When I watch a show or big budget movie I’ll see half a dozen ‘executive producers’, buncha ‘producers’, tons of ‘co-producers’. Just so many sometimes. What are their roles? Is it merely an investment? Or are they doing movie related things too?
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A producer is the guy who gets the gang together to make a movie. They hire & fire people, as well as selecting other high-level stuff like the script.
Sometimes people are listed as producers even though they don’t do anything – someone just wants their name on the credits.
A producer is a very general term for someone who plays a key role in the making of the film. Their actual contribution to the film varies. Sometimes it’s only a monetary one, sometimes they’re involved with the script, sometimes they’re on set, sometimes they only watch some footage sent to them from the set called “dailies” and send notes. An executive producer is a top-level producer. They might be responsible for securing funding from other investors, marketing the film, and supervising the whole project. Co-producer means they were working jointly with another producer. When it comes to television, a lot of the producer credits are just writers who didn’t pen the script for that particular episode, but they were in the room coming up with ideas.
Some producers are just investors, some are handling the actual business of seeking investors, some (like the big stars with producer credits) means they lent their name to attract investors and/or get a percentage of revenue vs. just set pay, some are the ones collecting the investment, allocating budget, monitoring the spending of money during production and post-productions…
In terms of what the different versions of the ‘producer’ titles mean:
The ‘showrunner’ is the lead producer on a television series. They’re involved in many of the day-to-day operations of a TV show or movie: budgeting, casting, hiring crew, ensuring that the show stays visually consistent and continuity is maintained, and ensuring that everyone has the resources they need to do their jobs. Usually, when someone says ‘we don’t have the budget for that fancy visual effect’ or ‘this is a *kid’s show*! *No*, you can’t explode that guy into bloody chunks!’, that somebody will be the showrunner.
An ‘executive producer’ is usually not *directly* involved with day-to-day operations; as the title implies, they’re most often at the studio level, making sure that the high-level hiring-and-firing decisions are made; if they don’t think the showrunner is getting the job done, the executive producer will have Words with them. Since they’re basically studio executives, an executive producer often oversees more than one production at a time.
Co-producers are, as the title suggests, producers that have paired with one another for various reasons. Maybe they don’t individually have the full confidence of the studio, maybe they’re co-producing because they developed the show together, or maybe they individually just don’t have the resources to put the show together on their own.
In general terms, though, sometimes a ‘producer’ credit is given as a gift to a close friend or mentor, or as a kind gesture to ‘bump up’ someone’s career a bit (‘producer’ is a fairly prestigious title, after all, even if you didn’t actually *do* anything).
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