UPDATE: Since this post, the class has come and gone. If you'd like to visit the web-site we built about producing for film and TV, please CLICK HERE.
Until the end of December, the "For What It's Worth" blog is also going to serve as a virtual meeting place for the class I'm teaching at USC School of Cinema and Television.
It's a grad-level class, CNTV 589, about the role of the producer in the entertainment industry. Since one thing every producer knows is that a good title can go a long way to selling your project, I've re-named it from the generic "Role of the Producer" to "Produce or Perish!"
While I could probably create a separate web destination for this material, I'm electing to use this address so that more people outside of the class can share in this information. We've got some very high-caliber guests and the information they have to teach will be written up and posted within a few days of their appearances. At last night's first class, for example, our guest was Patric Verrone, the current President of the Writers Guild of America, west. His insight into the way something begins as a "property" and gets produced, distributed and exhibited was really first-rate. The WGA's contract with the AMPTP expires next year and with all the technological and content-delivery changes taking place the negotiations are expected to be ground-breaking. His comments are being word-processed now and will up on this site soon.
Next week, it's Marshall Herskovitz, the current President of the Producers Guild of America.
There are a lot of exceptionally bright grad students in this class and I've no doubt that at least some of them will be running Hollywood in a few years. I'm looking forward to getting to know them first.
And, since they say a picture is worth a thousand words and Hollywood is all about the visual media, here are a couple of ways to visually understand what a producer's life is all about...
Ask any honest-to-God working producer. They'll all tell you they feel like one of the above pictures at least half the time.
