For those of you who don't have much experience with Hollywood, 
it's a long standing thing with all of us underlings that no one knows 
(or at least will tell you) what a producer does. Truth is I think very 
few people do. In fact I'd be willing to say that Jerry Bruckheimer is 
the only one that does. But anyway... this is from a letter I sent to a 
few of my film buddies last year.
-----------------------

I had an interesting insight today. I figured out what producers do.

All joking aside, as we all know, it's a running joke that no one 
knows exactly what producers do in the real world. They are 
necessary and make calls and foot the bill, but it was still always an 
ambiguous thing. But I figured it out, again no joking.

So let me start a little ways back... half a year ago I'm sitting around 
with Jack and he puts on a cable access show. We watch it (It was a 
weekly show where the guy interviews porn stars) and say, we 
should get a cable access show. "What does it take?" he asks. "Well if 
it's anything like FL, all you do is take some classes to prove you 
won't break the equipment. Why don't you call while I'm at work 
tomorrow." Of course he doesn't, so I do and I sign us up. I go, he 
doesn't. I finish out the classes and tell everyone, "Hey I got a cable 
access show. Let's get a camera and shoot some s**t." Of course it 
doesn't happen until I force it and even then I only get a couple 
people. Whoever I'd talk to would say, "Hey that's really cool, I got 
some ideas..." but no one ever did anything with it. No bulls**ting or 
anything, they just didn't get the ball rolling.

After a while I realized that the only way I was going to get anything 
done was to iron fist it. As in "I am the director, this is my show" 
and roll in there with jobs and story boards. 

Flash forward to today... I'm BSing with a guy I know who's right 
now an assistant director on Party of Five. He says he's thinking 
about getting another job; he wants to produce. I shake his hand and 
say I'm happy for him. There aren't a million schmoes who think 
they can produce running around the town. "You write, don't you?" 
he asks me. I say, "The thing is that everyone had to write stories in 
highschool and has been to a movie so immediately everyone 
assumes they can write."

So how do these things relate? A producer's job is to get s**t 
happening. He's a generator. Getting people together for a cable 
access show would seem easy, but it isn't. The producer is needed to 
push them. No one knows what a producer does because his 
function is something that everyone assumes just happens, but it 
doesn't. Bodies at rest stay at rest. A writer's job is to turn ideas into 
a story. A director's job is to turn that story into a movie. And each 
crew member has their function which are all usually translating 
some piece of the story into physical reality and that reality into 
film. The producer is the generator that everyone is plugged into.