2,000+ Top Producers Sign Petition To Drop Second “P” From AMPTP, Part Of Larger Push To Address Inequities; Cathy Schulman, Jason Blum, Dede Gardner, Todd Garner Among Signees

Matt Grobar
·10 min read
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EXCLUSIVE, UPDATED with PGA statement: More than 2,300 film and TV producers on Tuesday are delivering a message to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers: leave us out. The group delivered a petition to AMPTP President Carol Lombardini this morning demanding the dropping of the “P” from the acronym of the organization that just concluded a brutal negotiation with the WGA, and hopefully is in the final stages of a SAG-AFTRA deal after one of the longest strikes in Hollywood history.

Taking them out of a labor fight they were never part of is just the first step in what producers hope will lead to a redrawing of rules that leave them without health care, and being the last to be paid despite them being the early catalysts for film and TV projects.

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The producers have amassed 2,338 signatures since June, when they first posted a petition on Change.org. The document has been signed by many heavyweights including Andrea Sperling (Transparent), Bonnie Curtis (Saving Private Ryan), Cathy Schulman (The Woman King), Dede Gardner (12 Years a Slave), Grant Heslov (Argo), Guymon Casady (Game of Thrones), Jason Reed (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), former MGM Motion Picture Group president and Glickmania principal Jonathan Glickman (Creed III), Jennifer Fox (Nightcrawler), Fred Berger (La La Land), AMPAS president Janet Yang, Blumhouse’s Jason Blum, Lynette Howell Taylor (A Star Is Born), Mark Vahradian (Transformers), Nina Jacobson (The Hunger Games), Mollye Asher (Nomadland), Wyck Godfrey (The Twilight Saga), Todd Garner (Mortal Kombat), Peter Saraf (Little Miss Sunshine), and Kimberly Steward (Manchester by the Sea) to name just a few.

See the full list of signatories and the letter below.

It is not surprising producers want out of being considered part of the AMPTP: that group is comprised of signatory studios and streamers; not only were producers as hobbled by the strikes as writers and actors, their lack of an effective union leaves them in an unenviable position with the real members of AMPTP. How unenviable? Aside from shepherding projects through production and problem solving along the way, producers often generate project ideas and package them with writers. The reward for being the ground-floor catalysts? Most of them don’t get paid their fees until production begins — they can put years into projects and get nothing out of them if they are stillborn — and they are always the first to be asked to take a fee haircut by studios who tell them, do you really want to kill this project you’ve worked so long to put together? Since everyone else is covered by the union protections, producers are the only ones placed in that position. Sure, many producers get rich from fees and backends, and some have overall deals with studios that pay staff and keep the lights on. But more often than not, producing is a very speculative living.

Writer, director and producer Billy Ray has campaigned for the excision of producers from the AMPTP since launching Deadline’s Strike Talk podcast with Garner. It is a misnomer, he said, because producers were not part of the labor battles that shut down the business. In fact, Garner had to leave Strike Talk to head to Australia to shoot Mortal Kombat 2, only to have to shut down prep when SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on the picket lines.

Schulman, the Oscar-winning Crash producer who formerly headed up Women in Film, said that being lumped into the employer side of the labor strife ought to end; most producers have been vocal in their support of writers and actors.

“Producers have a tendency to say, ‘Woe is me. I live on my own island, and I’m miserable,'” she said. “Watching our colleagues come together and stand shoulder to shoulder to fight for what’s right has motivated us to be active in our own rescue.”

“Our profession is being devalued”

The petition to rename the AMPTP began over the summer with The Producers Union, a group that has sought to cement itself as a collective bargaining unit for producers but has yet to gain much traction. The Producers Guild of America has been unable to fulfill that function, despite concerted attempts over the years to make that possible. The trade organization is first and foremost a producer’s advocate, as well as an evaluator of which contractually listed producers actually deserve consideration in awards season, as opposed to being hands-off financiers or managers who leverage their way into credits because of the clout of their clients. In a statement in response to today’s story, a spokesperson for the PGA wrote, “The Producers Guild supports the efforts of the Producers Union and all producers advocating for the basic rights of producers including fair compensation, access to essential benefits and healthcare.”

In the early days of the WGA strike, Schulman pointed out, there was animus directed at producers, accusing them of “villainous” actions toward the guilds, based on a fallacy that producers are part of or take the side of the AMPTP in labor disputes.

Garner said the petition is part of an attempt to clarify who producers are and what they do.

“Our profession is being devalued due to the ambiguous definition of our role,” Garner told Deadline. “Correcting this devaluation and restoring the esteemed reputation of our profession is a complex and ongoing challenge.”

While meditating on the strikes via the Strike Talk podcast, over the course of Hollywood’s hot labor summer, Ray and Garner have urged for the AMPTP to be retitled the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Companies, or alternately, the AMPTS, with the “S” standing for Studios and/or Streamers.

