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DAN

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THE RIDEBACK FOUNDER & CEO HAS ESTABLISHED AN OASIS OF MULTICULTURAL CREATIVITY NEAR DOWNTOWN LA WITH THE AIM OF MAKING DIVERSITY MAINSTREAM

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IN “THE BARN” AT RIDEBACK RANCH, DAN LIN ADDRESSES THE WRITERS ROOM BEHIND THE SERIES INTERIOR CHINATOWN, WHICH IS BEING ADAPTED FOR HULU FROM THE CHARLES YU NOVEL THAT WON THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD. PHOTOGRAPHED BY MONICA OROZCO

FEATURES 38 THE COVER: HEAD, HEART, GUTS

52 ONE-ON-ONE ENCOUNTERS

Dan Lin and his fellow Rideback wranglers apply those three criteria to every project they consider. They also happen to describe the production company’s founder himself.

Two pairs of producers who’ve each tackled the same genre trade views on process, shared experience and thinking outside the box in the first of a new Produced By series.

65 NAVIGATING A MAELSTROM OF CHANGE Outgoing PGA presidents Gail Berman and Lucy Fisher talk COVID, #metoo, going green, what they’ve learned and the power of the collective mindset.

June | July 2022

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72

Lightyear redefines the nuclear family

DEPARTMENTS 22 LIVE FROM CENTURY CITY!

72 MARKING TIME

An ebb in the pandemic brings out the best and brightest for the 33rd Annual PGA Awards gala.

Galyn Susman, the producer of Pixar’s upcoming Lightyear, talks about animation’s limitless cinematic properties and her role as the director’s partner.

31 TOOL KIT Merri D. Howard’s needs aren’t fancy, but they are highly specific and absolutely essential.

77 MEMBER BENEFITS Belonging to the Guild brings multiple rewards.

35 NEW MEMBERS As you flip through the pages of Produced By, get acquainted with the PGA’s newest members and discover what makes them tick.

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82 IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GIANTS On its 60th anniversary, Darryl F. Zanuck’s D-Day opus The Longest Day draws an eerie parallel to the current devastation in Ukraine.

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‘INSECURE’ The team that usher ed in the hit hbo comedy refle cts on its upcoming final season and how they built a syste m to discover and devel op bipoc talent behind the scenes.

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“OUR TEAM IS THE MOST UNBELIEVABLE TEAM, AND THIS TO GET TO BUILD ALL OF D TOGETHER FROM THE GROUN Y UP HAS BEEN EXTRAORDINAR AND GRATIFYING.”

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OF DIRECTORS Charles P. Howard Hillary Corbin Huang Rachel Klein Kristie Macosko Krieger Dan Lin James Lopez Jacob Mullen Jonathan Murray

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Live FROM CENTURY CITY! An Ebb in the Pandemic Brings Out the Best and Brightest for the PGA’s Annual Awards Gala Written by Steve Chagollan

A

fter two years of remote celebrations due to Covid restrictions, the stars aligned for the 33rd Producers Guild of America Awards, both in terms of the honorees and those who introduced them. Among them: Steven Spielberg, Meryl Streep, and Oscar nominees Andrew Garfield, Kristen Stewart, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jessica Chastain. Even the venue itself, the Fairmont Century Plaza—the crown jewel of LA’s Avenue of the Stars, fresh off of a $2.5 billion-dollar facelift—lived up to its billing, providing an elegant backdrop for a well-heeled gathering in the mood to toast each other’s accomplishments.

The diversity of the crowd reflected a business of evolving demographics and changing paradigms, with the role of the producer, as always, open to interpretation. Chris Thomes called it “the critical art of getting things done.” Spielberg, who presented the Milestone Award to Kathleen Kennedy and George Lucas, said “producers do whatever the hell it takes, and they do whatever the hell it takes with courage and imagination and an utter lack of intimidation because producers need to know everybody’s jobs—not how to do them, but how they are done well.”

Lucas himself opined that the first and foremost job of the producer is “to do the impossible,

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and you do it every single day.”

And Issa Rae, accepting the PGA’s Visionary Award, half-jokingly lamented that after five seasons of Insecure, “Why doesn’t it get any easier? Y’all need an answer from me for everything?”

The profession’s against-allodds, can-do spirit—as well as Hollywood’s growing emphasis on underrepresented voices—was placed in historic context by Greg Berlanti while accepting the Norman Lear Achievement Award.

“I could draw a line between the shows that Norman made and all the shows that came after that dared to present America as it really was,” said Berlanti, “and by doing so, it helped all of us for the better.”

If there’s such a thing as momentum, CODA’s win for the Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Theatrical Motion Picture might have sealed the film’s fate a week hence at the Oscars, where the film triumphed in the Best Picture category, and its writer-director Sian Heder and actor Troy Kotsur—both on stage for the PGA grand finale—also walked home with Oscars.

“I think we will all agree that a good movie always starts with a good story,” said Philippe Rousselet, who shared the producer’s mark on CODA with Fabrice Gianfermi and Patrick Wachsberger, “and us producers have always been drawn to stories that are filled with humanity.”

Issa Rae Mary Parent, Denis Villeneuve & Josh Brolin

David Alvarez (West Side Story)

Presidents Gail Berman & Lucy Fisher

Lin-Manuel Miranda & Andrew Garfield

Meryl Streep

NOMINEES AND WINNERS

The Ted Lasso team accepting their award HoYeon Jung & Alana Haim

Rita Moreno & Jessica Chastain CODA win

Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures CODA Being the Ricardos Belfast Don’t Look Up Dune King Richard Licorice Pizza The Power of the Dog tick, tick...BOOM! West Side Story

Award for Outstanding Producer of Animated Theatrical Motion Pictures Encanto Luca The Mitchells vs. The Machines Raya and the Last Dragon Sing 2

Chris Pine with CODA cast

Norman Felton Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television – Drama Succession (Season 3) The Handmaid’s Tale (Season 4) The Morning Show (Season 2) Squid Game (Season 1) Yellowstone (Season 4)

Steven Spielberg & George Lucas having a laugh Greg Berlanti

Danny Thomas Award for Outstanding Producer of Episodic Television – Comedy Ted Lasso (Season 2) Cobra Kai (Seasons 3 & 4) Curb Your Enthusiasm (Season 11) Hacks (Season 1) Only Murders in the Building (Season 1)

David L. Wolper Award for Outstanding Producer of Limited or Anthology Series Television

Michelle Yeoh & Gail Berman

Hayden Schlossberg, Jon Hurwitz & Josh Heald

Mare of Easttown Dopesick ​​The Underground Railroad WandaVision The White Lotus

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NOMINEES AND WINNERS

Rachel Brosnahan

Venus Williams & Serena Williams

CONTINUED

Award for Outstanding Producer of Televised or Streamed Motion Pictures Tom Petty, Somewhere You Feel Free: The Making of Wildflowers 8-Bit Christmas Come From Away Oslo Robin Roberts Presents: Mahalia Single All the Way

Award for Outstanding Producer of Nonfiction Television The Beatles: Get Back 60 Minutes (Season 54) Allen v. Farrow (Season 1) Queer Eye (Season 6) Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy (Season 1)

Demi Singleton & Saniyya Sidney

Award for Outstanding Producer of Live Entertainment, Variety, Sketch, Standup & Talk Television Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (Season 8) The Daily Show With Trevor Noah (Season 27) Dave Chappelle: The Closer The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (Season 7) Saturday Night Live (Season 47)

Award for Outstanding Producer of Game & Competition Television RuPaul’s Drag Race (Season 13) America’s Got Talent (Season 16) Nailed It! (Seasons 5 & 6) Top Chef (Season 18) The Voice (Season 20)

Susan Sprung, Gail Berman & Kathleen Kennedy

Co-chairs Melvin Mar & Chris Thomes

Simon Rex

Kathleen Kennedy & George Lucas

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Award for Outstanding Producer of Documentary Motion Pictures

Ru Paul’s Drag Race team’s Game & Competition TV win

Summer of Soul (Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) Ascension The First Wave Flee In the Same Breath The Rescue Simple as Water Writing With Fire

HONORARY AWARDS

Kristen Stewart

Kathleen Kennedy and George Lucas: Milestone Award, the Guild’s highest honor, awarded to an individual or team for their contributions to the entertainment industry.

Kerry Washington

Ewan McGregor & Mary Elizabeth Winstead

Greg Berlanti: Norman Lear Achievement Award, recognizing a producer or producing team for an extraordinary body of work in television.

Mary Parent: David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures, which honors a producer or producing team for an extraordinary body of work in narrative features.

Summer of Soul win

Issa Rae: Visionary Award, which recognizes a television, film or new media producer for unique or uplifting contributions to culture through inspiring storytelling or performance.

Rita Moreno: Stanley Kramer Award, intended to honor productions, producers or others for their achievements in raising public awareness of social issues.

For a complete list of producers associated with the nominated

Francis Ford Coppola

productions, visit producersguild. org/2022-pgaaward-winners Donna Langley & Lin-Manuel Miranda

June | July 2022

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TOOL K I T

ZEN AND THE ART OF BEING PREPARED Merri D. Howard’s needs aren’t fancy, but they are highly specific and absolutely essential.

M

erri D. Howard has spent the better part of her career working on appointment television, from Star Trek: The Next Generation (line producer) and its spinoffs—Star Trek Voyager (producer) and Star Trek Enterprise (supervising producer)—to such Shonda Rhimes signature shows as Scandal and For the People (co-executive producer).

And during the pandemic lockdown, two shows that Howard co-executive produced—Little Fires Everywhere and The Morning Show (season 2)—kept viewers enthralled in their living rooms for weeks on end.

Overall, Howard describes her producer role as “the ship’s engineer overseeing everything production-related and assisting in the creative—interfacing with the studio and production team, cast, publicity, marketing and whatever else comes in play. My job is to keep the wheels turning, and the ship moving forward, no matter how rough the seas. Except these days, instead of an oil can and a wrench, for me it’s a cell phone in one hand, the schedule and budget in the other.”

Howard’s dance card as a co-executive producer continues to be full, with the romantic comedy Your Place or Mine, starring Reese Witherspoon, due out next year from Netflix; and season 1 of The Last Thing He Told Me, based on the best-selling novel by Laura Dave, also slated to air in 2023, on Apple TV+.

Howard approaches her job with the precision of a dentist, and likens her tool kit to a novelist’s writing tools, “all assembled properly to craft a tale.” She says that over the years her needs “have grown in specificity, to the point where I’m approaching a sort of Zen perfection. And what I need and like isn’t just desired, it’s required.”

THE BASICS • Moleskin Lined Paper Notebooks, freshly embossed for each show.

• Mechanical pencils • 1 black ballpoint pen • 1 red ballpoint pen

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TOOL K I T

WHY GO OLD-SCHOOL WITH PEN & PAPER? “It’s what I’m comfortable using. It’s physical.

It feels good in the hand. I like to touch and feel the paper, have one show’s notes all in the same place, crossing off and crossreferencing. They look good, come in great colors, fit in my bag, and I can personalize.”

OTHER ITEMS OF NOTE • Colored, coated paperclips to hold: › One line schedule of timelines › Staff & crew list › Call sheet of the day • Plastic sleeves for each episode, including: › Script › Budget • Mini black binder clips • iPhone on a bandolier (“so I never have to search for a missing cell phone”) • Laptop Mac with Movie Magic Scheduling and Zoom • Wet Ones • Purell • Evolvetogether brand black face masks or blue surgical mask • Water bottle • Lip gloss • Hand lotion • A spacious backpack to hold it all

WHY MOVIE MAGIC? “Simply, it’s the industry standard, allowing me to do different versions of the schedule, making our work very efficient.”

PICK-ME-UPS • Healthy fruit snacks in the morning • Chocolate in the afternoon • Coffee with Sweet’N Low and half & half (“prepared for me at 4 p.m. daily by our well-trained craft service crew”)

DRESSED FOR SUCCESS Lululemon joggers Adidas tennis shoes

LIFELINE “And a speed dial with those who matter most in my life.” ¢

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P G A AT YO U R SERVICE

NEW MEMBERS Produced By trains the spotlight on some of the Guild’s newest members, and offers a glimpse at what makes them tick.

MIKE FLANAGAN Flanagan is a quadruple-threat filmmaker (writer-director-producer-editor), not to mention a creator/showrunner on such Netflix series as The Haunting and the upcoming Midnight Club. Despite his level of accomplishment, the Intrepid Pictures partner is generous in his praise of those who have helped pave his career path, citing such role models as Intrepid colleagues Trevor Macy and Marc Evans, fellow producers Brad Fuller, Andrew Form and Jon Berg, and Blumhouse chief Jason Blum. “I really have been extraordinarily lucky to work with producers of their caliber and creativity,” says Flanagan, singling out Macy as demonstrating “time and time again how producing is truly an art.”

BUCKET LIST “A tentpole epic, a superhero project ... but my holy grail would be Stephen King’s The Dark Tower.”

“Trevor Macy describes producing as an ‘up-at-dawn, pride-swallowing siege,’ and it’s still the best description I’ve heard.”

PRODUCER’S ROLE IN A NUTSHELL

MICHELLE SNEED Sneed is not unfamiliar with the weight of responsibility. As president of production and development at Tyler Perry Studios, she identifies and curates talent “both in front of and behind the camera,” according to Perry, who adds that Sneed “embodies the values of TPS”—from her diligent work to providing opportunities “to those whose diverse experiences and stories are often overlooked and untold.” The Hollywood Reporter, which included her in its 2021 Women in Entertainment Power 100, says she “spearheaded the logistics for the ‘quarantine bubble’ that made it possible to shoot new seasons of BET and BET+ shows Sistas, The Oval, Ruthless, Bruh and All the Queen’s Men.”

YOUTHFUL ASPIRATIONS “As a very young girl watching live television from Inkster, Michigan, I always wanted to know what the people with the headsets were doing.”

“There are two pieces of advice from veteran UPM Tom Munroe that I think to myself about or repeat to others: ‘Trust, but verify’ and ‘It’s not your fault; it’s just your turn.’”

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Head,

Heart,

Guts

Dan Lin and his fellow Rideback wranglers apply those three criteria to every project they consider. They just happen to also describe the production company’s founder himself.

Written by Steve Chagollan Photographed by Monica Orozco

June | July 2022

39

HEAD, HEART, GUTS

It’s difficult to fathom what a producer does unless you step into their shoes.

What’s clear, though, is that the attention to detail is limitless, the obstacles never-ending. Problem-solving capabilities are a must, along with the ability to effectively deal with both talent and business with equal authority and sensitivity. The hours spent getting it all right cannot be measured.

These are not attributes most viewers can see in the finished product, and Dan Lin is the first to admit that. “I only knew things that I could see in front of the camera,” he recalls about his academic years, before he experienced a light bulb moment as a junior at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he studied finance and marketing. At Wharton, Lin heard Chris Lee, senior VP of TriStar at the time—and later president of Columbia/TriStar, as well as an executive producer—speak at a student career fair.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do.” recalls Lin, “He talked about what it was like to be a studio executive in film, and that completely opened my eyes. I had obviously watched movies and TV shows, but I had no idea that there were jobs (like) a producer. I just didn’t understand.

That talk really piqued my interest.”

Cut to 2022. With more than a handful of blockbuster theatrical credits on his resume like the Lego, It and Sherlock Holmes franchises—as well as outliers like The Two Popes—that he helped shepherd into reality, Lin runs his own production outfit, Rideback, established in 2018. It’s an outgrowth of Lin Pictures, formed a decade earlier when it was based at Warner Bros.

Rideback’s campus-like compound, called Rideback Ranch, also houses the Warner Animation Group, Animal Logic and Margot

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Robbie’s production arm, LuckyChap Entertainment, among other tenants.

Built from a former post office in the heart of Filipinotown, just west of downtown LA, the 35,000-square-foot facility stands as an oasis of creative enterprise far from the entertainment corridors of Burbank, Century City, Culver City and Santa Monica. It serves several purposes: film and TV studio, production think tank, workshop for rising talent, artistic salon, special events showcase and beacon of hope for the less fortunate.

Lin didn’t plant himself in a neglected part of the city for advantageous real estate prices. He has invested in the surrounding neighborhood as part of a larger goal to foster unrepresented voices and offer creative guidance to the disenfranchised. “We wanted to be part of the community,” he says, “but also we wanted to create community as well.”

The property’s Western motif is grounded in a cowboy code of honor. “‘Rideback’ means you have a group of cowboys that you choose to ride with in life,” explains Lin, the company’s CEO and “head wrangler.” “As a cowboy there’ll be times when you fall off your horse. The code is to ride back, get that cowboy back on the saddle and keep riding. That’s the ethos of our company, because we have people that we are living life with, personally and professionally, and we’re taking big risks, big swings, trying to do different things to break out in the marketplace.”

LOW-EGO/HIGH ACHIEVER Lin’s boyish looks belie his considerable experience as a studio executive, creative producer and entrepreneurial wunderkind. (He’s receiving the PGA’s inaugural Vance Van Petten Entrepreneurial Spirit Award, named after the Guild’s former national executive director, at the Produced By conference in June.) Lin’s reputation is not indexed by volatility, micromanagement or invasive meddling. Grandstanding is not in his DNA, and if anything, he prefers to deflect attention away from himself to those in

whom he places his well-earned trust.

“Dan is unique in that he really isn’t driven by ego at all,” says Jonathan Eirich, Rideback’s president of film. “So many times, that’s the thing that becomes the devil on the shoulder and lures people into bad business decisions in this town.

But for Dan, it’s not about personal recognition or ego. It’s about the success of making great things that can be out in the world, reach their intended audience and have their desired effect. When the process works and the company wins, that’s all that matters.”

Lin’s name may not stick in the mind like, say, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the studio exec/producer who took Lin under his wing as an intern, then later as a fast-rising player at Warner Bros. That they both hailed from Wharton and Harvard added to their bond. But it quickly became clear that Lin wouldn’t remain a junior executive for long.

As Lin took on more responsibility at the storied studio, ultimately rising to senior vice president of production—overseeing projects for the likes of Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Roland Emmerich—people in high places took notice.

“I was very fortunate and worked on (Scorsese’s) The Departed from start to finish,” he recalls. “I think a career changer for me was Martin Scorsese thanking me and recognizing me at every awards show (the film would end up winning Best Picture and Director at the Oscars).

I didn’t realize how much that would change my profile. I felt like I was a very internal executive before, and just by his external blessing of me, it completely changed my career.”

RISK AND REWARD Instead of basking in the adrenalin rush and security of a dream studio job, Lin, only in his mid-30s, experienced what he called a “mini midlife crisis.” Warners intended to sweeten the pot, but Lin had other designs. “I wanted to start my own company, and I wanted to do it under the Warner Bros. umbrella—‘to live and die by my own sword,’ is what I said. I’d been an executive for 10 years. I wanted to be closer

HEAD, HEART, GUTS

to the creative process. I felt like what I was doing was essentially producing. I felt I could show them how I could do it, but I wanted to do it in a different way.”

To Warners’ credit, the brass signed Lin, who had two years left on his original contract, to an exclusive fiveyear deal, keeping him in house instead of warning him that he’d never work in this town again. That association lasted from 2008, when he formed Lin Pictures, until just before the pandemic in the spring of 2020.

Lindsey Liberatore, Rideback’s executive VP of television, says she was drawn to Lin’s vision of a community of creators from different backgrounds and the emphasis on spirited collaboration. Lin felt the studios had become “too corporate,” and the lines of demarcation too rigid.

“I couldn’t pass up the chance to get involved with something more entrepreneurial than the traditional production company model,” says Liberatore. “Dan is equal parts businessman and producer. He’s constantly studying the world, whether that be business, tech, politics or culture. I believe this is half personal curiosity and half wanting to make sure our programming is ahead of societal shifts. He’s also very interested in new ways of doing things, so our workflow is continually being tweaked. To outsiders, our working style probably feels akin to a tech startup, and that’s intentional.”

KILLER CLOWN = KILLER B.O. Lin might salt and pepper his conversations with terms like “brand filter” and “incubator,” but it’s the creative process that stokes his imagination. His most successful movies seem to inhabit their own worlds, whether it’s Stephen King’s bucolic small-town America where nothing is as it seems (It), the steampunk version of Sherlock Holmes’ turn-of-thecentury London, or the phantasmagoria of the Lego universe, which, as it turns out, exists purely in the mind of a child. He won’t tackle a well-worn genre or age-old IP unless he can give it a fresh spin.

The It films, which raised the specter

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of the killer clown to its apotheosis, expanded horror’s appeal beyond its usual fan base. The year before the first film came out in 2017 marked what was called “the great clown panic of 2016,” with lurid sightings of clowns all over the country, usually in forests or near schools, inciting a mass case of “coulrophobia” (fear of clowns). It rode this hysteria to box office gold, but not just because it captured the zeitgeist. It also offered the appeal of a first-rate coming-of-age story, like Rob Reiner’s Stephen King adaptation Stand by Me (1986), which was also an inspiration for It director Andy Muschietti.

(It’s no coincidence that Reiner’s production company, Castle Rock Entertainment, formed at Warner Bros. with one of Lin’s previous bosses, Alan Horn, among others, is cited by Lin as a model company, along with Pixar.)

It featured masterful direction, pristine production values (a through line for all of Lin’s films), heartwarming performances by its adolescent cast, and an over-the-top stroke of acting genius by Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, who triggers demons that each member of The Losers Club has buried in their psyche.

The project was long in the making, with Lin on board as a producer as early as 2009, and later announcing in 2014 that the massive King novel (over a thousand pages) would be divided into two parts. At the time, Cary Fukunaga was attached as the director, but disagreements with New Line, a Warner Bros. specialty division, caused him to drop out, while maintaining a writing credit on the film.

That It fell on Muschietti’s shoulders turned out to be a supreme stroke of kismet. Lin compares the filmmaker to the top practitioners of the genre. “He doesn’t say just because it’s a horror movie, he’s going to shoot it like a horror movie,” Lin says of Muschietti. “He shoots it like a dramatic movie, with the scary elements.

The code is to ride back, get that cowboy back on the saddle and keep riding.

That’s the ethos of our company, because we have people that we are living life with, personally and professionally, and we’re taking big risks, big swings, trying to do different things to break out in the marketplace.”

HEAD, HEART, GUTS

What I’ve found with the most successful horror directors—James Wan, Sam Raimi, Andy, even David Gordon Green—they take their craft very seriously.”

The film would end up as the highest-grossing horror movie of all time, earning approximately $702 million worldwide, on a $35 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo. Lin chalks it up to the film’s universal appeal, calling it “a story about friendship, about underdogs. I think that’s why everyone relates to it. Also, it’s not the kind of horror movie where at the end you feel badly about yourself or the people in the movie that went through the journey. It felt very redemptive and encouraging and positive.”

Lin and fellow producers Barbara Muschietti and Roy Lee wasted little time following up with the sequel, released two years later, with such stars as Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy and Bill Hader playing older versions of The Losers Club members.

The younger actors also inhabit significant roles, yet look exactly the same.

“It was always a dream to make the movies back to back, but we couldn’t get that signoff,” says Lin. “As you can imagine, it’s not an easy green light because you’re making an R-rated horror film with kids in the lead. Ideally you shoot it back-to-back, but we did not do that. Luckily you didn’t notice that some of the actors are much taller, and we deaged them through visual effects.”

Made with more than twice the original’s budget and weighing in at almost three hours, it was like The Godfather: Part II of horror movie sequels, and like that epic, did not receive the original’s level of praise. But its success is undeniable, topping $473 million worldwide, only a disappointment compared to its predecessor.

GENRES REIMAGINED Lin’s proclivity for reinvention of established genres was evident in Gangster Squad (2013), released by Warner Bros.—the company that made gangster movies its bread and butter in the ’30s and ’40s. The film plays fast and loose with the story of Mickey Cohen’s downfall in a neon-lit, postwar Los Angeles, with Sean Penn essaying the mobster with the same force as WB contract players Cagney, Bogart and Robinson did in their bad-guy heyday. But despite a

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NEW MEMBERS cast that included Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, the film ended up a victim of the zeitgeist instead of riding it.

The film’s release was pushed back in the wake of the shootings in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, a scenario similar to a scene in the film that takes place in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, with assassins firing machine guns through the screen. Reshoots switched the setting to a restaurant in Chinatown, but the compromise to the film’s promotion cut into its commercial prospects.

“I wish that movie did better,” says Lin. “There were life factors and things going on in the world at the time, like gun violence, that really hurt the box office performance.

I’m still very proud of that movie. But if you look at it, it’s all about how do we give people a shot to elevate the material. Both (directors) Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes and Ruben Fleischer on Gangster Squad, these are not obvious choices. They were head-scratchers.

It’s because we were looking for a nonobvious choice to direct those. We weren’t looking to do the classic Warner Bros. gangster movie with Gangster Squad; we were looking for a new spin on it.”

The Sherlock Holmes movies, directed

by Guy Ritchie, with Robert Downey Jr. as the legendary detective and Jude Law as Dr. Watson, fared better. They also stand as a clear example of placing a contemporary sheen on a dusty property. Instead of the buttoned-up, flannel-clad sleuth with monocle and pipe, this Sherlock Holmes is informed by Ritchie’s testosterone-fueled criminal sagas, with our otherwise cerebral protagonist very much able to handle himself in hand-to-hand combat—even engaging in underground, Fight Club-style fisticuffs in his spare time.

Lionel Wigram floated the concept as a graphic novel when Lin was still at Warners.

“His whole take was, is there a Dark Knightlike way to approach Sherlock Holmes and reinvent him in a more graphic novel type of way,” recalls Lin. “Then when Guy Ritchie came aboard, he brought on Robert Downey Jr. to star, and then Robert brought on Joel Silver and Susan Downey to produce with us. That’s how the filmmaking team started.

So I generated it as an executive, then stayed on as a producer.”

The 2009 film and its sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), would

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earn more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office.

Even more out-of-the-box was the pairing of Ritchie with the Disney property Aladdin (2019), which seemed akin to throwing a kidney pie into a child’s Easter basket. A live-action variation of the animated 1992 Disney musical of the same name, and produced by Lin and Rideback partner Eirich under the Disney distribution banner, this Aladdin featured an international cast more in line with the story’s Arabian setting, with Mena Massoud, a Canadian actor born in Cairo, in the title role, and Naomi Scott, an English actor of Indian descent, playing his love interest. Will Smith played the genie, voiced by Robin Williams in the original.

“It was Dan’s working relationship with Guy Ritchie from the Sherlock Holmes films that helped back the unorthodox decision of giving Guy a big Disney musical,” recalls Eirich. “Dan loves putting the big pieces together to make these projects happen, and then once the movies are going, he and I are talking multiple times a day, every day, whether that’s in the office or from the set. So while I’ll be embedded a bit deeper in the creative trenches at times, there is no key decision on the film that we as producers aren’t making together.”

Although the film earned mixed reviews, it proved critic-proof at the multiplexes, grossing north of a billion dollars worldwide, and another $345 million in ancillary revenue. (Despite talk of a sequel, the prospect has been put on indefinite hold given Smith’s current status in the industry.)

In terms of tentpole franchises, the two pairs of Lego and It movies fall more in line with Lin’s Joseph Campbell-like quest themes. The producer describes the concept as the hero having “a clear call to action,” in which he or she “enters an exciting new world. And there’s a clear aspirational theme.” That aspirational theme is about “teaming together,” Lin explains, and being “stronger as a group than you are individually.” That more or less applies to his own company.

STRONG SENSE OF SELF The so-called Losers Club of brainy nerds in It (2017) and It Chapter Two (2019), as well as underdog everyman Emmet in The

PRODUCED BY TRAINS THE SPOTLIGHT ON SOME OF THE GUILD’S NEWEST MEMBERS, AND OFFERS A GLIMPSE AT WHAT MAKES THEM TICK.

