What's this guy doing on the podium? Jeremy Thomas receives his prize at the Warsaw awards. Photograph: Jacek Turczyk/AFP
There's a memorable scene in Ferris Bueller's Day Off where a weary economics teacher is trying to interest his students in the Great Depression. "Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone?" Something of the awkward silence which greets these inquiries could be heard at the press conference after the weekend's European Film Awards, when Jeremy Thomas faced the media after receiving the prize for European Achievement in World Cinema.
This is perhaps unsurprising, since Thomas's considerable achievements are those of a producer, and producers are, in general, not accorded the highest esteem by the filmgoing public. "Producers are unpopular in most places," Thomas explained, apparently unnecessarily, to the not very attentive audience.
And yet Thomas - described by regular collaborator Bernardo Bertolucci as "a hustler in the fur of a teddy bear" - is responsible for seeing a great number of projects both maverick and majestic into being, from David Cronenberg's The Naked Lunch to Bertolucci's The Last Emperor. But public recognition for producers is very rare.
Partly, this is the result of confusion over what it is that producers actually do. "No movies exist without a producer ... We find the material, we work with the director, we raise the money, we fight on the set, we fight everybody and we release the movie," was Thomas's summary of a producer's role, and it certainly seems a pretty considerable contribution.
Some producers are on set every day, playing just as crucial a role as the director. Other people credited as producers, of course, make vanishingly small contributions. Without naming names and inviting the lawyers in, many a famous actor has got a producer credit for little more than turning up to a couple of fancy lunches with potential investors. "What's an associate producer credit?" asks a character in David Mamet's State and Main. "It's what you give your secretary instead of a raise," is the dismissive reply.
Another reason producers' get such scant respect is their association with money: we don't like to be reminded of film-making's associations with grubby financial manoeuvring, but a director's visions cannot be seen without someone stumping up a sizable dollop of dosh. It's also the producer's job to worry about profits and a fair few of them, such as Harvey "Scissorhands" Weinstein, have been blamed for ruining films by insisting on cuts to please an audience.
Equally, however, good producers will go into battle to protect a movie. That Hollywood was able to produce such uncompromising stories as The Conversation and Pulp Fiction has more to do with Robert Evans and Harvey Weinstein than Coppola or Tarantino.
Shouldn't there be an Oscar for Best Producer, then? Insiders will tell you that that's what the Best Picture statuette is for (and it's always the producers who go up to collect them). But is there much point to an award if most of the audience have no idea who got it, or why?
