The Producers Guild of America moved Wednesday to enforce the "produced by" credit through arbitration and lawsuits, the first step toward restoring the title's accuracy and value.
The credit's use as a bargaining chip, partial payment or reward to family and friends has made it the butt of jokes both inside the industry and out, leading the PGA to spend four years defining what it means to be a film or television producer and look for ways to back that up.
On Wednesday, the guild began asking production companies, networks and studios to amend producers' contracts to both abide by the PGA's credit guidelines and settle disputes through arbitration. Distributors who ignore this campaign and allow false credits to be published will be sued in civil court.
"After a generation of erosion of producing credits, the role of producer is becoming so muddled and confused that we must take action to preserve the very meaning of the term," PGA vp Marshall Herskovitz said at the press conference in Los Angeles to launch the "Truth in Credits" campaign.
Initially, at least, the enforcement will be limited only to the "produced by" credit in feature films and the "executive producer" title in TV. It is hoped that industry pressure will help eliminate fraud in related credits like associate producer.
No studio or network has yet adopted the proposals, but the companies were said to be supportive, in part because it gives them an added reason to help curb credits proliferation.
"There is complete and total agreement that this is something they want to see stopped," PGA president Kathleen Kennedy said.
Industry acceptance will be crucial because the PGA is not a union and cannot use collective bargaining and the threat of a strike to protect its credits in the same way that the WGA and DGA can do.
Still, the guild spent several years working with the industry's official bargaining unit, the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, to reach agreed-upon definitions of the duties of a producer in various media. Those talks, which later explored the arbitration process, were stopped this year to avoid antitrust issues raised by the unrelated debate over awards season screeners.
"The studios did not set out to demand the producing credit; they simply discovered they could use the unregulated producer credit as a form of currency," Kennedy said. "Our industry needs to defend the definition of a producer and restore legitimacy of the job."
PGA leaders said they only are targeting genuinely false or deceptive credits and will not be policing every project.
The burden is being put on the studios, networks and production companies to award credits fairly.
Disputes that come to the PGA's attention might go to arbitration, where collaborators such as writers and directors would testify before a judge from the American Arbitration Assn. as to what a producer did on the project. The choice to use an outside judge rather than a veteran producer was something the studios wanted. The PGA currently uses fellow producers to mediate PGA Awards arbitrations, about 60 of which have been completed to date.
The new credits process will apply only to current and future productions and will not be retroactive.
Lawsuits are being reserved as a last-ditch effort to prevent the dissemination of false credits. These cases would be filed in Los Angeles Superior Court and seek an injunction on the credit's use but not monetary or punitive damages.
"Under California law, the false attribution of credit on a motion picture is false advertising," PGA general counsel George Hedges said. "So legal action can be taken to stop false attribution of credit where they occur using the same laws that protect against false advertising."
PGA executive director Vance Van Petten and vp Hawk Koch also participated in Wednesday's announcement.
The credits action is being supported by an ad campaign designed to familiarize producers, distributors and others with the guild and its guidelines. PGA currently has more than 2,000 members.
Over the coming weeks, the PGA hopes to announce that negotiations on a studio-by-studio basis have resulted in agreements to abide by the credit guidelines and contractual language, which is currently being studied by the companies' legal and labor divisions.