DAVID GRANDISON JR. Grandison is not afraid of applying the latest technological advances to open people’s minds to the power of possibility. He’s taught science to inner-city middle school students as part of Teach for America, documenting the work of rainforest researchers in Costa Rica and using the video footage to implore his students to produce multimedia experiences that could teach younger, cognitively challenged students about deforestation. “One thing I learned was that my students naturally embraced multimedia storytelling and most of them preferred to learn through multimedia content.” The project helped Grandison discover his passion for filmmaking and helped him find his “true calling as a producer.”

BUCKET LIST “I would love to work on an immersive science fiction project one day.”

BEST ADVICE “The best advice I have read was Walt Disney’s advice to stay curious.

‘We keep moving forward, opening new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious, and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.’”

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HEAD, HEART, GUTS

NEW MEMBERS PRODUCED BY TRAINS THE SPOTLIGHT ON SOME OF THE GUILD’S NEWEST MEMBERS, AND OFFERS A GLIMPSE AT WHAT MAKES THEM TICK.

NADIA SARMOVA Visual stories played an important part of Sarmova’s childhood in Sofia, Bulgaria, and even more so after her family immigrated to the U.S., where films and TV shows helped her “escape the ridicule and ostracism” she faced at school for being “different.” She also viewed such programming as “sources of reflection, insight and motivation” that helped her assimilate into a foreign culture.

Sarmova says she’s drawn to “unexposed stories and diverse, multicultural perspectives,” with producing credits that include Joseph (2020), about a Jamaican doctor who travels to Ghana to study alternative forms of medicine. Devoted to social change through visual storytelling, she calls her brand of producing “impactainment.”

“‘The ambience behind the camera will find a way to show up on camera. Therefore the experience of making any piece of content is just as important as the final product.’ I honestly don’t remember who passed this nugget of wisdom on to me, but it has stayed with me and propels me to create production environments where crew and cast alike can truly thrive.”

BEST ADVICE

BUCKET LIST “A limited scripted drama series inspired by the life of C.S. Lewis; an uplifting, second-chance docuseries about homelessness; and a gritty, scripted drama exploring the grimy sewers and glittering palaces of international human trafficking.”

Lego Movie (2014), in which the real villain is the death of imagination, embody these themes. It’s not a stretch to draw parallels to Lin’s own life. In a way, he’s an insider with an outsider’s perspective, having moved as a toddler from Taipei, Taiwan, to Canaan, Connecticut. His was one of two Asian families in what he describes as an “all-white community.”

His father, who worked for Kraft General Foods before starting his own company, encouraged both a sense of pride in their heritage and assimilation into their adopted country, just like many immigrant parents.

“I grew up with them instilling in me a strong sense of self, remembering and knowing your own mother tongue and culture,” says Lin. “So we would go back to Taiwan almost every year during summer vacation. But at the same time understanding American culture and exposing myself to that and learning that way. So in many ways I consider myself what I call a ‘third culture’ kid. I wasn’t straight American, I wasn’t straight Taiwanese, but I was a combination of the two.”

He says his parents were great at exposing him to American TV and motion pictures. “I remember watching (Richard) Donner’s Superman (1978) and like, wow, I was in a totally different world. That’s how I always envisioned movies—that you’re transported to a different world.”

LEGOS’ META UNIVERSE Those worlds in The Lego Movie and The Lego Batman Movie (2017) are seemingly built from plastic toy bricks.

Although the look is inspired by stopmotion animation (it was pitched to the Warners brass as a “stop-motion hybrid”), everything was achieved through computer graphics—aided and abetted by Animal Logic, the Warner Animation Group, the Lego System AS, and others—with the kind of cinematic lighting, rich mise-en-scène and superhero score flourishes one might expect from a DC, Marvel or Star Wars property, all of which are referenced

in some shape or form. The films constituted a massive undertaking, each averaging three years in production, and spanning three countries, with teams working in Australia, Canada and Los Angeles simultaneously. As Lin points out, “at some time of day, The Lego Movie was always being made.”

The effort was well worth it. The Lego films might be the most witty, arch and ingenious product-placement movies in the history of cinema, while the humor and the metacultural references fly so fast and furiously, they can be missed in the blink of an eye. The first film mirrors characters ranging from Walter Mitty to Obi-Wan Kenobe, while Lego Batman resurrects every monster/baddie dating back to King Kong, including the Wicked Witch of the West, the skeleton warriors from Jason and the Argonauts, the great white shark from Jaws and Harry Potter’s Voldemort. For the most serious cineastes, there’s a play on the funhouse mirror scene in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai.

“It’s one thing to make a big family movie for all the kids to go see, but you want the evening show to be full as well,” says Lin. “Luckily, we were able to do that, and I really credit (directorwriters) Phil Lord and Christopher Miller.

Their sense of humor, their design, their vision of how they wanted to make the movie, was even grander than the one that I initially brought to them.”

The Lego Movie team also proved you could make commercial entertainment that was multilayered, multigenerational, a critical darling, and kill it at the box office. The two films combined earned north of $780 million in worldwide theatrical receipts.

Finding helmers proved difficult, however; even Lord and Miller were reluctant to come aboard at first.

“There’s a long list of directors that passed,” says Lin. “Ultimately you only need one.” Or in this case, a tandem.

“We were worried the film would seem like a toy commercial rather than a film, so we were wary of making it,” said the two filmmakers, speaking as one, in an email exchange with

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Produced By. “But Dan eased us into the pool—he had the same goals as we did for the film, and asked us first to just write a treatment, then to write a script, and by the time we were midway through the script, we knew we had fallen in love with it. We felt it would only work with a particular stopmotion style that Dan was very supportive of, despite the studio’s unease.”

Lin would always go the extra mile, revealing an ironclad determination beneath his seemingly placid demeanor. “He will do whatever it takes to make the movie as good as it can be,” say Lord and Miller. “When we wanted to build a basement set to shoot the live-action ending of the movie but didn’t have the budget to do it properly, Dan found a way. He presold the basement set to Legoland as an attraction, which got us enough money to get it done.”

NOTHING LEFT TO CHANCE Lin’s powers of persuasion cannot be underestimated. As he gathered his Rideback posse, he exposed a vetting process that might be considered beyond the call of duty at best, and extreme at worst. He spent months courting Eirich, from friendly exchanges over coffee as a sort of mentor

President of Film Jonathan Eirich and Lin strategize in the Rideback Ranch courtyard.

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figure to more formal overtures.

“Even then,” recalls Eirich, “he had me join a full company staff meeting and meet every exec at the company individually before I was given an official offer. I had a few job offers come up during that time. However, Dan’s diligence to both recruit me, but also to really put me through the wringer to make sure this would be a good fit, was something I respected greatly. It made me confident this was going to be an ideal situation for us both.”

Ironically, for all the Western paraphernalia that adorns Rideback’s headquarters—mini stagecoach, weathervane tower, mounted antlers, vintage dinner bell, saddles atop barstools in the “saloon”—Lin isn’t interested in making a traditional Western unless he can update it in some way that would appeal to new audiences. The closest proximity would be Walker on the CW, on which he acts as executive producer alongside partner Lindsey Liberatore, showrunner Anna Fricke, star Jared Padalecki and pilot director Jessica Yu. It’s a contemporary action soap opera dressed in western duds that’s a spinoff of Walker, Texas Ranger. Yellowstone, on the Paramount Network, proved that TV audiences are enthralled by the wide-open

range, steely patriarchs, sibling rivalries and strong female characters.

The project was conceived with CBS Studios. Anna Fricke is also a participant in Rideback Campfire, for which she acts as a mentor. “It’s a collaborative process where we work with writers who have not created their own show, but they’re mentored by big writers who act in a nonwriting, producing capacity. Essentially, they’re mentored by big showrunners.” Also in the works is yet another spinoff, Walker Independence, a prequel that will have a female lead played

by Katherine McNamara. The series also has secured a commitment from the CW. When pressed to differentiate his role as an executive producer on a feature film versus a Produced By credit, which makes you eligible for the producer’s mark (p.g.a.), Lin uses the upcoming Dear David, a supernatural thriller for Lionsgate based on a Twitter thread by Adam Ellis, as an example. “I secured the rights with my team, and we hired the writer,” he explains. “It ended up being too small for us to be day-to-day on, and we let Lionsgate and other producers play the day-to-day role of making that film. Once we got the rights, hired the writer and got the draft, we then handed it off to a different team to make a low-budget

HEAD, HEART, GUTS

RIDEBACK SPREADS THE WEALTH When Dan Lin planted his production company in the heart of Los Angeles’ Filipinotown with the idea of fostering a community of underrepresented creatives both inside and outside Rideback Ranch’s walls, he didn’t just talk the talk.

“We took a walk and tried to understand the needs of the neighborhood,” says Lin. Just across the street is the Union Avenue Elementary School, which Lin describes as “the largest elementary school for first-time immigrants in Los Angeles.” When Lin offered donations for computers and special-ed programs, the school principal instead asked Lin for his “superpower”—storytelling.

The resulting mentorship program, with Young Storytellers—started in 2018—pairs 10 Rideback employees with 10 fifth-grade students, who are charged with writing a six-page screenplay over the course of each semester.

Rideback then enlists its actor friends to perform this short one-act in front of classmates, friends and family.

“The giving-back philosophy extends to the Rideback TV Incubator program that was initiated with film and TV studio MRC (Ozark, Baby Driver), which is now in its third year. “[RTI is a] similar model that we do across the board.

We hire writers who show great talent, who have staffed on TV shows before but never created their own show,” explains Lin. “We pair them with big showrunners who mentor them, and we work on those projects and take them out to market.” Five writers participate in a six-month residency, for which they are handsomely paid, to create “market-ready material” (pilot script, format and pitch), that Rideback/MRC would ultimately produce.

One recent example is a drama being developed from a New York Times bestselling book, which Rideback and MRC are keeping under wraps, The book’s underrepresented writer is being paired with Susan Stanton, who has written episodes of HBO’s Succession for each of its three seasons.

Stanton was then paired with a well-known actress, also yet to be announced. It’s part of a process that Lin refers to as “stacking the deck” to form a “Justice League of diverse talent” for each of Rideback’s projects.

Rideback has a similar partnership with CBS Studios and Thinking Hat founder Craig Turk called Rideback Campfire, which focuses on broadcast television.

Lin also joined the board of the nearby Good Shepherd Center for Homeless Women and Children, a shelter for women who are victims of domestic violence. Lin helped bring in a restaurant to the facility that’s open to the public, HiFi Kitchen, which specializes in Filipino fare.

“We’re basically producing,” says Lin, “but we’re not producing film; we’re trying to produce a community.”

horror movie. So we weren’t involved in every step of the way. Whereas when I’m a producer, I’m involved in every step of the process.”

TELEVISION’S NEW FRONTIER Television is where Rideback’s biggest expansion lies, with Lin and his TV team poised to extend their sphere of influence into viewers’ living rooms, which is where most Americans ingest their entertainment anyway.

Liberatore says their mission is to “challenge accepted conventions—both on the page and in the development and production process. It’s our tech mindset at work to some degree. We’re constantly asking ourselves: Is there a better way?”

She adds that in evaluating material, Rideback looks for three attributes: “Does the story create a conversation that no one is having? Does it move us? Is it disruptive in some way? Internally, our shorthand for this is ‘head, heart and guts.’ This is our north star for whether a project is Rideback-ready.”

She cites Avatar: The Last Airbender, a live-action adaptation of the Nickelodeon animated series for Netflix, as one of Rideback’s upcoming titles she’s most excited about. “It’s a story with Asian and Indigenous heroes, plus we’re shooting it on the Volume, so it’s the most cutting-edge tech for filmmakers available,” she says. “It’s the perfect marriage of challenging how things are normally done and telling a story that reflects ‘head, heart and guts.’”

Also on tap for Rideback is Easter Sunday, a family comedy starring Filipino American comedian Jo Koy. The film, being released August 5, is in post for Universal, where Lin now has a first-look deal for theatrical features. The pact includes the next Lego movie, on which Lin and Rideback are in development.

Also in post is Disney’s Haunted Mansion, based on the Disney ride and directed by Justin Simien, due out in March 2023.

If Lin’s expectations are high, he has the patience of a saint. Who else would offer their time and resources to underprivileged kids in the neighborhood, where Lin equates enterprise with community? But when he talks about fostering underrepresented voices, he’s using mainstream entertainment as a vehicle. He also sees it as the surest path to success.

“We’re not a charity. We are a business, and our strategy is to make diversity mainstream,” he asserts.

“We’ve done that with Aladdin. It was the most diverse Disney movie that became north of a billion-and-ahalf blockbuster. We’re doing it now with Avatar: Last Airbender—making diversity mainstream and showing that it is good business.” ¢

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IN THEIR OWN WORDS In the first of new a series, Produced By asked two pairs of producers to chat with each other about process, building blocks, challenges and facilitating the director’s vision.

T

o illustrate how elastic biopics can be, consider Spencer—a fictional meditation on the late Princess Diana that takes place over 48 hours beginning on Christmas Eve—and tick, tick…BOOM!, inspired by a three-person musical that chronicles the early struggles of Rent author Jonathan Larson as he tries to make it in New York as a composer and playwright. Paul Webster, a producer on the former, and Julie Oh, a key force on the latter, helped breathe new life into the biopic form, avoiding the cradle-tothe-grave formula that usually results in skimming the surface of a subject’s life, not to mention the attendant hagiography that can come across like visual CliffsNotes. In their conversation, Webster and Oh discuss their mutually respectful approaches to the genre and how they navigated the crippling effect of COVID. (Webster, whose film was shot mostly in Germany, took pains to give equal credit to his fellow producers Jonas Dornbach and Juan de Dios Larraín.) Each started out by revealing their project’s origins.

