PGA Awards nominees roundtable: ‘Daisy Jones and the Six,’ ‘Jury Duty,’ ‘Red, White and Royal Blue,’ ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’
What does a producer do? The question probably has as many answers as there are producers. To glean some of them, the question was posed to our 2024 Producers Guild of America Awards television nominee panelists Lauren Neustadter (“Daisy Jones & the Six”), Todd Schulman (“Jury Duty”), Sarah Schechter (“Red, White and Royal Blue”) and Tom Campbell (“RuPaul’s Drag Race”), whose lively banter made for particularly informative and entertaining viewing. Watch the exclusive video interview of their roundtable above. Click on each name to watch that producer’s individual chat.
“I think what we do is we push every boulder up every hill,” Neustadter emphasizes, “and we are the people everyone comes to when there’s a problem. I always said when I was a movie studio executive, I would walk on the set and be like, ‘I think I smell smoke. Is everything cool?’ And it’s be like, ‘Everything’s totally fine. We’re good. You just sit over there and we’ll come back and get you,’ And they would go and put out the fire. Out job as producers is we just walk around. We’ve got the fire extinguisher casually behind our back, and we’re ready to put out every single fire. And we’re the people that they go to when they smell smoke. I think it’s really our privilege that we get to run toward it and figure out what’s really going on and how we can make it better.”
Schechter tapped into that same firefighter metaphor in describing her job.
“You’re there in full gear just waiting for the fire,” she stresses. “It’s like when there’s a fireworks display and the firetruck’s waiting there, just in case. But I think in general, look, producers are oftentimes the very first people to sign onto a project, or the second or third, and we work on it for years and years and years. What we do is we have to build a dream team. It’s a lot of convincing (of people) that this writer’s idea or this book or this actor’s notion is enough and can build a foundation that’s strong enough to make something from. So it’s really about falling in love with something. It’s trying to remember why you fell in love with it for years, draft after draft. And you’re trying to assemble an incredible group of artists to share a collective story that will touch other people.”
And in Schechter’s experience, not only are producers the first to sign on; they’re also the last to sign off. “We’re working on it until the very end,” she says. “I mean, we’re in color timing. We’re in marketing meetings. We kind of oversee everything and work really, really hard oftentimes without nearly enough credit.”
Schulman describes his experience as a producer as essentially doing whatever is needed to keep a project moving forward. He calls “Jury Duty” “truly a very strange project in that there wasn’t one singular author who had this thing and saw it through from start to finish. It was a collective. And so we were all constantly in communication and doing whatever. We all had different skill sets, and I, coming from the Sacha Baron Cohen world, knew more about how to meld the reality element to it. As Lauren said, we’re doing whatever’s needed and putting out fires that are presented on the day.”
Like Schulman, Campbell has found that the producers on “RuPaul’s Drag Race” each have different strengths that they bring to the table.
“We have our story producers, our technical crew producers, and our then what I tend to do more of, the talent and creative producing,” he observes. “We all come together. We work together like a machine. And it’s just a joy. There’s also a part of the production where it’s like you’re always selling. Oftentimes, we’re the ones who sell the show, and then you’re selling it back to the network. And when you have multiple seasons (like we do), you don’t stop selling. You keep having to reinvent. Sometimes it’s even trickier, because you’re taking a lot of these familiar elements and finding a way to freshen them and get people excited again. So we’re here not to (screw) it up, if I may. In general, it takes a village people. That’s a RuPaul quote.”
Adds Neustadter: “The other thing we talk about (at our company) is that producing ids a lot like parenting. You always see the show or the movie for its potential, and it doesn’t matter how hard it gets, you just love it more and more and more and believe in it more and more and more. And at the end you get to admire it, which I think as a mom, as I look at my tiny little humans and I look at them growing up, it’s all those things and all those feelings – and it’s never giving up.”
