ABSTRACT
The role of the producer has been both caricatured and misunderstood, hence the absence of discussion in accounts of British cinema and in Film Studies as a discipline (Spicer 2004: 33-50; Spicer, McKenna and Meir 2014). And yet, as Alexander Walker argues, “the tendency to ignore the role of the producer or production chief has to be resisted if films are to make sense as an industry that can sometimes create art” (1986: 17). Straddling the competing worlds of art and commerce, and encompassing all the elements of the filmmaking process from conception to exhibition, producers need to be financial wizards, creative partners, efficient organisers, promoters and showmen, strategists and, above all, eternal optimists in the face of endless setbacks. In “The Context of Creativity”, which contrasts the policies of Michael Balcon at Ealing Studios with those of James Carreras at Hammer Films, Vincent Porter argues that producers play a crucial and creative role in filmmaking but their effectiveness needs to be considered over their career as a whole, contextualised within the conditions in which they operated (Porter 1983: 179-207).