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Reimagined Julie Oh and Paul Webster on Probing Lives with Focus and Intimacy WEBSTER: First I’m going to say

one thing: I loved your movie. I thought it was terrific, one of my favorite films last year, and really moving. I watched it again to prep for this conversation, and it’s actually much stronger on second viewing.

It’s always a good sign that repeated viewings reward in different ways.

This all began when (director) Pablo Larraín called me and said, “I can’t keep Princess Diana out of my mind. I think I’d like to do a film about her. What do you think?” Being a producer, I did the mental gymnastics: Princess Diana was a huge brand, Pablo Larraín is an esteemed director and a serious filmmaker, and wouldn’t that be an interesting intersection of ideas and brand awareness?

I was surprised Pablo wanted to make this movie, having done a film about a female 20th-century icon (Jackie Kennedy) not too long before that. But he seemed very passionate. I believe directors are a key component in the filmmaking process, and my job is to help realize their vision. We decided we would approach Steve Knight to write the script, and off we went.

That was about three years ago.

OH: I also feel like so much of a

producer’s job is that you are constantly pitching everywhere, to everyone, an idea. What was the conversation like with Steven Knight when you first brought up the project to him?

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WEBSTER: He doesn’t watch a lot

of movies, but he had seen Jackie, which he loved. Steve is driven by directors. Once he said, “OK, I think I can do something with that,” it came together very easily.

When Pablo was next in London, we had breakfast together, the three of us: Steven, Pablo and I. Basically, it was me being sort of the umpire in a little tennis game.

Pablo’s insistence was always to find a moment in this person’s life and use that to illuminate their entire life experience. They came up with the Christmas idea, which gave us the structure for the story and the idea that this person was kind of imprisoned.

As you know, Julie, as a producer, you are always pitching and you’re always thinking of different ways to succinctly sum up a complicated idea.

We decided that it was a jailbreak movie, which is a producer’s gold dust because you can simply explain everything in a few words. As often is the case with Steve, he basically wrote one draft of the script, there were a couple of additions that Pablo asked for, and that was it. The two most difficult things were, 1) waiting for Pablo and for Steven to become available for the script to be delivered, and Pablo to be ready to make it and, 2) the actual making of it.

OH: I also feel like development is so

important. When you feel like you’re working with a writer and director that has been hit by that lightning, you can just tell because they say, “Leave me alone. I’m going to just go and do this and come back and show you something.” What’s so brilliant about

your film is that it is a jailbreak movie, but then you’re turning it on its head— because anyone else going to that estate would want to stay there and be a part of all the pomp and circumstance and proximity. You’re meeting Diana when she’s experiencing the exact opposite.

WEBSTER: Yes. As Pablo put it very succinctly, it’s a reverse fairy tale.

I find the long developments are usually much more complex when it comes to actually making the film.

The ones that come together very easily in development, that sets your course for the whole process.

OH: The development of tick, tick…

BOOM! was stretched out for a number of years. But as soon as we came upon the idea of how we were going to do it, it happened very quickly. The inception for the idea really started in 2014 when I saw a performance of tick, tick…BOOM! at Encores at New York City Center.

I didn’t know anything about tick, tick…BOOM! other than I was a fan of Jonathan Larson, and just was so struck by his story, which was an adaptation of his (1990) rock monologue (called 30/90 and Boho Days at various points), which is shown in the film.

After (Larson) passed away, his family commissioned (playwright) David Auburn to create a three-person version in 2001. It felt so relevant to today, even though it had been written over 20 years prior. That’s why I started trying to figure out how to get the rights.

The family wanted to know what our plan was going to be: “How are you going to develop it? Who is going to direct it? Who is going to play

ONE ON ONE

Jonathan?” At the time, I was a very junior studio executive and didn’t have the right answers. It took over two years—I had then become producer at Imagine—for me to realize that the man who had played Jon in the version I saw, Lin-Manuel Miranda, had been waiting to direct a movie his entire life. It felt cosmically right that it was going to be this one.

Even before I approached Lin, I approached the family and asked them what they thought. I got their blessing.

Miranda responded to me in like two hours. I was on a plane to London a couple of weeks later to have breakfast while he was shooting Mary Poppins Returns. From that point onward, it was off to the races to develop the movie.

WEBSTER: It’s really interesting to contrast your experience where you are dealing with the rights holders, the family. We didn’t deal with the royal family at all. That gave us a lot of fear and trepidation going in, because normally when you adapt anything based on real-life people, even if it’s fictional, you need their endorsement. Because if you get a movie out there and you get slagged

off by the novelist or the person it’s based on, that’s kind of poison.

But in this case, we were dealing with an institution and people who are public property in a way very few people are. Diana, of course, is no longer with us. But we were very sensitive about the impact of the film, the story, and how it would impact her sons, William and Harry. In fact, we initially minimized the presence of William and Harry in the story. Harry was barely in the very first draft, and we knew that wasn’t working. We all agreed he’s got to be part of it, and we actually built up their stories. That was taking a risk, but that risk is mitigated very pragmatically. It’s very unusual for the royal family to comment on anything that’s said about them or any portrayal. It never happens. So we kind of felt protected in that way.

OH: It sounds like the decision was

made quite early to move forward on the movie, to do it as respectfully as you possibly could, but not to make the overture (to the family), which is typically what someone would do right off the bat.

REAL VS. IMAGINED WEBSTER: That’s true. I have

a question about your portrayal of Jonathan Larson: How much is invented and how much is based on verifiable actuality?

OH: Even before our screenwriter,

Steven Levenson, came on board, we brought on Jennifer Tepper, who’s a (performing arts) historian, consultant and a theater producer.

The first thing we did as a group is Lin, Steven and Jennifer went down to the Library of Congress where the family has preserved every piece of paper that Jonathan ever touched.

We went through old drafts, through demos. They interviewed (Larson’s) best friend Victoria Leacock, and Matt O’Grady, who’s the character of Michael (in tick, tick…), and asked, ‘Was he a good friend in this case? Was he a bad friend? What was important to him? What was complicated about him? What mattered?’ We never wanted to put forth this person as St. Jonathan, because he wasn’t. That was also something that Lin never wanted to do in terms of the movie.

And this a man who is Lin’s

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hero, whom he credits for giving him permission to write musicals.

What was really beautiful was that the family was on board with that, because they wanted him portrayed as the complicated, living, breathing human that he was. With all the research, we were able to start to piece together some things that are true, some things that aren’t.

red carpet or she’s attending an event or she’s at a big gala. For Jonathan, it’s about the moments when he’s in the rehearsal room, alone in his apartment—moments of intimacy that I think reveal who they are as people.

But the biggest question was always for us, who’s going to play Jonathan Larson? That was probably a similar question for you with Diana.

WEBSTER: We had an interesting

WEBSTER: We had some very cursory

challenge with Diana. We had no way of knowing what went on over the purported weekend that gave us the structure of our story. We did research, mainly by Steven, who spoke to people who worked at Sandringham House during that time. The chef, Darren McCready, was very important to us.

But Diana was a very public figure, and we’ve seen her many, many times on camera before. So there was an anchor. Kristen Stewart doesn’t physically resemble Diana much on the face of it. But she learned enough character traits, movements, that she was able, with her own process, to absolutely merge herself into that character, and I think gives a very convincing version of Diana.

OH: I would agree. I think she is absolutely fantastic.

WEBSTER: Thank you. You know,

I love the contrast between these two stories. Jonathan wasn’t a particularly public figure. Obviously, Rent was hugely successful, but it was a posthumous success. Diana was arguably one of the most public figures of the 20th century. But we arrive, I feel, in the same place.

OH: What I also really love about

both films is that they’re both intimate.

You get to know the person and spend time with them in a way that is a little bit unconventional. It’s not about the moment where she is on a

conversations with a couple of people Pablo met, which didn’t come to anything. Then we were looking at the British-Australian acting pool as our basis. Then Pablo just called one day and said, “What do you think about Kristen Stewart?” I said, “Well, I think she’s a brilliant actress. But she’s from LA, from the Valley. There’s no cultural connection between her and this character. Does that matter to you?” He said, “No, I think she can do it.” I think there was just one conversation with Kristen. Pablo spoke to her, and I believe she was more or less committed before there was a script. She’s absolutely fearless, and I think that’s the quality you’re looking for from an actress.

Our movie is a quintessentially British movie starring an American playing a Brit. Yours is a quintessentially New York movie starring a Brit playing an American.

I am always amazed by an actor’s ability to transform themselves. It’s about a willing suspension of disbelief, and I think these guys just make it so easy for us as the audience.

OH: Because they embody these

characters. Or in our case, real people who lived on this earth to a point that you feel like they are channeling them in some realm that is beyond us.

Andrew Garfield came on board very early. We got our first draft, and all of us being musical theater creatures, the first thing we said was, “We need to hear it out loud.” So how do we get in

a room and do a weeklong workshop as though we would be workshopping a musical that we would be taking to Broadway? After that, it forced the question of who we were bringing into the fold to play the role of Jon.

WEBSTER: Yeah.

OH: This is a movie where there were

never any plan Bs. I had no plan B if Lin-Manuel wasn’t going to direct it.

He was the only person that could, and thank God he said yes. I asked Lin who he was thinking about to play Jon, and he said Andrew Garfield. I said, “Is there anyone else you’re thinking of?” He said, “Absolutely not. I think he can do it.” At the time, Andrew was on stage in Angels in America, which is a master class in endurance and acting. We set the workshop for—this is horribly cruel, but we had to because of scheduling— for the day after his last performance of Angels in America.

WEBSTER: Oh wow!

OH: So he finished his run, which he

never missed a performance of, and in the morning, he got up and came to our workshop where we handed him a binder and said, “Can you sing?”

WEBSTER: [Laughing] Yes, I

was going to ask that. How was his singing? He sings well in the film but was there a process you had to undertake to get there?

OH: The way Lin had described it to

me is that Andrew had this beautiful instrument his entire life that he had never played. We had no idea what was going to happen when he finally sat down and devoted himself to it in that first workshop. We said, “Don’t worry. You don’t have to sing.” Lin did the singing through all the Jonathan parts on the first day, and Andrew did the speaking Continued on page 78

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ONE ON ONE

for All Ages Jeremy Dawson and Yvett Merino talk about the form’s methodical, timeconsuming process, and how it’s broken out of its sanitized, family-fare box.

As producers of animated features, Jeremy Dawson and Yvett Merino represent a study in contrasts. For Dawson, animation is an exception to the norm, having worked mostly in live action as a producer, graphic artist and VFX supervisor. He’s best known for his collaborations with the auteur Wes Anderson on such films as Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, as well as the stop-motion offerings Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs. The latter two tout voices from Anderson’s usual repertory of players, including Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman. Merino, on the other hand, is a longtime employee of Hollywood’s most revered animation factory, Disney, and has worked her way up the ladder from temp to tentpole producer. For Encanto, her debut p.g.a. mark credit, she won a PGA Award and an Oscar for best animated feature, alongside Jared Bush, Byron Howard and Clark Spencer. Anderson’s animated movies—about a thieving fox trying to go straight and a dog flu pandemic that banishes all canines to a bleak, garbageinfested island—are not exactly geared for tots. Encanto, set in Columbia, is a magicalrealist ode to individual empowerment that doubles as a full-on musical in the most lavish Disney tradition.

DAWSON: Do you want to talk a little bit about how Encanto came to be?

MERINO: Sure. A little background on

myself: I’ve been in animation for about 25 years. I started doing administrative stuff, then transitioned to the technology side a few years into that. Then I started out in

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production, working as production supervisor on Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph, and then moved up to production manager on Moana and Big Hero 6. After Moana I started working on Encanto as a producer. Here at Disney, our films come from our directors, and as the film starts to take shape (in development) they get the producer on.

So Byron (Howard) and Jared (Bush), our two directors, worked on it for about five, five and a half years, and I was on it about three and a half years.

DAWSON: Wow. And it was all done inside the pipeline there?

MERINO: We are a vertically integrated

situations with scale and all this stuff.

MERINO: Yeah.

DAWSON: So that was my path. Then I re-

joined Wes for another stop-motion feature, Isle of Dogs, four years later, which brought a lot of the same team back together again.

In that case, it was a lot less painful, because we knew what to expect.

MERINO: I can imagine trying to bump

your way through the process and trying to figure it out and get it done is probably very, very, painful. But I guess coming back for a second time you had some idea, right?

studio, so everything from initial pitch all the way through final rendering is done in-house.

What about you? You’ve had such a grand career...

DAWSON: Exactly. I think one thing about

DAWSON: I guess mine was sort of back-

have that history. One of the things I love about working here is that people are constantly trying to improve the process and make sure it’s a meaningful and deeply emotional story. Our amazing team of artists are constantly trying to push the envelope of what they can do and try to do it better.

wards because I didn’t really start in animation. When I started working on Mr. Fox with Wes, it was the first animated feature that either of us had worked on, so we were flying blind, which allowed us to kind of do things the wrong way, but maybe that gave us a leg up in other ways.

I had a background in photography and visual effects, and I’d done some bits of animation—stop-motion, specifically—with Wes on The Life Aquatic. He had this idea for Mr. Fox. He came to me and really didn’t know what to do, so we brought in another producer, Allison Abbate (The Iron Giant, Corpse Bride), and others who knew about stop-motion. But we did our own reckless way of trying to make the thing. Stop-motion is a very old process, probably as old as pictures. The amazing part is you can make everything, but you also have to have it there in front of the camera and show up within the frame. You get into strange

Disney, which obviously has been making animation for so long, there are all the departments and the pipeline and the systems for it.

MERINO: We’re fortunate because we

DAWSON: One thing that I found is a big

difference between live action and animation is in live action, I’m so used to the experience of being on set and seeing almost everything happen. So when you see the movie, you’re remembering every little bit: like that was the take where he dropped the glass, or that was the day it was like 3,000 degrees out. So the thing becomes an assemblage of all these experiences you’ve had.

With animation, especially stop-motion, you have these people go behind a dark curtain, then they come out six weeks later with a shot.

