I’ve talked before about how runaway producer credits, aka vanity credits, are the new STD of the movie industry (most notably here, and here as well). Understandably, many producers aren’t exactly thrilled to chat about the subject, lest they be seen as taking shots across the bow at their own. Lakeshore Entertainment honcho Gary Lucchesi isn’t much different, but his take on the matter did offer up an interesting comparison that I hadn’t previously pondered. To wit:

“I’m on the board of directors for the producer’s guild so it is an
issue,” Lucchesi admits. “It’s become more profound now because it takes so much more to
get a film made. Twenty years ago, if a studio made Henry Poole, it
would be [with] a producer who’d have an overall deal with the studio. He’d
bring the project in, and if an executive liked it, they’d make the
movie. And there would be one producer or perhaps a team, not a
plethora of producers. Nowadays, on a movie like this, we brought it to
Lakeshore, where Tom [Rosenberg] and I take a producer credit. And then there were other
people — Tom Lassally was (director Mark Pellington)’s manager, who actually introduced the material to Mark, so he had a credit. And then Gary Gilbert brought in some
money, so he got a credit. Most of the executive producers are money
people, and if you have to cobble a movie together you all of a sudden
have seven or eight credits. So I get it, I understand it, I don’t like
people that didn’t contribute getting credits, but on the other
hand we’re a little bit like Broadway now — there are angels, and they
throw money at it, and if the movie gets made it’s good for everybody.
I know what my contribution is, and I think that at the end of the day
we all know who the actors are… I get the problem, but it’s because
our business is so much harder now.”

Is it really harder, though? More movies are made than ever before, it’s just that studios are looking to let other people spend the bulk of that money, and plug films into their distribution pipeline, right? So outside of its tentpole releases — big summer fare, genre offerings and a handful of awards-bait contenders — they don’t really care what names are on posters and press kits. If it’s actually markedly more difficult to get movies made these days, wouldn’t honest-to-God hands-on producers want to be more proactive about protecting their credit? “Fine line” and all, I get it. But no one gets to scratch a seven-figure check (or bundle the same) and just call themselves a special effects coordinator, do they? So where’s the outrage, or even leadership on this issue? Just throwing this out there…

I’m doing some file brush-up and vacuuming — the electronic age, records-sweep equivalent of brush-clearing, which would warm Dubya’s heart, I’m sure — and I came across this pulled tidbit from an interview last summer with Jonathan Levine, writer-director of The Wackness, in which he talks about prescription medications like anti-anxiety and anti-depression drugs. I didn’t run it at the time because it came during a digressive sidebar pocket which dipped into some (shared) state-of-the-world bewilderment, but it merits another look for a very important and intriguing reason. Set in 1994, and centering around an unlikely friendship between a teenage dope dealer and one of his clients, a therapist, the film doesn’t specifically take an anti-psychotropic drug stance, but from talking to Levine it’s clear he believes they’re over-prescribed. His comments:

“Well, it’s something that we definitely tackle. The early ’90s were a time when pharmaceuticals were becoming more and more a part of psychiatry, you know? And I think that Dr. Squires resists giving Luke medication, but at the same time at the end of the movie he’s on medication himself, and to me this was a question that needed to be asked, and what we really tried to do was resist any sort of judgment. You have one person who it isn’t right for, and one person who it is right for, but I think certainly it begs the question who needs this, and are people getting this who don’t need it? Squires asks Luke if he wants to handle his problems the way Rudy Guiliani handles the city, and sweep everything away, and that to me is allegorical for what anti-depressants do. But the flip side of that is that I see a movie like Garden State, a movie that I love, where a guy quits doing his medication at the beginning of the movie, and it’s this whole revelation for him. And look, a lot of my friends are on this stuff, and I have been on stuff like this as well — and that doesn’t ring true to me at all. So I just think that we wanted to resist pat answers, because I don’t know where I stand on that question. I’m just examining something and don’t have an answer. And sometimes I think that’s what movies need to do.”

The most interesting thing here for me is Levine’s admission to personal experience with these types of prescription medication, which is a heartening thing. For so many folks there’s still a stigma about anti-anxiety or ADHD drugs, but a closeted discussion is the most dangerous debate and does the public the most ongoing disservice, as I think Heath Ledger‘s tragic death proves. If more people around were aware of… not just some vague, amorphous “struggles,” but Ledger’s actual diagnoses, and medications, does anyone doubt that wouldn’t have been over-prescribed (by different doctors, no less) in the manner that he was? Levine’s right, the truth — both externalized, and within ourselves — is so often grey, and what works for one person might likely not for someone else, even a family member. We’re just scratching the surface of biogenetic diagnosis. But painting in broad brushstrokes, or refusing to acknowledge — publically, or just to loved ones — drug-treated conditions does no one any service, and should be consigned to the past.