Kelly Souders, the co-showrunner of Superman drama Smallville and co-creator of The Hot Zone, has had her say on the complicated relationship between producers and creatives.
In a panel hosted by Deadline in Germany at Seriencamp yesterday, Souders railed against producers whose primary goal is imposing their will on a production without considering how to connect with their creative counterpart.
“As a producer, you’re constantly giving notes and you need to figure out your goal. Is it being right, or is it to get a tune out of someone?,” she questioned.
Her key message to producers addressing issues with creatives was to figure out how to deliver an opening line. “There are a lot of times I get notes in meetings that say, ‘Okay, there is a lot of work to be done here.’ Immediately, your front cortex shuts down and you go into fight or flight mode. I’m going to walk out, and without even trying I’ll forget what you said,” she added.
She also criticized producers who provide notes on scenes when a production is at edit stage. “It would have been a great note when we were shooting, but now everybody’s gone home,” she added.
“They don’t like to read”
Souders was talking on a panel alongside Noémi Saglio, the French TV and film writer behind 2019 Netflix series The Hook Up Plan, who stunned an excited audience with her own take on producers’ pitfalls.
“They don’t like to read,” she said. “That is what producers really need to work on. Guys, the creative is the basis for the whole thing: If you don’t like to read, I don’t know what to tell you. We have to come back to the material, and they have to know it by heart and understand every sentence.”
Both agreed that producers needed to make tough financial calls, but urged this to be a collaborative process informed by the script and not a decision-making process taken alone with an “Excel spreadsheet,” as Saglio put it.
Souders said she has had few entirely positive experiences with producers. The exception to the rule was Ridley Scott’s Scott Free Productions, whose staff had creatively supported her vision on The Hot Zone, a Nat Geo drama adaptation of Richard Preston’s book about the ebola virus.
Souders joined Smallville as a staff writer on Season 1 in 2001 before rising to become co-showrunner on the Warners-then-CW young adult drama. She remained with the show through its next nine seasons.
She later went on to co-create and showrun Julianna Margulies-starrer drama The Hot Zone and was consulting producer and writer on Genius: Picasso and Genius: Einstein for the same network. She was also an executive producer on WGN’s flagship show Salem, and consulted on CBS’s Under the Dome and USA Network’s Political Animals.
“You want desperately to find a creative producer who is going to elevate what you’re doing, but instead a lot of times you are just arguing with them,” she said.
Both Saglio and Souders noted they worked with the same creative team on most projects.
“Everybody on set is my family, and I never change that, but I change producers,” said Saglio. “I haven’t made two projects with the same producer. I don’t fight with them, but I haven’t found one who has brought enough to the table to do another one with them. I am so hands-on that it is so difficult to trust someone has the same vision.”
Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, the American-Icelandic actor-producer, said that a good producer “connects with the story, brings together the best creative people they think should make that story and then stay out of their way as much as they can, but be ready to pop in when needed.”
He criticized how “ego” can derail projects, and recalled an anecdote about Mel Brooks, who quietly organized Academy Award-nominated 1980 film The Elephant Man, directed by a young David Lynch.
“He was the producer, the one who bought the rights and the one who put it in the hands of David Lynch. But Mel Brooks’ name isn’t on the film, and the reason he gave was if it was, people would expect something different. It is an incredible thing to have the humility to tell yourself that, and that is the mark of a great producer.”
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