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Jeff Balis - In the Fish Bowl
When the concept of Project Greenlight was in its early stages of development, and we were hammering out the details of the show, we talked a lot about what dramatic elements would compel the audience to watch. Aside from plucking a first-time director from obscurity and watching him/her flounder under the pressures of commandeering a film crew, we settled on the possibility of having an inexperienced producer on the film as well; someone who wouldn't have years of experience to draw on to solve all of the director's problems. As a consequence, the show would reveal something about what a producer does on a film. After all, no one really knows what the hell a producer does, and this show would be a great way to depict it first hand. Naturally, the TV cameras would be running on-set during production, but they would also be running in the office during pre-production, where the producers do most of their "real" work. This seemed like a pretty novel concept to us all, and the idea sounded good to me at the time. And since I had been involved with these early discussions, I felt like one of the people putting on this pageant that was to become Project Greenlight.
Cut to several months later when Pete Jones' script was selected and we were prepping the film in Chicago. I was lathering up in the shower one night, thinking about an interview I had just had with the TV documentary crew. The interviewer had probed me for some pieces of dirt on my working relationship with someone (probably Pat Peach). They were snooping for details, and I realized that they had probably done the same thing to Pat about me.
Suddenly it dawned on me-I was the inexperienced producer I had championed in those early development meetings about Project Greenlight. Holy shit. I remembered thinking in those meetings that it would be cool to watch the novice producer flounder. Now I was that guy. I had hyphenate-produced some movies in the past, but this was by far my biggest responsibility to date, and I knew things were going to get messy.
This was a weird feeling to say the least. Up to this point, I had felt like one of the technicians in a white lab coat helping to conduct this grand Project Greenlight experiment. Suddenly, though, I looked up and realized that I was looking through a plate of glass at the real experimenters. It wasn't until I saw the technicians jotting down observations on their clipboards about me, and conducting little electroshock (and sleep deprivation, etc) experiments on me, that I realized I wasn't one of the technicians. I was one of the mice. They didn't care any longer what input I had on the parameters of the experiment, just like a real lab technician doesn't care how the mice think the experiment should be run. All they wanted was for me to run on my little wheel.
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