Rita, Stewart and I are the three central members of Standing There Productions. This means we meet regularly, drink tea, argue over the layout and tardiness of meeting minutes, and have ideas about what Standing There Productions wants to do next.

We have quite a bit of trouble explaining to other people exactly what it is we all do. I write things, that much is clear. But then, so does Rita (see The Receptionist for example, although there is more where that came from and in fact she has won script awards and has directed things and has a cameo or twelve in I Could Be Anybody). Also, I direct things like our comedy festival show this year, none of which I do without the help of Rita as casting co-director and Stew, whose withering gaze is cast over all things visual, and who also takes all our photos and does all our technical work.

To confuse things further, we met Stew when he performed in our play, People Watching in 2003. He has, as he delights in reminding me, never been on stage since. Even that isn't quite true because Stew stage-manages most of our projects. Rita handles the financial direction of the company, with Stewart and I asking her once a week to tell us what the budget means, and she generally has her ear to the ground and knows about funding opportunities which I completely fail to write proposals for.

What I think all this means is that we are all, according to a loose definition, producers. Or maybe Rita is our executive producer and we are all producers with various different roles. The problem with any of these definitions is that nobody knows what any of them mean.

For example. Please tell me what any of these mean (thanks to Wikipedia for your enlightening descriptions):

A film producer, or filmmaker, is a person who creates the conditions for making movies.

The primary role of a television producer is to coordinate and control all aspects of production.

A theatrical producer is the person ultimately responsible for overseeing all aspects of mounting a theatre production.  

 

According to these descriptions, a producer is a control freak who does everything. Ergo, I suspect we are all producers, in some way or another. Having said that, the definition "control freak who does everything" is perhaps too broad, because if this is the case, the following people are also producers:

1. My grandma

2. The woman at the Smith Street post office

3. The Australian Prime Minister

 

In fact, that's not a bad point. You'd be mad not to give my grandma funding. I might give her a call.