I think as part of a filmmaking process

ONE ON ONE

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ONE ON ONE

there is something about animation— which is both the fact that you can see there’re no rules in what you’re seeing, and there’re no rules regarding the physics and the time and the scale. You can make anything you dream up because you’re building every single thing. I think I have a bigger appetite for something wacky to happen, which is sort of freeing.

It’s also kind of exhausting.

MERINO: I totally agree. It goes on here

in story rooms: Someone has an idea, and they’re like, “Oh, what if we do this?” or “What if this happens?” There’s someone sketching it out, and literally you’re watching it go through the process.

So when I watch one of the films that I’ve worked on, on every single shot I’m remembering all of the stories behind it.

Because everything is so planned and thought out that by the time it gets to the artist, they know the idea and the intent behind the scene. Then they’re able to put their take on it. You’re just watching it grow and grow and grow—all the way until you get into post with score and the music and the sound effects. It’s fun and exciting and also challenging because it’s limitless, and you’re trying to get it done and make sure that it all flows together.

So what does your crew look like on a stop-motion project?

DAWSON: The biggest is model makers

and construction people. As far as crew, you start small and probably max out at around 200 or so. Animators, we started with very few and we ended up with maybe 30, including assistants. Some were junior or assistant animators. We probably had 10 lead animators and an animation director.

MERINO: In stop-motion-–this may

sound like a very ignorant question— they’re the ones actually posing it, taking a picture, posing it, taking a picture?

DAWSON: Yeah. Those guys are doing it, and they’re basically quite self-sufficient.

Some shots are much faster and some shots with a lot of characters are much

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more complicated. We’d probably budget like 10 seconds a week—something like that—for an animator.

What about for you guys? You have animators in the dozens or hundreds or what?

MERINO: Well, like you said, it starts

small and grows. We have our designers, modelers and our riggers, who have to allow the characters to move. Once we get into production, we’ll hit a peak of about 450 people.

DAWSON: OK. MERINO: Our two biggest departments

are lighting and animation. Lighting will have about 60 to 70 people. We had about 100 animators for Encanto, maybe 110.

DAWSON: So like three times the ani-

mators we had. Our lighting, we had four, something like that.

MERINO: Oh, wow.

DAWSON: But they’re pretty good. We

were shooting on little mini stages, so we basically had these curtains dividing up the soundstage, and we probably had around 40 shooting units. Ours were each based on about a year of prep and then a year of animation.

MERINO: Our production pipeline is

probably about a year from when we start layout, setting up the cameras and stuff like that. We want to plan for like a year and a half, but because the story changes and different things develop, we do it in about 12 to 13 months. Our animation runs about six or seven months.

There’s always that moment, right, where you’re wondering, “Well, maybe this is the one that’s not going to finish.

And what are we going to do then?”

DAWSON: It’s like when you’re on the

treadmill and you’re running and you’re looking at the time and it’s been like eight minutes, and you just put a towel over it and then when you look again, you’ve made it.

CASTING

DAWSON: In terms of casting, we

probably had more household names than you guys had. One thing I found interesting was I really thought about voices. F. Murray Abraham had this crazy voice. Or Tilda Swinton or even George Clooney in Mr. Fox, who had the perfect pal-like attitude for it.

MERINO: We have an amazing casting department. I think everyone assumes, “Oh yeah, just put them in there.”

But really, you have to listen to the voice and look at the character, and ask yourself, “Does that really work?”

Even with Stephanie Beatrice (who played lead character Mirabel Madrigal),

ONE ON ONE

NEW MEMBERS PRODUCED BY TRAINS THE SPOTLIGHT ON SOME OF THE GUILD’S NEWEST MEMBERS, AND OFFERS A GLIMPSE AT WHAT MAKES THEM TICK.

whom we had known from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, she does that character (in the series) of Rosa Diaz in this very low speaking voice. Her normal speaking voice is high-pitched and has so much energy, and it’s bouncy. So she just fit into Mirabel from the very start, but it’s not something that we ever expected.

DAWSON: For us it’s mostly MANJARI MAKIJANY A native of Mumbai, India, where she hails from a family of actors and filmmakers, Makijany set her mind on directing from an early age, eventually achieving visibility on the fest circuit with such shorts as The Last Marble, The Corner Table and I See You, which she also produced. She was subsequently selected for the AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. She credits her husband and producing partner, Emmanuel Pappas, for nurturing her “natural instinct to produce.” She made her feature production debut with Skater Girl (2021), about a rural teen in India with dreams to compete as a skateboarder, for Netflix. “I wasn’t going to wait for a big producer to believe in me,” she says, “I wanted to go off and create my first production as a testament to what I was capable of achieving.”

“Be slow to hire and quick to fire. I believe it’s important to assemble a harmonious group of talented creatives and technicians who can elevate each other’s work.

But when you have a bad apple in a crew, it can quickly spread or disrupt the harmony and shift the focus from what’s being created to managing people’s egos.”

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BUCKET LIST “Creating an engaging and visually compelling animated project that can help children’s development and education while inspiring and entertaining the four quadrants would definitely be #1 on my bucket list as a producer.”

people doing their own voice. Wes tends to keep it quite natural, and mostly does the casting himself.

In Isle of Dogs, we had a bunch of Japanese actors and we had a good friend in Japan who helped us cast.

I just was curious, do you guys have the characters designed and then do the voices? Or are you designing the characters with the voice already determined?

MERINO: Typically in

development, we’ll start thinking of who the characters are and what they look like. So we’ll start designing early before we even start talking casting. Then once we cast, we definitely record them and pick up little movements or something that they do, and the animators will watch that. Do you guys do that?

and then some of the animators will definitely join in the reviews.

We’d do that every morning.

I’m curious about one thing with Encanto: For instance, with Mirabel’s character, did you use any emotion capture, or was it all hand-animated?

MERINO: It’s all hand-animated.

We have our animation supervisors, and they really oversee characters. But no, we cast out our shots and they just go in there and animate them all.

But they’ll use references from the recording sessions.

DAWSON: The animation was

excellent. That’s why I was wondering, because it didn’t have that motion-capturey feel. There was a realism to it.

MERINO: Thank you for

that. And I think a lot of credit obviously goes to our amazing animation team, but also our consultants who talk to dancers and animators. They really focused on body movement.

DAWSON: Well, that makes

Fantastic Mr. Fox, we acted the whole thing out and ran around on a farm and recorded it. So that was like location sound. Also, Wes acts out a lot of the parts as a reference for the animator.

sense. Everybody always says all moviemaking is storytelling, but animation is even more so. The visuals are so intermingled that the storyboard artists are writers in a certain way, right?

Did you start out thinking of the story as like a family story?

Or who were you thinking it was being made for in terms of age or the audience?

MERINO: Are your animators in

MERINO: We try to make these

DAWSON: Yeah, yeah. On

the reviews with him, or do you guys just look at dailies separately and send notes?

DAWSON: We have an

films for everyone. I think early on Myron and Jared and Lin-Manuel (Miranda, who wrote the songs), they really just wanted to tell a story about family, right?

animation director in the reviews,

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ONE ON ONE

NEW MEMBERS DAWSON: Right.

MERINO: They’d gone to Colombia, this research trip, and

PRODUCED BY TRAINS THE SPOTLIGHT ON SOME OF THE GUILD’S NEWEST MEMBERS, AND OFFERS A GLIMPSE AT WHAT MAKES THEM TICK.

they came back and really wanted to tell a story about family, about the complexities of it. It just grew from there.

Even with your films—Isle of Dogs and Mr. Fox—people look at them and they’re like, “Oh, it’s animation.” I think they automatically want to put it on a shelf somewhere.

But there’s so much work that goes into the story.

DAWSON: Yeah.

MERINO: With Encanto it’s about displacement. It’s about a

family that has to leave their home, and losing their home, and building a home, and all this generational trauma. It’s kind of deep. People were like, “Oh yeah, I saw it.” But I was like, “Well, sit down and actually watch it. You might actually enjoy it.”

DAWSON: We sort of got the same thing. Like with Mr. Fox,

was it going to end up as Searchlight or Fox Animation or Fox? (It was distributed by Fox proper.) Ultimately it ended up hurting us in terms of how we did in its first release. But luckily it lived on, and that movie gets referenced more than any of the others I’ve worked on. But I think that people are not sure if it’s a movie for kids or not. It can be problematic from a marketing point of view because a lot of people will probably say, “Look, I don’t watch animation. I don’t like animation.”

MERINO: Yes. DAWSON: But I think animation is kind of a filter for reality. It also

provides a different way to experience stories. You’ve got things like Flee (2021, about a political refugee’s escape from Afghanistan) or Persepolis (2007, about a young girl’s coming of age during the Iranian revolution), and all these movies that deal with heavier subject matter in a way that has poetry and emotion without being as difficult.

MERINO: Yeah, there’s almost like a filter to separate you a

little bit, but also to allow you to watch it. I wish people would just take animated features off the kid shelf. Because they truly are for everybody.

DAWSON: Yeah.

MERINO: I’m so excited to see where the industry is going with animation. You mentioned Flee and films that are so deep and so meaningful. It allowed people to experience adult themes in a different way.

DAWSON: Were you using any live-action films as reference points?

MERINO: Yeah, The Grand Budapest Hotel was one we talked a lot about.

Continued on page 81

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MAXX TSAI Taiwanese-born Tsai credits director Ang Lee, for whom he worked as the Taiwanese production office coordinator on Life of Pi (2012), with inspiring him to pursue a producing career. He cites Lee’s early “Father Knows Best” trilogy (Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman) with changing his perspective on movies. “Although (Lee) is telling stories that describe traditional values, modern relationships and family conflicts about Chinese,” says Tsai, “he can make it accessible and enjoyable for people around the world. He made me realize cinema knows no borders.” Most recently, Tsai was a coproducer on Memoria (2021), starring Tilda Swinton, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.

BUCKET LIST “I am a great admirer of Terrence Malick. Working with him is on the very top of my producing bucket list!”

“Many years ago, a producer told me that to be a competent producer, (you must) ‘understand the job responsibilities for all the positions/credits.’ This advice has been so profoundly rewarding that I have been able to make films with people of different nationalities, languages, colors and cultural backgrounds anywhere in the world, and could always work in a respectful, friendly and pleasing environment.”

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THE 13TH ANNUAL PRODUCED BY CONFERENCE

Navigating a of Change Outgoing Presidents Gail Berman and Lucy Fisher talk Covid, #MeToo, Going Green and the Power of the Collective Mindset.

Interview By Steve Chagollan

W

hen Gail Berman and Lucy Fisher were elected presidents of the Producers Guild of America in June of 2018—the first two women to serve in that capacity in the organization’s history—Hollywood was still reeling from the Harvey Weinstein scandal of the previous fall, the #MeToo movement had become widespread, and streamers like Netflix and Amazon had turned Hollywood’s traditional business model upside down.

As if these tectonic shifts weren’t enough, the COVID-19 lockdown was already three months old as the two began their second term in the summer of 2020, when the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder forced Hollywood, and the country, to face a racial reckoning. Diversity—a long-stated goal of the guilds and studios—went from empty mantra to committed policy.

“There was a lot going on and we had a lot of challenges on our watch,” says Berman with understatement. “The industry had a lot of challenges. Society had a lot of challenges.”

What was clear from the beginning, though, was that Berman and Fisher were proven leaders. After all, they had been plucked from the top of the Hollywood food chain—perennial names in the trades’ annual power lists, with Berman already having earned the presidential seal at Regency

Gail

Television, the Fox Broadcasting Company’s entertainment division and Paramount Pictures.

Fisher—who was the PGA’s 2006 recipient of the David O. Selznick Achievement Award in Theatrical Motion Pictures, alongside her husband and producing partner, Douglas Wick— had served as vice chairman of Columbia TriStar, executive VP of worldwide production at Warner Brothers, head of production at Zoetrope and president of production at 20th Century Fox. This is not to mention their own production shingles as they took on the PGA’s top post: Berman’s The Jackal Group and Fisher’s Red Wagon Entertainment.

The list of successful series and movies engendered under their watch is too numerous to mention here. And yet they hardly crossed paths before both serving on the PGA’s Independent Production Safety Initiative committee shortly before occupying the Guild’s equivalent of the Oval Office.

When we spoke over the phone in early April, they were still basking in the afterglow of the PGA Awards three weeks prior—a star-studded affair that was sold out in record time after two years of remote ceremonies left members craving human interaction and mutual celebration.

Lucy

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NAVIGATING A MAELSTROM OF CHANGE

“THERE WAS AN EMPHASIS FOR A LONG TIME ON THE FEATURE BUSINESS, AND THAT MAY HAVE TAKEN CENTER STAGE FOR A WHILE. BUT THE DRAMATIC CHANGES IN THE BUSINESS OVER THE PAST SEVERAL YEARS HAVE TO BE REFLECTED IN WHERE THE GUILD IS GOING AS WELL.”-GAIL BERMAN The following was edited for clarity and brevity.

PRODUCED BY: Hollywood is a vast industry, but it’s also kind of a small town, so I find it baffling that you two weren’t better acquainted prior to serving as presidents of the PGA. BERMAN: It happens to be true. We knew of each other obviously, but being co-presidents made us get to know each other pretty quickly.

I like to refer to this as a shotgun marriage. One of the great parts about it, and hopefully Lucy feels the same way, was my opportunity to get to know Lucy Fisher. That’s been a remarkable part of this four-year journey for me.

FISHER: I’m blushing and saying the same. This is a job that one person really can’t do, besides the fact that we became very close friends almost immediately.

One of the nicest things about the Producers Guild is it’s a little bit of a village water well where people can talk to other people. There’s no question that talking to your peers makes things easier and less lonely. A producer’s job—as the head of anything, a show, a movie, whatever it is—can be lonely.

The Guild is designed so people can have encounters that can help make their lives more productive and fruitful and enjoyable.

