and what they’ve been saying is, what can I do to be of service? I think it goes somewhat to who producers are, which is they look at a challenge and say, how am I going to take care of this? How can I fix it? I’m going to get this done. And I’ve just been amazed at how people have sort of looked at it and thought, I’m okay. We’re going to figure out how to make this work. And I’d say, I hope that everyone realizes the importance of bringing production back to LA. It is critical to bring back the city, to really send the message that production needs to be in Los Angeles.
DEADLINE: You are honoring an eclectic group.
ALLAIN: One of the genuine joys of this appointment is figuring out who we’re going to honor. We spend a lot of time talking about it, and it’s hard because there are so many serving people, but we only have basically three slots. So I could just speak to Taika Waititi, who is really somebody who has changed the game and we’re such fans of his work. We’re such fans of his work, his activism for showing underrepresented communities, for bringing others to the main front with humor and dignity. And we’re just super excited to give him the Norman Lear Award this year.
DE LINE: He’s just such a creative force in all ways. I worked with him when he was an actor, before he’d made any movie, and he gave me the script for Jojo Rabbit to read. And I thought said, oh, okay, so you want to make a comedy about the Holocaust? Good luck. Next thing I know, there you go. None of us know anything, but God bless him. What a vision and what bravery.
DEADLINE: What movie of yours did Taika act in?
DELINE: The Green Lantern.
DEADLINE: Nobody knows anything.
DE LINE: I’d say that’s true about each of our honorees. If you look at what Chris Meledandri and what he’s done for animation, it’s quite remarkable. At a time when the box office was completely falling apart, if you look at his success, it is remarkable. He’s part of this renaissance of animation where it’s really all age viewing. Intelligent and sophisticated, but in such a way that it goes to people’s hearts, whether you’re a child or an adult.
We’re also honoring Dana Walden for the Milestone Award. As an executive who just keeps on going. It’s unbelievable when you look at her career. So we’re very excited about her.
ALLAIN: We’re doing something we’ve never done before, with Paula Weinstein and Lynda Obst. It’s so sad that we lost both of them last year, and we’re really excited about getting to honor them. The Trailblazer Award is not a memorial, it’s about these two women. They changed the industry and not just for women, but for lots of people. They were two women who were unbelievably successful at a time when I think it was a lot harder for women.
DE LINE: They were both remarkable. At Paula’s memorial, they asked people who she had mentored to get up on stage, and hundreds of people got up. Much the same thing was true for Lynda. Both of these women had such a broad positive impact on the industry. And not only did they produce remarkable movies, they also were hugely impactful for the next generation.
DEADLINE: Recently, I noted how when five of the ten Best Picture nominees were announced, they did not have name producers, but rather a note they were to be determined later. Fair to imagine that next year when the nominees are announced, that won’t be repeated?
ALLAIN: Only if people submit their movies on time to get it done. This is up to the filmmakers, and hopefully people will go, oh, I better submit my movie so that if I get nominated, they’ll say my name.
DE LINE: They saw what happened this year, and no one liked this. It’s terrible. But hopefully it’s a wake up call for everybody to pay attention to the timeline of events.
ALLAIN: By the way, I don’t know if people know, but this is a free service of the PGA, to identify who was doing the heavy lifting on the movie. So the least folks can do is submit in time for us to do the work.
SPRUNG: The time and the man hours are extraordinary. We evaluate like 400 movies a year. This year was a tiny bit below typical because there were slightly fewer movies in the pipeline because of the strike. It is typically between 300-400 films a year. It’s a huge number.