RELATED: Deadline’s Strike Talk Podcast: Billy Ray Dissects WGA Deal With Negotiators David Goodman And Chris Keyser

“Producers are people,” Ray told Deadline. “The alliance is an ill-fitting group of companies, and I’ve never felt that they were producers. Why are we giving them that identification?”

An Oscar nominee known for his work on films like Little Miss Sunshine and The Farewell, Saraf made the same point, noting that the companies represented by the AMPTP “are for the most part financiers, distributors and broadcasters. Essential elements of our ecosystem, but not producers.”

Schulman pointed out that, like writers and actors, producers have become the victims of a structure implemented for the industry decades ago and just as institutionalized as with the 10% commission earned by agents, and the $5000 a month most clients pay their publicists. The “P” in AMPTP is a remnant of the studio system of the 1940s and ’50s in which producers “were, in fact, employed by the studios,” working there under contracts just like actors, writers and directors. By the ’70s, that system crumbled as agents gained leverage for their star clients and got them paid upfront and in backend deals. That didn’t happen for the majority of producers, who lost the studio safety net. Producers began getting development fees in 1971, Schulman said, adding that it was “a measly $25,000″ being floated by the studios to cover them financially prior to production.” If a producer lands a development fee today, she added — “which is very, very rare, under 10%” — $25,000 is still what’s offered, with $12,500 paid in advance against the fee.

This makes survival difficult for producers, said Rebelle Media Founder & CEO Laura Lewis, who are “being denied basic rights granted to every other above-the-line and below-the-line person” on a production.

“On a movie set, the only people who have no health insurance or pension contributions are movie producers,” said Schulman. “The executives at the studios, who greenlight the movies, and every single other person working is receiving those benefits. We don’t. Simple things that other unions have been able to achieve … we don’t have yet.”

We’re getting to the point that if you’re not a billionaire or a dilettante or a nepo baby, what are your chances of being able to produce?

— Producer Cathy Schulman

Even more problematic than the absence of health insurance, she argued, is “this sort of culture and business and practice” that leads producers to be asked “to work without wages through the entire development period of a movie, while writers and underlying rights holders receive options and payments.”

Said Lewis: “We should not work for free. That is not right. It should be illegal. That’s a basic understanding that we want to start with.”

Given standard “customs and practices,” Schulman noted, “producer fees are customarily held up and sometimes not paid until a movie’s finished.” Add that to the indignity of being first to be asked by studios to take a pay cut in order to get a project off the ground, and “the bartering of producer credits” vis-à-vis actors, managers and others who are not rendering services, which has caused “a total erosion” of fees that aren’t coming soon enough. Managers who are hands-on producers of projects involving their clients are particularly susceptible to this: how will it look if they refuse a cut in fees and imperil a project a client wants made? Newbie producers are often hit with clauses that allow them to be removed without cause, meaning they are only owed fees up to the point the project continues without them.

The ways in which the industry has systematically disadvantaged the very producers tasked with breathing life into its product is, in Ray’s eyes, simply “un-American.”

To Schulman, pushing for industry regulation on behalf of producers is, on one level, a matter of their desire for “respect and acknowledgement for the real job we do,” which is distinct from that done by any “hyphenate producers” who might come along. “It’s not so much about the credits, although it’s frustrating,” Schulman said. “It’s that the misuse of this term ‘producer’ has caused the erosion and the fee splitting that is pushing producers out of the business. We’re getting to the point that if you’re not a billionaire or a dilettante or a nepo baby, what are your chances of being able to produce?”

Much of the agenda pressed by WGA leadership was to fortify the ecosystem by limiting mini-rooms and ensuring that future showrunners learn by being in the room. Schulman believes producers are owed the same basic consideration.

The current construct “is discouraging producers from coming into the business and making troves of them — younger ones, emerging ones — leave the business,” said Schulman. “Why? How are they supposed to support themselves between movies being greenlit? And how do they get trained when all of our overhead deals have been dropped?”

Unionization push

As things stand, a weakened pipeline “to grow the next group of producers” is just one big problem for the industry, which can’t arrive at exceptional creative product in the absence of established hands. “There is a reality to the fact,” said Schulman, that “[creating this] product requires thought and time and oversight and experience, all these things.”

Lewis feels the “P” droppage is “Step 1 in a much larger fight on behalf of the value and the work of producers,” which will culminate in a broader drive toward unionization.

As Ray noted, producers’ efforts to unionize has been hobbled because the National Labor Relations Act designates them “management” professionals — despite the fact that they, almost without exception, do not control the purse strings. Producers, he said, are really “employees of the LLC making the movie or the TV show,” just like everyone else, and therefore “deserve” unequivocally to be able to unionize.

“Whether or not the group called The Producers Union is the right path is unknown,” Schulman said. “So what career producers are going to do in the meantime is use our collective leverage for a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign. And when I say a hearts and minds campaign, [I mean] changing hearts and minds. For example, talking to the studios about, ‘Why would you think that only our children shouldn’t have health insurance, but everybody else in the business should?’ You really believe that’s fair?'”

To read the producers’ letter to Lombardini, which includes the list of petition signatories, click below.

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