I’ll flesh out your film just as soon as I need money

Rob Long knows what it means when a producer says his idea is practically the finished article

Years ago, I met a movie producer who was on a roll. He had made a bunch of successful movies, and one of the things you have to do when you’re a movie producer is meet a lot of writers. The key for a successful producer is always to look busy.

He specialised in comedies and he wanted to talk about doing something together. I wasn’t really a fan of his pictures – they were mostly of the “gross out” variety: lots of bodily-function humour, scenes of teenage debauchery, that sort of thing – but at the time I found myself in the middle of an unexpectedly costly house-building project, and, well, there’s probably a more diplomatic way to put this, but the truth is I needed money, and this producer had lots of it.

You don’t need a sophisticated business mind, or an MBA, to understand the logic. I took the meeting.

I was younger then, and didn’t know what I know now, which is that I would always need money and someone slightly embarrassing always has some to offer. That’s one of the reasons I still have so many meetings with producers.

The meeting started out well. The producer was charming, despite the charmlessness of his output. Perhaps it was a case of being so sophisticated and clever in real life that he ran out of it when it came to his projects. He told me that he was working on a science fiction comedy idea – which are probably two things that shouldn’t go together – and he wanted some help, as he put it, “fleshing it out”.

“Fleshing it out” is something people say around here when what they really mean is “writing”. What they’ll say is, “I have a great idea, it’s terrific, a total winner, and honestly, the whole thing is all there. It all works. It just needs to be fleshed out.”

What they mean is: “I need someone to write the script, come up with a story and characters and one hundred pages of dialogue.”

At that point in my life – and it’s a point which circles back regularly, like some kind of evil comet – I needed the money, so I started to toss out some ideas. Most of which he rejected.

He liked science fiction, but he didn’t like the then-popular genre of “virtual reality”.

“I don’t want anything,” he told me, “where the audience is, like, is it a dream? Is the guy in a computer? I don’t like that.” He shook his head. “And you know something else?” he asked. “Neither do audiences. Those virtual reality movies always fail.”

“Well,” I said, “what about all of those Matrix movies?”

“Oh, yeah, those,” he said. “Those are good. Those they did right. I just meant ordinary virtual reality movies, not good ones.”

I guess he wasn’t aiming for good. He was aiming for safe, which can often be good, but being safe means figuring out your market and how you’ll sell a product before you even start. That’s the secret that people in Hollywood – and probably every other business – are obsessed with discovering: what are the rules for creating a financially successful, but mediocre, product? How can I make money and not have to be good?

The global “attention industry” – encompassing, essentially, all businesses on earth that derive their success from stealing away a little of your time, like news, movies, music, televised sports, and staring at the ceiling (if anyone could figure out how to make some money out of that) – is the most competitive and cut-throat of all. We’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to get a fickle and unpredictable audience to spend its time on our stuff.

Time, though, is the one totally non-renewable resource. We cannot make more hours in the day.

The audience may have baffling and unexpected tastes, but they all have to sleep and eat and go about the business of their day. And that leaves only a few hours left for the global attention industry to fight over.

Unfortunately – especially for those of us who occasionally find ourselves in a financial pinch – the only way to compete is to be interesting. To be special and different. To be good.

The producer who years ago thought he knew for certain what audiences wanted and what they didn’t is no longer in the global attention industry. Last I heard, he was teaching film classes at a college in New England. Don’t feel sorry for him, though. He made a lot of money in his career and never worries about it. Unlike some of us.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl