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"We've got a lot of very unhappy members right now," admits PGA exec director Vance Van Petten. "It's the hardest time I've had since I came here nine years ago. We've talked about it a lot at our board meetings and our conclusion is always the same -- that we should not intervene because it would be a disservice to what's already a very complicated process."

With the 3,600-member org not having a collective bargaining agreement with employers, Van Petten and PGA president Marshall Herskovitz believe PGA is better suited to focusing on its core mission -- advancing and protecting the status of the producer. Some of those key areas:

• acting as a key arbiter on producer credits;

• pushing to protect producers from unfair workplace conditions;

• serving as a go-to org for employers looking to hire producers;

• working to highlight industry success stories via its own awards show Saturday and its involvement in the Movies Rock event, which aired Dec. 7 in a two-hour special on CBS;

• and finding methods for producers to take advantage of opportunities in the exploding new-media sector.

Of course, the PGA is best known for providing the final word on a key question: Who's a producer on Hollywood's most important films? And with this year a toss-up in terms of identifying which films would be the most likely to win, the org's been forced to go into overdrive.

"Since there wasn't really a front-runner film this year, we had to do a lot of arbitrations," Van Petten admits. "We've had to go deeper than ever before."

Thanks to controversies over the credits on "Crash," "Little Miss Sunshine" and "The Departed," the PGA's role has been heavily scrutinized in recent years. But it remains the go-to org for determining the names listed as producers of the top five nominees when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences makes its announcements.

The PGA determination has served as a guideline for AMPAS in recent years; the Adademy has even tweaked its selection process to be a bit more in line with the PGA, which has no limit on the number of producers that can be credited. The Academy announced last June it would retain the rule of no more than three producer names per film, but it also allowed there could be an exception for extraordinary circumstances.

The PGA's Code of Credits process attaches specific weight to the producer functions for determining the "produced by" credit for features and the executive producer credit for TV:

• 30% for development;

• 20% for pre-production;

• 20% for production;

• and 30% for post-production and marketing.

Herskovitz also is eager to amp up the PGA as a location for producers to figure out how to take their ideas into the world of new media, via seminars and access to information.

Along with longtime partner Edward Zwick, Herskovitz created 36 eight-minute episodes of "Quarterlife" that have been running online at MySpace and Quarterlife.com since November. NBC decided to air "Quarterlife," stream it at NBC.com and become a distribution partner, but Herskovitz and Zwick remain owners of "Quarterlife," which they've self-financed from deals with advertisers and private investors.

"There's a decentralization going on in show business right now," Herskovitz says. "Independent producers have to react quickly because the opportunity won't last."