In accepting the Milestone Award tonight at the 37th annual Producers Guild Awards, producer Jason Blum thanked many, beginning with his longtime friend Barry Diller, the billionaire chairperson of IAC, who presented him with the prize.<\/p>\n
Referring to himself humbly as \u201cthis lowly middle-aged producer,\u201d Blum said Diller\u2019s \u201cbeen a friend of mine for a long time and a mentor of mine, and someone I admire so, so much, and he\u2019s changed my life in a lot of ways.\u201d<\/p>\n
The mega horror producer also thanked his wife Lauren, who \u201csupports me in everything I do\u201d; CAA\u2019s Bryan Lourd, \u201cwho believed in before anyone else did\u201d; Universal\u2019s Donna Langley, \u201cwho gave Blumhouse a home when we had basically produced a half a movie\u201d; and his \u201cpartner\u201d in the newest chapter of his career, \u201cone of the greatest artists I\u2019ve worked with in my life, \u201cJames Wan.<\/p>\n
The crux of Blum\u2019s speech, though, was a story about his parents \u2014 and his father, specifically \u2014 who while running The Ferus Gallery on La Cienega decades ago, somehow convincing the artist Andy Warhol not only that his iconic 32-piece set of Campbell soup can paintings needed to remain together, but that he should sell them to him for just $2000.<\/p>\n
Watch on Deadline<\/p>\n
\u201cThat story has stayed with me and it\u2019s in my bones, and it taught me that good taste doesn\u2019t come from consensus. That belief has to come before validation,\u201d Blum told the crowd. \u201cIn hindsight, it seems like what my dad did seems easy. But it wasn\u2019t, it was impossible. Everyone was making fun of these paintings. They hung them in their kitchen. And my dad is like, \u2018I\u2019m eating tuna fish sandwiches, and I\u2019m going to spend all my money and buy these paintings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Similarly, Blum said, good producing is \u201cimpossible\u201d \u2014 and producers, themselves, are impossible.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s hard to pin down the job of the producer, he suggested, and how they pull off what they do. But he said he believes we can define their craft as the effort \u201cto somehow bring all of us impossible people together. To keep the team intact. To keep the soup cans in tact \u2014 even when it would be easier, faster, and more lucrative to sell them off one at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Blum continued, \u201cwe\u2019re living in this time where machines are very confident that they can pick what will work, that algorithms can tell us everything we\u2019ve ever watched and what we should watch next, and AI can tell us what to stream and the mood we\u2019re in next Tuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n
What machines cannot do, however, is \u201cfall in love with something,\u201d or \u201chave instinct.\u201d<\/p>\n
Said the producer, \u201cIf you had asked an algorithm a few months ago to predict how a low-budget gay hockey romance with zero known stars would perform, I promise you the algorithm would\u2019ve been like \u2018Do not make that show.\u2019 But that\u2019s why Heated Rivalry needed us; it needed producers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The show\u2019s key creatives, Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady, believed in it when perhaps no one else did \u2014 and it\u2019s that belief, Blum said, \u201cin artists, in stories, and the road it takes to get things made\u201d that producers as a community do \u201cbetter than anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the past, Blum said, he wasn\u2019t one to tell stories \u201cabout people who believed in [someone] before anyone else.\u201d But he\u2019s come to realize that \u201cthose stories are really, really important because they tell the next generation that producing matters, that passion matters. That belief matters. That sometimes \u2014oftentimes \u2014 the market is wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n
In winding down, Blum left his audience with the message, \u201cKeep believing in your stories, and in your impossible directors and impossible actors and impossible writers, and most of all, impossible producers, even when we are at our most impossible.\u201d<\/p>\n
The PGA\u2019s Milestone Award recognizes individuals or teams who have made historic contributions to the entertainment industry. Other contemporary recipients of the prize, once given out to the likes of Louis B. Mayer, Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, include Steven Spielberg, Sherry Lansing, James Cameron, Bob Iger, Donna Langley, Ted Sarandos, George Lucas and Kathleen Kennedy, Charles D. King, and Dana Walden.<\/p>\n
The founder of Blumhouse, the horror powerhouse that merged with Wan\u2019s Atomic Monster in 2024, Blum\u2019s recent producing credits include Five Nights at Freddy\u2019s 2, Black Phone 2, The Lost Bus, and the USA Networks series The Rainmaker, based on the novel by John Grisham.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s PGA Awards are taking place at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. Other honorees include Amy Pascal, who\u2019s receiving the David O. Selznick Achievement Award, and Mara Brock Akil, who\u2019s being recognized with the Norman Lear Achievement Award.<\/p>\n
Source: RhinoEasy News<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In accepting the Milestone Award tonight at the 37th annual Producers Guild Awards, producer Jason Blum thanked many, beginning with<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2022"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2022\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhinoeasy.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}