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PB: I’m wondering if there was a division of duties. Were there certain strengths that one of you had that the other deferred to?

FISHER: I would say not—by experience level and by our past history. Gail is an extraordinary force in the television business and has been forever. Now she’s in the movie business as well. When I took the job, I had never produced television shows. So the PGA did a bit of a pivot and the separation between movies and television became smaller and smaller.

BERMAN: Obviously as the industry pivots, the Guild must do the same. I think there was an emphasis for a long time on the feature business, and that may have taken center stage for a while. But the dramatic changes in the business over the past several years have to be reflected in where the Guild is going as well. Some of that played into my strengths. Certainly Lucy is good enough of an executive to look at the big holistic picture. She doesn’t get mired in micromanagement.

FISHER: I’d also like to say on the television front that the PGA for a long time has not differentiated between movies and television the way that other organizations have.

We decided that was becoming an arbitrary division. Some people would say if a movie premieres on television and not in the theater, it wasn’t a movie—even though it was two hours and looks, smells and tastes like a movie. The PGA did not differentiate that way.

The wind was shifting, and we didn’t want to be followers—we wanted to be leaders. So we started to tear down that wall because most of our members already had, or would soon, work in both mediums.

We made it an overt effort to expand the backgrounds of our board members so that we did not represent primarily as feature people.

PB: Isn’t it strange to think that even as little as a half a decade ago, theatrical features were considered one class of creativity and TV was slightly below that?

BERMAN: It is kind of crazy. Somebody could have a background in one or the other and feel like they couldn’t be comfortable crossing those lines. It seems like it could never be that way now.

PB: Ms. Berman, you were an innovator in the digital space with Berman Braun back in 2007. Could you foresee then how powerful a force streamers like Netflixand

With PGA National Executive Director Susan Sprung at the 33rd Annual PGA Awards

Amazon would become in disrupting Hollywood’s distribution model?

BERMAN: I don’t think I was that clever.

I knew digital was something that we needed to pay attention to. At that time, Netflix was still delivering DVDs to your home mailbox. But it was clear that change was on the horizon, and we could—Berman Braun did—make tremendous headway in the early days of websites. We had many of them, and we learned a lot about where the world was headed. It was moving so quickly that it sort of went right through that phase. But it was clear that nothing was ever going to be the same.

PB: The obvious elephant in the room is a pandemic that continues to ebb and flow, despite all of us wishing it would go

away. Did you ever in your wildest dreams imagine something like this would cripple Hollywood for the better part of two years?

BERMAN: I certainly could never, and didn’t, anticipate anything like this. I certainly was thrown off by it in my own personal work. Then obviously we had to deal with it as it related to our Guild membership. We had to come up with safety procedures for our members.

A lot of our membership works in independent film, and they didn’t have access to some of the same research that the studios were doing. We had to get that going. Inside the Guild, we needed to try to assess and understand how to get our members back to work. Some people found themselves experiencing hard times. We needed to get an emergency fund together.

FISHER: The truth of it is, we were positively terrified, if I’m allowed to say that. We each have our own companies as well, so we had to take care of our families, we had to take care of our companies, and then we had the PGA. The weight of 8,000 people suddenly out of work pressed on us as a huge responsibility. We make most of our money through dues and through the PGA Awards.

Because so many members were hurting, we immediately put a hiatus on having to pay dues, so people who were struggling wouldn’t have that burden on top of everything else.

BERMAN: We had just moved into our brand new offices.

FISHER: Which were two or three times the size of the old ones.

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NAVIGATING A MAELSTROM OF CHANGE

“WE CAN LEAD BY PUTTING [THE GREEN INITAITVE] FORWARD AS A VERY, VERY IMPORTANT PART OF OUR MISSION... AND WE HAVE A GUIDE TO HELP [OUR MEMBERS] TAKE IT VERY SERIOUSLY.”-GAIL BERMAN

BERMAN: We moved in in January, so we were there about six, eight weeks maybe? Then everything had to close, so we had a larger expense than we had prior to moving. We had to furlough some people. We had to let some people go. But we also had to figure out how to keep the organization going.

FISHER: With the help of (PGA National Executive Director) Susan Sprung, who’s pretty brilliant, we played the horrible game of: ‘If we don’t have any income, how long can we last?’ And we found out that we could last nine months. Which took a lot of hardship in terms of cuts and stuff like that.

Producers basically only get paid when a project goes into production. So there we were without the income. Some people have big overall deals, but a very small percentage of our membership had that.

So it was very rough.

But I would like to say that we are now

in sounder financial shape than the Guild has ever been.

BERMAN: And one of the great things that did come out of it was we’re a national organization, and it was very difficult for some people to participate who were shooting in Vancouver or Atlanta.

But Zoom came along and people could participate from wherever they were in the world, and that was kind of great.

That will never go back to the way it was.

FISHER: The membership stepped up in a way that was so moving and spectacular.

Leaders rose to help each of these problems and devoted huge amounts of time, energy, intelligence, foresight, communication skills—everything that they could bring to keep it going and to build on it.

We have been blessed by having these members who preceded us from every avenue of the entertainment business

rolling up their sleeves and saying, “How can we help?”

PB: You were talking about Zoom being a kind of savior in those early pandemic days. But Zoom also became a source of burnout for a lot of people. I would imagine by the second time you were conducting your PGA awards remotely, you might have been over it.

BERMAN: It wasn’t the ideal, but at least we could honor the traditions of the Guild. We didn’t give out honorary awards, but we did give out awards for excellence in people’s work, and that felt like the right thing to do. In fact, a lot of good came out of that, which was we had never streamed our awards before.

When we did have an in-person show again, we kept the streaming alive, so a lot of people could tune in who weren’t able to attend. We had a sold-out event. So the good news is the technology again prevailed and we’re now using it going forward.

PB: One more pandemic question: In terms of safety measures that were implemented during that time, which ones are you keeping into perpetuity?

BERMAN: I will say the various different zones to keep people from being everywhere on a set. I felt it made things more efficient.

I do think that wearing masks when you’re in a close environment— when you’re helping people with makeup or hair or dressing them—is not a bad idea, and a pretty wise thing to do going forward. But we also have to be aware that our unions are going to set some examples and rules going forward. We want to make sure that we’re leading the way as we have been in terms of safety protocols, and doing it in concert with the various unions that we work with.

FISHER: I agree with everything Gail said. But there’s also the sense of community that’s harder to achieve when everybody’s going off in their own

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directions and not able to congregate. I look forward to a time when we can be together in person and the serendipity that happens when you can bump into somebody without a mask and sit down and have a conversation.

Just to segue back a little bit to the PGA Awards: They were scheduled for February and we pushed them back about six weeks. We had incredibly strict protocols. The response to gathering in person was so extreme—the people we felt would never show up because they hadn’t gone anywhere, really did.

And the response—we sold out faster than we ever had. People wrote us letters beforehand—the nominees and the honorees—saying, ‘We can’t wait to be with each other.” We just came out of it a few weeks ago, so we’re still having a little afterglow.

PB: Tell me about the Independent Productions Safety Initiative, which I understand was implemented under your predecessors’ watch.

BERMAN: It was a training program that was put in place to help our members deal with sexual harassment and safety issues on their sets. As producers, we are in a unique position to set the tone and standards on our sets. The PGA and its leadership put together a program funded

by CBS to help qualifying independent productions and provide them with free anti-harassment training and legal advice.

If you were in independent film or television or a digital production company with 20 or more individuals, you were eligible for free training in this area. You could get a lawyer on the phone, ask questions, and have safety and harassment briefings for your cast and crew prior to starting your productions.

That was the initiative that took place as we were getting started. Lori McCreary and Gary Lucchesi were the presidents as that stuff broke. It was a great idea. Susan (Sprung) put the program together and it is alive and well.

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With Brad Pitt at the 31st Annual PGA Awards

FISHER: If your production is with a major studio or network or streamer, they provide legal and HR help. But if you are an independent production, you are completely on your own to try to deal with this.

People didn’t have road maps of how to do it, or how to conduct the training. The fact that it was free, and anybody could take advantage of it, was a really big deal. I think bullying is also in there now too.

That was what we dealt with first.

Then we had Black Lives Matter. So even before the pandemic, there were a lot of social issues where we realized we wanted the PGA to be a front liner on it, and we hadn’t been.

PB: I think it’s way more dramatic than a lot of people think, because bullying just seemed to be part and parcel of Hollywood culture, whether it was on sets or in studio suites. That’s just no longer acceptable, and it just seems like it happened so quickly. Suddenly it’s not OK. BERMAN: Correct.

PB: Can you pinpoint some of the most lasting lessons you learned as copresidents of the PGA? BERMAN: We still have a ways to go. The lesson I learn all the time is that leadership

counts. And that it’s really important that if you’re going to take a position like this, or be voted into a position like this, and agree to do it, that you take it seriously and understand that people are looking to you for leadership. As producers, we’re leaders to begin with. You know, we know how to assess situations and make a plan and execute the plan.

My takeaway is it’s a very hard job. And it takes much more time than we ever anticipated, based on all of the things we just talked about. But if you take the job on, you’ve got to step up.

FISHER: It really pays to have great people around you. If you don’t, (a) you have to do everything yourself, which you can’t do, and (b) you won’t be as good.

Because the whole being greater than the sum is something that I learn over and over again with every production, every organization. How to make people feel included is a very big part of it, because with everybody rowing the same boat in the same direction, you’re going to go a lot faster.

BERMAN: Susan Sprung and (Associate National Executive Director) Michelle Byrd, who lead the organization, are two examples of excellent leaders that the membership can really depend on. It’s been a tough

“IT REALLY PAYS TO HAVE GREAT PEOPLE AROUND YOU. IF YOU DON’T, (A) YOU HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING YOURSELF, WHICH YOU CAN’T DO, AND (B) YOU WON’T BE AS GOOD.”-LUCY FISHER

couple years for everyone, and these folks really have risen to the occasion.

PB: You two have played such huge roles as studio executives and independent producers, with dream resumes that almost couldn’t be made up. How do you impart some of that knowledge to PGA members?

BERMAN: We have all kinds of workshops dealing with exactly this stuff. All year long we have programming. We have a Produced By Conference that we do in June where we bring together a thousand people. We have this huge mentorship program pairing more experienced people with newer people. We have PGA Create, which launched last fall, a program for emerging and mid-career producers from underrepresented backgrounds. We just do as much as we can in whatever spare time we have, which isn’t that much. But as an organization, it’s the mainstay of our stock in trade to try to do exactly that.

A lot of producers were studio executives at some point or another, so we’re not alone in that.

PB: Obviously, climate change is a scientific fact and we’re experiencing it every year with raging fires and long, hot summers that drift into winter. And there’s a lot of waste that’s killing the oceans.

So I love the fact that you have put this foremost in your mission statement with

the PGA Green initiative.

BERMAN: It’s important to note that it’s been around since 2008, prior to our tenure. So the Green initiative, which was started by (PGA members) Mari Jo Winkler, Lydia Dean Pilcher and Katie Carpenter, was way ahead of its time. And we have our Green Production Guide—you can go on our website and find out how to handle lots of situations on sets, etc., so this is an area that this Guild has led in for many, many years.

I think it’s an amazing thing that these women were prescient enough in 2008 to know that something had to be done.

PB: Will this be enforceable at some point or is it always going to be voluntary?

BERMAN: We can lead by putting this forward as a very, very important part of our mission. I don’t know that you ever get full participation or can force participation, but we can make sure that our members know that we take this very seriously and that we have a guide to help them take it very seriously.

FISHER: And we partnered with the studios early on with our guide.

BERMAN: And they’ve been supportive.

PB: What is the biggest misconception

about a producer’s role and how do you disabuse people of this notion?

FISHER: That’s a tricky one. I think the biggest misconception is that producers don’t do anything. We try to explain that we do everything.

PB: At the PGA Awards, George Lucas said something I wasn’t sure how to interpret: He said executive producers don’t count; that they raise the money, make the deals, hire the people, then sit back and watch television. How much truth is there in that?

FISHER: It really goes case by case. In television it’s the highest title you can have. Part of the answer is the PGA Mark.

It codifies the definition of what a real producer does, so that you can apply those benchmarks. The studios all said, “What’s in it for us? It’s your problem.”

They didn’t disagree that the titles were given out like candies instead of money to everybody’s brother-in-law or somebody that they didn’t want to pay.

Every few years we go through it again: “Are we doing it well enough? Should we change the definition? How do we protect (the credit)? How are we making sure that everybody who deserves it gets it? And how do we make sure the people who don’t deserve it can’t game the system?”

Our great pride is that not only does our film vetting go to the Producers Guild Awards, it goes to the Academy Awards and the BAFTAs. So it’s becoming the gold standard for the entire industry—the actual real definition. People really, really want the PGA Mark because it says, “You did the work.”

I think that has done more for recognizing the actual work of the profession than anything we can say.

We’re not a union, for better or for worse.

But we can move with a greater speed than some organizations. It’s the same skill set as making a product of entertainment: What are we lacking in our business that we can do better at? There’s a lot of things. So we keep trying. ¢

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P G A AT YO U R SERVICE

ALONGSIDE TWO EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS. WAS THIS A CASE OF FEWER COOKS IN THE KITCHEN, THE BETTER?

MARKING TIME

That’s how we do things at Pixar. The executive producers are generally creatives that can be more objective partners for the director in developing the story and can wear the studio mantle for determining when creative thresholds have been met. I work closely with an associate producer, in this case Michael Warch, who is more intimately involved in the staffing and the day-to-day management of the budget and schedule, along with our production manager, Sara Wilson. As the producer, I am the director’s partner for getting his vision onto the screen within constraints set by the studio. I think it’s helpful that we can work this out together, that he has one point of contact for the overall strategy of the film. I certainly enjoy this model, as it keeps me as close as possible to the filmmaking.

Producers of two upcoming films share their insight on making the projects that earned them the Producers Mark certification.

Lightyear

Galyn Susman, p.g.a.

