Is the great foreign producer a dying breed?
Except perhaps for Oscar night and its often sanctimonious presentation of the Irving G. Thalberg Award, producers are normally culprits without honor in film history. They're crooks, chiselers, philistines, profiteers and uncultured bandits in the business to collect yachts, girls, homes in multiple countries and fat bank accounts. They can't create anything themselves, so they acquire a cloak of respectability by attaching themselves to highfalutin projects and artistic directors.
Some of that may be true but it has recently become clear that what the world film industry misses and needs, perhaps more than anything, are a few great, entrepreneurial, ambitious, and at least somewhat enlightened producers.
WHEN FEDERICO FELLINI DIED, I checked to remind myself who actually produced his wonderful films. Who had the vision and confidence to put up substantial money to back projects that cannot have been easy to visualize based on their scripts? It's especially interesting, since that is a country that no longer has any producers worth their salt and, hence, is home to a withering industry. When one thinks of the great years of Italian cinema, from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, one naturally thinks of its directors: Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, De Sica, Antonioni, Leone, Pasolini, Bertolucci, Risi. But it is no coincidence that this was also the era of great Italian producers: Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis, Angelo Rizzoli, Alberto Grimaldi, Franco Cristaldi and others. Without them, very few of the classics associated entirely with their directors' names would ever have been made.
The situation is similar in France, where, as in the U.S., many of the top producers through the 1960s and 1970s were immigrants from points east. Pierre Braunberger produced everything from Jean Renoir's earliest films in the 1920s to early works by Godard and Truffaut. How many admirers of Godard, Jacques Demy , Jacques Rivette, Agnes Varda, Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer can name the producer of many of their earliest and best films? That producer, Georges de Beauregard, could justifiably lay claim to the title of father of the New Wave.
Who realizes that another man, Anatole Dauman, backed some of the greatest films by Alain Resnais, Robert Bresson, Chris Marker, Godard, Jean Rouch, and Wim Wenders?
For that matter, where would Luis Bunuel have been without Oscar Dancigers, who produced 10 of his Mexican films? Or Serge Silberman, who, after a relatively undistinguished career, produced most of Bunuel's late masterpieces? (Silberman also produced "Ran," by Kurosawa, whom no one in Japan would support.) And not to be forgotten are the Hakim brothers, Robert and Raymond, who during long careers produced Renoir, Jacques Becker, Antonioni, Rene Clement , Chabrol, Losey and Bunuel's "Belle de Jour," among many others.
UNSURPISINGLY, THESE MEN had or have the same traits that one associates with the old-school Hollywood producers -- expansiveness, charm, boldness, joie de vivre, a veneer of sophistication, a taste for the high life and a gambler's instinct. Despite whatever can be said against them, their swashbuckling got the films made, sold and known, and their respective national industries generally flourished when such producers were operating at full force.
The alternative to such powerful figures in other countries has been state-supported industries, which were the norm in the Eastern bloc as well as in some Third World nations. When the state apparatus is removed, of course, the entire industry tends to fall to pieces, as was apparent on a recent visit to Brazil. With the long-term state company Embrafilme defunct, there is no one to pick up the slack, and the local film business has essentially ceased to exist.
Brazilian filmmakers agreed that just about the only thing that could pick things up again would be venturesome independent producers and private investors , although they too would have to confront the phenomenon the anti-GATT auteurs in Europe are complaining about: American distribs' virtual stranglehold on theaters.
Whether it's South America, Europe or Japan, the landscape seems bereft of the sort of high-rollers who can change the filmmaking environment and, importantly at this moment, help forge a national cinema. Wherever you go, you meet no end of young or aspiring writer-directors, but very few producers who want to do anything but get in bed with the major studios.
The major studios notwithstanding, the international industry would be well served by some outsized characters with a little chutzpah interested in producing some good films. Applicants don't even need to smoke big cigars, have large bellies or boast hot and cold running babes. As Hollywood is overrun by agents and biz-school executives, the global business really needs a few operators who are still pirates at heart.
