This is the first collection of original critical essays devoted to exploring the misunderstood, neglected and frequently caricatured role played by the film producer. The editors' introduction provides a conceptual and methodological overview, arguing that the producer's complex and multifaceted role is crucial to a film's success or failure. The collection is divided into three sections where detailed individual essays explore a broad range of contrasting producers working in different historical, geographical, generic and industrial contexts. Rather than suggest there is a single type of producer, the collection analyses the rich variety of roles producers play, providing fascinating and informative insights into how the film industry actually works. This groundbreaking collection challenges several of the conventional orthodoxies of film studies, providing a new approach that will become required reading for scholars and students.

Author Biography

Andrew Spicer, Professor of Cultural Production at the University of the West of England, UK, has published widely on British cinema, masculinity and film noir, most recently The Man Who Got Carter: Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry, 1960-1980, co-authored with A.T. McKenna. He is currently working on a study of Sean Connery. A.T. McKenna teaches Media and International Communications at the University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China. His work has appeared in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Journal of British Cinema and Television, and the Journal of Popular Film and Television. He is currently working on a monograph on Joseph E. Levine. Christopher Meir is Lecturer in Film at the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine in Trinidad and Tobago. He edited a special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television on film marketing and has published on Jeremy Thomas. He is currently completing Scottish Cinema: Texts and Contexts.