Disney and Pixar’s Lightyear, the latest spinoff from the wildly successful Toy Story franchise, is described as an origin story, with Buzz Lightyear and his crew stranded on a hostile planet with the mission to get them all safely home. Tim Allen, long the voice of the buff, Herculean-jawed astronaut, has been replaced by a younger model: Chris Evans. The original Toy Story (1995) was the first feature-length film created entirely with CGI, and it’s safe to say that Lightyear producer Galyn Susman has witnessed the form’s phenomenal growth first-hand over the years, having joined Pixar in 1990. She’s a CGI pioneer in her own right, having participated on the team that created a short film on Macintosh computers in the late ’80s when she conducted graphics research and development at Apple. Lightyear is due out on June 17, the first theatrical release for Pixar Animation Studios since Disney and Pixar’s Onward in March 2020.

SAVE FOR THE CHARACTERS, LIGHTYEAR FEATURES AN ASTONISHING LIVE-ACTION, CINEMATIC LOOK—ALBEIT ONE WITH THE KIND OF SPECIAL EFFECTS WE ASSOCIATE WITH THE STAR WARS FILMS. HAS IT GOTTEN TO THE POINT WHERE THERE’S NO LEVEL

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OF PHOTOREALISM THAT CAN’T BE ACHIEVED WITH COMPUTER ANIMATION? I’m not sure that photorealism is really the boundary condition. We have been able to achieve photorealism in FX for live-action films for some time now. I do think that we are no longer limited in the stories that we can convincingly tell with animation. We can now create worlds and characters that an audience can invest in and feel concern for, and we have the cinematic tools to apply the wealth of live-action cinematography lessons to telling complex stories. We are fortunate that, as sci-fi lovers, we have been given the opportunity to use all of these tools to make Lightyear.

The question really isn’t “why animation?” anymore. Animation is a medium, like any other medium, not a genre.

LIGHTYEAR FEATURES A SAME-SEX, BIRACIAL MARRIAGE. MIGHT THIS BE A FIRST IN THE DISNEY-PIXAR UNIVERSE? I believe we have alluded to same-sex relationships in some of our prior films. I’m not sure about biracial, though we have been definitely striving to be more diversely representative in our films for some time now. I do believe this is the first time a same-sex relationship has played such a significant emotional role in one of our films. There is so much I could say about the role of this relationship, the choices we made, etc., much of it being unnecessary spoilers. Suffice it to say that I am thrilled to show a healthy, long-term relationship that is central to the arc of our characters, and more specifically, to Buzz’s arc. I hope our audiences find it meaningful.

HOW LONG DID THIS PROJECT TAKE FROM THE INITIAL RENDERINGS TO THE FINAL PRODUCT? (Director) Angus (MacLane) and I have been working on this film for over five years. That includes all of the time in development, script, storyboarding, etc.

When you say “initial renderings,” if you mean from when we first pitched the concept, that would be five and a half years. If you mean from when we started “shooting,” i.e., when we began building shots in the computer with characters in environments, that would be the fall of 2020.

Day Shift

Shaun Redick, p.g.a.

Clockwise from top: Alisha Hawthorne (right), Lightyear’s comrade in arms, voiced by Uzo Aduba, gets married to a same-sex partner and raises a biracial family; Lightyear with Sox (Peter Sohn), his robotic sidekick; Susman on the set of Lightyear

THIS IS THE SORT OF LAVISH PROJECT WHERE YOU’D EXPECT AN ARMY OF PRODUCERS, AND YET YOU ARE THE SOLE CREDITED PRODUCER,

The upcoming Day Shift, an action thriller set in the Southland that combines domestic drama, the supernatural and comedy. Oscar winner Jamie Foxx (Ray, 2004) plays a blue-collar everyman struggling to hold his marriage together while raising an 8-year-old daughter. His night job? Vampire killer.

It marks the directorial debut of stuntman-turnedfilmmaker J.J. Perry. Shaun Redick, a former literary and packaging agent who comes to the producing profession by way of WME and ICM, played a key role as producer on Jordan Peele’s game-changing directorial debut, the horror feature Get Out (2017), and Spike Lee’s provocative BlacKkKlansman (2018)—

June | July 2022

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P G A AT YO U R SERVICE

P G A AT YO U R SERVICE

ALONGSIDE TWO EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS. WAS THIS A CASE OF FEWER COOKS IN THE KITCHEN, THE BETTER?

MARKING TIME

That’s how we do things at Pixar. The executive producers are generally creatives that can be more objective partners for the director in developing the story and can wear the studio mantle for determining when creative thresholds have been met. I work closely with an associate producer, in this case Michael Warch, who is more intimately involved in the staffing and the day-to-day management of the budget and schedule, along with our production manager, Sara Wilson. As the producer, I am the director’s partner for getting his vision onto the screen within constraints set by the studio. I think it’s helpful that we can work this out together, that he has one point of contact for the overall strategy of the film. I certainly enjoy this model, as it keeps me as close as possible to the filmmaking.

Producers of two upcoming films share their insight on making the projects that earned them the Producers Mark certification.

Lightyear

Galyn Susman, p.g.a.

Disney and Pixar’s Lightyear, the latest spinoff from the wildly successful Toy Story franchise, is described as an origin story, with Buzz Lightyear and his crew stranded on a hostile planet with the mission to get them all safely home. Tim Allen, long the voice of the buff, Herculean-jawed astronaut, has been replaced by a younger model: Chris Evans. The original Toy Story (1995) was the first feature-length film created entirely with CGI, and it’s safe to say that Lightyear producer Galyn Susman has witnessed the form’s phenomenal growth first-hand over the years, having joined Pixar in 1990. She’s a CGI pioneer in her own right, having participated on the team that created a short film on Macintosh computers in the late ’80s when she conducted graphics research and development at Apple. Lightyear is due out on June 17, the first theatrical release for Pixar Animation Studios since Disney and Pixar’s Onward in March 2020.

SAVE FOR THE CHARACTERS, LIGHTYEAR FEATURES AN ASTONISHING LIVE-ACTION, CINEMATIC LOOK—ALBEIT ONE WITH THE KIND OF SPECIAL EFFECTS WE ASSOCIATE WITH THE STAR WARS FILMS. HAS IT GOTTEN TO THE POINT WHERE THERE’S NO LEVEL

72

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OF PHOTOREALISM THAT CAN’T BE ACHIEVED WITH COMPUTER ANIMATION? I’m not sure that photorealism is really the boundary condition. We have been able to achieve photorealism in FX for live-action films for some time now. I do think that we are no longer limited in the stories that we can convincingly tell with animation. We can now create worlds and characters that an audience can invest in and feel concern for, and we have the cinematic tools to apply the wealth of live-action cinematography lessons to telling complex stories. We are fortunate that, as sci-fi lovers, we have been given the opportunity to use all of these tools to make Lightyear.

The question really isn’t “why animation?” anymore. Animation is a medium, like any other medium, not a genre.

LIGHTYEAR FEATURES A SAME-SEX, BIRACIAL MARRIAGE. MIGHT THIS BE A FIRST IN THE DISNEY-PIXAR UNIVERSE? I believe we have alluded to same-sex relationships in some of our prior films. I’m not sure about biracial, though we have been definitely striving to be more diversely representative in our films for some time now. I do believe this is the first time a same-sex relationship has played such a significant emotional role in one of our films. There is so much I could say about the role of this relationship, the choices we made, etc., much of it being unnecessary spoilers. Suffice it to say that I am thrilled to show a healthy, long-term relationship that is central to the arc of our characters, and more specifically, to Buzz’s arc. I hope our audiences find it meaningful.

HOW LONG DID THIS PROJECT TAKE FROM THE INITIAL RENDERINGS TO THE FINAL PRODUCT? (Director) Angus (MacLane) and I have been working on this film for over five years. That includes all of the time in development, script, storyboarding, etc.

When you say “initial renderings,” if you mean from when we first pitched the concept, that would be five and a half years. If you mean from when we started “shooting,” i.e., when we began building shots in the computer with characters in environments, that would be the fall of 2020.

Day Shift

Shaun Redick, p.g.a.

Clockwise from top: Alisha Hawthorne (right), Lightyear’s comrade in arms, voiced by Uzo Aduba, gets married to a same-sex partner and raises a biracial family; Lightyear with Sox (Peter Sohn), his robotic sidekick; Susman on the set of Lightyear

THIS IS THE SORT OF LAVISH PROJECT WHERE YOU’D EXPECT AN ARMY OF PRODUCERS, AND YET YOU ARE THE SOLE CREDITED PRODUCER,

The upcoming Day Shift, an action thriller set in the Southland that combines domestic drama, the supernatural and comedy. Oscar winner Jamie Foxx (Ray, 2004) plays a blue-collar everyman struggling to hold his marriage together while raising an 8-year-old daughter. His night job? Vampire killer.

It marks the directorial debut of stuntman-turnedfilmmaker J.J. Perry. Shaun Redick, a former literary and packaging agent who comes to the producing profession by way of WME and ICM, played a key role as producer on Jordan Peele’s game-changing directorial debut, the horror feature Get Out (2017), and Spike Lee’s provocative BlacKkKlansman (2018)—

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both films that combined social consciousness with sly humor. Day Shift premieres August 12 on Netflix.

Day Shift has been a blast to prep, produce and post, and the marketing campaign, starting soon, is very exciting and cool.

GIVEN ITS MIXED-GENRE ELEMENTS, WHAT DID YOU ENVISION FOR THIS TONALLY? AND HOW DID YOU AND YOUR TEAM NAVIGATE THESE SEEMINGLY DISPARATE ELEMENTS?

WHAT WAS THE BIGGEST PROBLEM-SOLVING CHALLENGE THAT YOU ENCOUNTERED DURING PRODUCTION?

Our goal was to produce a fun action thriller with a buddycomedy element. Bud (Foxx) is a character our audience can identify with. He’s trying hard to save his marriage, his family and his business but can’t seem to get a break. At the same time, it’s a love letter to the San Fernando Valley.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE IN A NUTSHELL HOW YOU DIVVIED UP PRODUCING DUTIES WITH YOUR WIFE, YVETTE, AND YOUR OTHER PRODUCING PARTNERS, JASON SPITZ AND CHAD STAHELSKI? Yvette and I develop properties together and discovered Tyler Tice’s screenplay and developed it further with him. We brought it to J.J. Perry, a top name in action films, to direct. He’s close friends with Chad Stahelski (the Wick franchise), so we all teamed up and continued to collectively develop the script around our filmmaker’s vision. Our whole group built a dream cast and crew, and our Netflix team is strong, stayed close and really helped (us) producers get everything we needed. Chad and J.J. are elite action (veterans) with nonstop, wild, fun ideas.

Navigating COVID in 2021 was a big challenge, but we became very good at producing with extra safety measures in effect 24/7.

Producing as well as communicating on set through zones, masks, plastic shields and text messaging to reduce contact is not easy.

FEW ACTORS COMMAND THE SCREEN AS CHARISMATICALLY AS JAMIE FOXX. WHAT DOES HE BRING TO THE TABLE THAT YOU DIDN’T EXPECT? I’ve always been a Jamie Foxx fan since In Living Color, and this was the first time I got to work with him. He’s a total movie star.

Every day on set was like a stand-up show or a concert, and we had front-row seats. We hope to get a sequel and do it all again. ¢

Certification via the Producers Mark indicates that a producer performed a major portion of the producing functions on a specific project. Criteria, its definition, the process for earning the mark and other particulars can be viewed at producersguild.org.

Jamie Foxx, left, plays a pool cleaner who moonlights as a vampire killer in Day Shift, on which Shaun Redick is a producer.

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both films that combined social consciousness with sly humor. Day Shift premieres August 12 on Netflix.

Day Shift has been a blast to prep, produce and post, and the marketing campaign, starting soon, is very exciting and cool.

GIVEN ITS MIXED-GENRE ELEMENTS, WHAT DID YOU ENVISION FOR THIS TONALLY? AND HOW DID YOU AND YOUR TEAM NAVIGATE THESE SEEMINGLY DISPARATE ELEMENTS?

WHAT WAS THE BIGGEST PROBLEM-SOLVING CHALLENGE THAT YOU ENCOUNTERED DURING PRODUCTION?

Our goal was to produce a fun action thriller with a buddycomedy element. Bud (Foxx) is a character our audience can identify with. He’s trying hard to save his marriage, his family and his business but can’t seem to get a break. At the same time, it’s a love letter to the San Fernando Valley.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE IN A NUTSHELL HOW YOU DIVVIED UP PRODUCING DUTIES WITH YOUR WIFE, YVETTE, AND YOUR OTHER PRODUCING PARTNERS, JASON SPITZ AND CHAD STAHELSKI? Yvette and I develop properties together and discovered Tyler Tice’s screenplay and developed it further with him. We brought it to J.J. Perry, a top name in action films, to direct. He’s close friends with Chad Stahelski (the Wick franchise), so we all teamed up and continued to collectively develop the script around our filmmaker’s vision. Our whole group built a dream cast and crew, and our Netflix team is strong, stayed close and really helped (us) producers get everything we needed. Chad and J.J. are elite action (veterans) with nonstop, wild, fun ideas.

Navigating COVID in 2021 was a big challenge, but we became very good at producing with extra safety measures in effect 24/7.

Producing as well as communicating on set through zones, masks, plastic shields and text messaging to reduce contact is not easy.

FEW ACTORS COMMAND THE SCREEN AS CHARISMATICALLY AS JAMIE FOXX. WHAT DOES HE BRING TO THE TABLE THAT YOU DIDN’T EXPECT? I’ve always been a Jamie Foxx fan since In Living Color, and this was the first time I got to work with him. He’s a total movie star.

Every day on set was like a stand-up show or a concert, and we had front-row seats. We hope to get a sequel and do it all again. ¢

Certification via the Producers Mark indicates that a producer performed a major portion of the producing functions on a specific project. Criteria, its definition, the process for earning the mark and other particulars can be viewed at producersguild.org.

