Oh yeah, it’s difficult to do successfully and a determined producer might still change things just to assert their dominance, even if it will inevitably hurt the film.
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Remember your TM, Mr. Lynch… The TM…
But I’m with him… Once you watch that young chap walking down an entire hallway in some Classical Roman post office in Il Posto, you think… what is the effing rush?
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Out of context, without knowing who the other person is or their prior interactions:
it’s difficult to know exactly what’s going on.
She does sound conciliatory, as if she’s trying to help (rather than interfere).
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Hell. Howard the Duck should have been strangled in its crib. Unfortunately, Lucas’ Star Wars ‘juice’ allowed it to live.
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Don’t mess with a master!
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As much as I love David Lynch, the whole don’t watch on your phone thing just really gets the Gen X film nerd in me angry. The only reason I even know who David Lynch is, is because Cinemax used to show a terrible 480 pan and scan copy of Blue Velvet all the time when I was a teenager. When I finally found a video store that had a copy of Eraserhead, the video store was renting out a dupe copy of it in case it got stolen. A high def screen, even only 6 inches large is a measurably better cinematic experience then a shitty pan and scan VHS dub.
Anyway, enough with the old man rant. If you want the new “death to cinema” movement track down a Racer Trash stream on Twitch. Especially if you ever liked any culture jamming art like Negativeland, Church of The SubGenius, Ron English and so on.
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He’s wearing these hats, also in other videos. I need to know where to get such a hat! Anyone?
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I think it makes sense in context. This is the time and place to shoot the entire scene the director has in mind, sometimes with variations they want to experiment with. The length here doesn’t really matter, and it certainly isn’t the time to shorten it just because a producer thinks it’s too long for the final film.
That’s going to happen in the edit, and some directors prefer more choices during the edit. (As someone else said, some directors prefer the opposite. They carefully plan what they shoot to limit the ability of others to edit together something other than what they intended.)
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Maybe?
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OK, making movies is a team sport and perhaps my not liking the movie isn’t all because of choices Lynch made. I heard Lynch hadn’t read the “Dune.” I know the movie can’t and maybe shouldn’t try to replicate the book. Fine, but I hated what they did. I am hoping that the 2021 “Dune” adaptation is more enjoyable.
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Lynch, to the studio, possibly:
(And takes his name off the credits.)
Well, not the worst choice Lynch made, innit?
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So ‘producers’ are part of the creative process?
Producers can be a valuable and welcome part of the creative process, but they have to have earned the general respect of the other participants in the film project. The opinion of that kind of producer on a shot or dialogue or what have you is actively solicited on set by the director, writer, actors, etc.
In contrast, a producer who offers up unsolicited and non-specific fretting about the time spent on a shot to a veteran director like Lynch (who isn’t known for wasting time and money) tends to get this reaction.
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I guess I’m just thinking of the American studio system producer and not the independents.
Almost by definition the Hollywood producer is the worst of the worst in any creative situation as they are the money holders.
In music it’s an entirely different deal.
A producer’s main concern and job on a picture should be about the money: raising it, monitoring how it’s spent. The filmmaking process doesn’t happen without it.
Some producers also add to the creative process in a substantive way and have done so since the early days of the studio system. Irving Thalberg was the classic example. But it’s a special and unusual situation. A producer like that knows that David Lynch doesn’t need to be told what time it is, or that they’re losing their light for the day, or what the union rules are.
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Show runners, who are producers, are becoming increasingly powerful on the creative end of the business, in fact.
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I 'm just pining for the days of the auteur when a creative vision isn’t watered down by a production company’s desire for neat and tidy endings and stellar casts that pay off what the producers see as their bottom end.
Some auteurs benefit from constraints being imposed on them. Films like Fitzcarraldo and Apocalypse Now are not the usual result when a director is allowed to get out of control.
The auteur theory is problematic in its own right. Putting aside a lot of sexist assumptions underlying it, the vision of the director – even a talented one like Welles or Gilliam – only gets one so far in one of the most collaborative (and expensive) of arts.
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OK, I was just throwing the auteur idea into the ring as an anachronism but I honestly can’t see any value in the means of cinema production having the restrictions of the money keepers having any creative value except for the OHS that you’ve suggested.
I’m thinking of my favorites and how a producer would effect the work of Dyer, Passollini, Wells, Visconti, Craven, Chronenberg, Chaplin, Lupino, Antonioni…
After writers, directors, editors, composers, gaffers and grips… producers really have to be the lowest level on the creative food chain… except for executive producers 
Oh, so a time that never existed… cool.
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