Producer-Artists

[Sin Agog]

Seems like whenever I hear a producer in an interview, they have immense people skills, but can only talk about movies in The Player-esque terms: "It's like Game of Thrones and Emmerdale had a baby!"

Val Lewton is the only one I can think of off the top off my head.  He took all the eerie folktales from his Eastern-European childhood, and merged them with twentieth century sensibilities to give horror a good kick in the backside.  Also was willing to take pay cuts to give untried directors a go at the helm, and did tons of uncredited rewriting (even having his spirit broken by a couple of complete hack job playwrights/chancers successfully suing him for stealing their idea).

Aside from him, there must be a few who turned the act of wheeler-dealer movie producing into a real humane artform.  Corman, I guess.....but not really.

[Shit Good Nose]

Orion Pictures was famous for giving a lot of time, money and resources to new writers and directors, important but select appeal films that they knew wouldn't do much at the box office, and risky genre films.  Which is also why they eventually went down the shitter.

But Mike Medavoy was the chief mover at Orion and was legendary for giving the greenlight when most others wouldn't.