Jamie Foxx, left, plays a pool cleaner who moonlights as a vampire killer in Day Shift, on which Shaun Redick is a producer.

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ONE ON ONE

Reimagined scenes. By the end of it, you could just feel him dying to sing.

And by the end of it, he sang a couple of songs—enough that (Larson’s sister) Julie, after our first reading, turned to me and said, “I feel like he is channeling my brother.” I said, “We’re five days in and you’re already feeling that way.”

We set Andrew up with vocal lessons, and every time we did a workshop, he would come back and he would be singing a little more confidently.

By the time we all convened in New York in January 2020, and he got his first Jonathan Larson perm, it was as though Jonathan was in the room. It was really an amazing thing to witness.

WEBSTER: Wow, that’s very moving.

I guess the similarity with our film was instead of singing, it was the British accent—a very, very particular, aristocratic English accent. We all thought, “Can she do it?” She got a fine dialect coach very early on, William Conacher, who ironically also does The Crown. So he’s a world expert on Princess Diana and accents.

It was very challenging for Kristen because she knew she absolutely had to nail it. We knew that all the practical details, the etiquette, were very, very important to get right, so we had two royal advisors on set.

At the heart of it was Kristen’s ability to do this accent. We checked in with William, and sure enough, on day 1 she had it down.

There was no doubt about it.

OH: I feel like locations are so

important, especially for actors as they are getting into character. How did that kind of thinking go into where you decided to shoot the film?

WEBSTER: We were all ready to

film the movie in Britain in houses

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Continued from page 57

which are similar to Sandringham.

But along came COVID, and because of Kristen’s and Pablo’s availability, we had only a limited window in which we could shoot, which was basically starting in January last year.

GERMANY DOUBLES FOR THE UK WEBSTER: Because COVID was

out of control in the UK and in Germany, things were under much greater restrictions. We were already working with a German coproducer, Jonas Dornbach of Komplizen Film.

So we ran budgets on shooting the movie in Germany or England. The key thing was that the houses exist in Germany which mirror those in the UK. The architecture is the same, generally speaking. Sandringham doesn’t look anything like the amalgam of the two houses where we shot in Germany, but the sense of them architecturally, the authenticity, is there at the core of it.

So we shifted the whole production to Germany and shot all but one week there. Then we shot key location exteriors in England in and around the area where Sandringham is, in Norfolk.

So it came together. The German crews were fantastic. There was a sense of camaraderie that we’re all in this together.

In Schlosshotel Kronberg, a castle built in the late 1800s where most of the interiors were shot, we lived in the hotel. It was closed because of COVID but we lived there so people would come out of their rooms, walk downstairs, and be on set. There was a kind of immersive quality to the experience, which I think really helped the final version of the film.

OH: It sounds like method producing.

WEBSTER: Yeah, completely

by accident [laughing].

But tell me about your experience and tell me about New York. What was on a soundstage and what was real?

OH: Well, our biggest challenge

was trying to present a New York City that no longer exists. How do you do that with locations like the Moondance Diner in SoHo and Jon’s apartments, which are no longer actual places where you can go and film? And at the same time, Times Square is completely changed.

WEBSTER: Yes, absolutely.

OH: We started shooting on March

3, 2020, and on our first day, we shot all of our hospital scenes. Ironically, as part of the props, all the actors had face masks on because they were going into an AIDS/HIV ward. Then we were disrupted due to the pandemic.

But we had a week and a half where we got to shoot at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which hasn’t really changed since the ’90s. We got to shoot at the Strand Bookstore, which I don’t think we would have been able to do post-pandemic.

On our 10th day, we were shut down.

March 12 was our last day. All of our crew that wasn’t local got flown out the next day. It was a lot of wait and see and hunker down and weather the storm and be safe. I remember walking through Times Square, and it would be completely empty except for me—one or two people on their daily sanity walk.

Andrew Garfield stayed in New York until summer because he was hoping that we would go back into production.

It wasn’t until June or July when we said, “Go back, go to England for a couple of months.” We spent those six months having to come up with a safety plan. I made color-coded grids about

ONE ON ONE

the risk that each scene would have.

WEBSTER: Wow, that’s extraordinary.

And did you do any stage work at all? Or was it all location?

OH: It was a lot of stage work. The

Moondance Diner was already being built. Jonathan’s apartment was already being built. But the greatest silver lining for the entire experience was that our plan for New York Theater Workshop was to build it in that abandoned factory in Bushwick because New York Theater Workshop should never be available. It has a vibrant theater program and you can never go in there and shoot. But theater wasn’t happening in fall 2020, and the actual location was available.

So we didn’t have to try to recreate those brick walls or that space. We got to spend a week and a half there.

WEBSTER: And the big shot where we pull out and go up and out of the Moondance, and we see SoHo— how was that shot realized?

OH: In the 10 days of production

before we shut down, we had shot at Duarte Square, which is right across the street. All the footage of Jonathan on his bicycle cycling past we had done with a green screen across the street where the diner would be.

Then we shot plates, then superimposed the diner into that section and created SoHo all around because that doesn’t really exist anymore.

WEBSTER: We had no green screen in Spencer at all. We shot the film on Super 16. And there’s very little in the way of visual effects in the movie—removal of a few details and stuff. But we were aided by the fact

we were dealing with period houses with basically period furniture.

FIRST-TIME DIRECTOR EQUATION

WEBSTER: Can we talk about Lin,

please? I’m not mistaken in saying that’s his first film he’s directed, right?

OH: Yes. WEBSTER: So assured in direction. I

mean, you feel it. If you have experience watching a lot of films, you sense the directorial hand on everything.

Did he grow in this experience?

OH: The thing that I appreciate the

most about Lin is, with everything that he has accomplished, one of the first things he said to me is, “Please treat me like a first-time filmmaker.”

As a producer, that tells you that you are now working with a collaborator.

He wanted to know, “What am I not asking? What do I need to do? Who do I need to talk to? How do I do my research so that when I’m on set and I’m in charge, I know exactly what I’m doing?” Because we had such a prolonged development period of several years, he took different jobs so he could shadow directors. Being on the set of Mary Poppins Returns was, I feel, a master class in directing for him from Rob Marshall. In the Heights went into production in the summer of 2019 and he shadowed (director) Jon Chu. Lin, I think, has been a storyteller his entire life. By the time we got to the first day of shooting, we had done several workshops where he was in the director’s chair. And I think he realized that he actually had the answers to every single question.

Because not only had he grown up in New York during this time, but his and Jonathan Larson’s life had

so many parallels. So when you talk about sitting at a keyboard, erasing your writing—he’s done that. He can speak from personal experience what it’s like to press the backspace key in frustration in that way.

WEBSTER: I’ve worked with quite a

few first-time directors, and directors who’ve come from other mediums. One of the things that for me is absolutely key—along with understanding the story and being able to work with actors—is the technical side of filmmaking. You’ve got to understand lenses and light at the very minimum.

It’s always that challenge when you’re with a first-timer, because they’re not going to know. You have to trust. I think it was extraordinary work that Lin did. It’s so assured.

There’s a theatricality to the piece.

But because you’re grounded in real New York, real people, it doesn’t feel theatrical at all, even at its most theatrical, which is astonishing.

OH: Well, I think as soon as we started talking about the movie—and it sounds like Pablo is the same way—Lin had a vision. You can tell when a director is already cutting a movie in their head.

WEBSTER: Pablo did everything he

said he was going to do, and that’s what you want. That’s why I’m not a director. I can make suggestions to a director, but, in a way, I want them to come back and say, “No, you’re wrong.

We should do it this way.” My ideas are usually only going to be catalytic.

Well, it’s lovely to be here and spend time with you, Julie. This has been great.

OH: Likewise. Thank you for loving

the movie and for this conversation. ¢

June | July 2022

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ONE ON ONE

for All Ages DAWSON: Oh really? The colors?

MERINO: The colors and the overall feel of it. Very, very early on, it was one that we looked at and watched and talked about a lot.

DAWSON: That’s interesting. Because I think definitely in terms of Mr. Fox, a lot of the influences from the stop-motion side were the classic Christmas specials and the things that we saw as kids, like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964).

But when we get to Isle of Dogs, it was like things got more cinematic, so there are certain ones from ’70s animation like Watership Down (1978) where there was a dark side. But also because of the Japanese side to it, there’s a lot of (Akira) Kurosawa references in there and different things we sort of just picked up along the way.

That’s one of the fun things about animation—you can take a reference and put in an animation filter and it becomes something new.

MERINO: Charise Castro Smith, who was

our co-director and one of our writers, wrote that whole scene about leaving home and losing Manuel (the family patriarch, who is killed by renegade soldiers). We knew once that was locked in, it was like, “OK, that’s a big part of the film.” We played with it, on where it lands: Is it going to be at the end of the film? At the beginning?

It was a big discussion. We were thinking, “Is it too much?” Because you’re in storyboards, and then as you start making it, it becomes more and more real.

We did play with it, as in “How much are we going to show? How much do we need to show?” Of course, we want people to stay in the film. We don’t want them to pull out and think, “Oh my gosh, they’re going to kill him, and this is how they’re doing it.”

DAWSON: Right.

Continued from page 62

MERINO: It explains how (Manuel’s

widow and family matriarch) Abuela changed and it kind of threads throughout the story. But it is one of those things where you’re like, “This is a serious moment in the film,” and kids in life have serious moments also.

BIGGEST CHALLENGE

DAWSON: There were so many. The thing with stop-motion is it’s not just like you can draw it and it exists; you have to physically build it.

system is like an entire room full of boards everywhere.

When one thing goes wrong with an animator, he’s holding up everybody else.

So that whole traffic jam of scheduling assets, physical assets—we had like one person whose entire job was figuring these out and moving these slips of paper around this room all day long.

MERINO: That’s a whole set of logistics that I never even thought of.

DAWSON: We made multiples (of each

MERINO: Yeah.

main character). And as time goes by, you’re like “We need another one.”

DAWSON: The biggest challenge we had

MERINO: For Encanto, one of the

on Mr. Fox starting off was how to make the faces. And then the fur. Because you’ve got a drawing that says here’s what the guy’s supposed to look like. But you put fuzziness on it, and you lose all the character and all the ability. So that was the kind of thing we spent a lot of time on, and it was just trial and error.

That’s the kind of thing with stop-motion that you don’t think of when you’re watching.

MERINO: I’ve never really thought about it, but because we build our characters, even the ones with fur, always the expression in mind, right? We’re able to manipulate it in the computer, and the emotions come through in the film. But when you’re building all these characters and you maybe put a layer of texture on top of it...

DAWSON: It’s like wearing a thick

sweater so you can’t see the outline of the body anymore.

MERINO: Yeah, we’ve lost the silhouette.

DAWSON: I think just the biggest

challenge of all was scheduling programs and software. Our scheduling

things we committed to early on was the number of characters. It was important to the story that we were going to have this family of 12, and we wanted to make sure that each character earned their place in the film and that they had depth. We would screen the dailies, and people would be like, “I don’t really think we need him or her.”

Because they weren’t doing anything.

Then we’d go back again and say, “OK, how can we make them a deeper character?” Because it’s very easy when things get going and you’re like, “Well, maybe if we cut down characters, then the animators are only animating three characters in a shot, not five.”

DAWSON: Right.

MERINO: But we were all committed

from very early on that we wanted to keep these characters, because it made it more real.

The biggest and most unexpected challenge was the pandemic. When the rest of the world said, “We’ll go home for a couple of weeks,” we had story meetings that went on and on, and it became, “Oh shoot—we’re going to make this at home now.” We ended up doing every single frame from home. ¢

June | July 2022

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IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF GIANTS

Zanuck’s D-Day Opus

PHOTO BY DAILY EXPRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Written By Steve Chagollan

ON THE BEACH: Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, far left, acts as field marshal on the set of The Longest Day. Seated next to him is Robert Wagner, and far right is former teen idol-turned-actor Tommy Sands.

T

he 60th anniversary of producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day traces an eerie parallel to the current devastation in Ukraine, where cities and towns have been reduced to rubble. In Zanuck’s 1962 magnum opus about D-Day, during an assault on the French port of Ouistreham—the scope of which is stunningly captured with a sustained aerial tracking shot—French soldiers are forced to level their own landmarks to root out their Nazi occupants.

This was a film where “a cast of thousands” literally applied (23,000 real soldiers were used to fill out the battle scenes, including the U.S. Navy’s Sixth Fleet). Zanuck recruited an international team of directors to lend each major participant an equal perspective, intimate or epic. Instead of accented English, French and German characters spoke their own language, despite the commercial risk of using subtitles. Through it all, Zanuck commanded more troops than any single general did during the actual invasion. His associate producer, Elmo Williams, was listed in the end credits as “coordinator of battle scenes.” Zanuck himself got behind the camera to helm key sequences.

A pioneering Fox executive whose legend loomed as large as that of his contemporaries Thalberg and Selznick, Zanuck earned the possessory credit emblazoned on The Longest Day’s posters from the get-go. He bought the rights to Cornelius Ryan’s book and insisted Ryan write the screenplay, with support from such scribes as James Jones (From Here to Eternity). He recruited a global all-star cast that included Richard Burton, Jean-Louis Barrault and Curt Jurgens. American names ranged from Golden Age stalwarts like John Wayne and Henry Fonda to such young Hollywood heartthrobs as Fabian, Robert Wagner and Richard Beymer, fresh off of West Side Story. Zanuck even found a dead ringer for Dwight D. Eisenhower, a nonactor named Henry Grace.

Zanuck’s gambles, including the decision to shoot in black and white, paid off. The Longest Day turned out to be the top grossing film of 1962, outgunning Lawrence of Arabia and affording Fox executives a huge sigh of relief given that cost overruns on Cleopatra, being made simultaneously, almost sunk the studio.

“In the entire history of warfare, no undertaking had ever approached in size or stakes the D-Day invasion,” said Zanuck in 1969. One could say the same about the producer’s massive cinematic undertaking.

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