You are here: Home | Resources | Articles | On Production Management

On Production Management

Other articles in "Articles"

by Lucy Hunot
Linda Stradling (taking a much-deserved rest) Linda Stradling (taking a much-deserved rest) Top Production Manager Linda Stradling has been in the business 25 years, and what she doesn't know about PM-ing isn't worth knowing. She chats to DFG about some of the insider tips and skills that have helped her in her career.

What are you up to at the moment?
I am running a series of four, one-hour programmes for Discovery Channel – science documentaries about what we are calling ‘extreme bodies’; extreme shapes such as people who are unusually tall or obese, conjoined twins and dwarfs. It is not a freak-show; we are looking at the science of what causes those extremes and how the body copes with them. We are using a lot of CGI so that we can create simulations of what happens when, for example, a very tall person (in excess of seven foot) runs and jumps down a basketball court, and the subsequent stress that puts on their joints and their skeleton and their internal organs. I have been working on this project since the beginning of June – it is a very fast turn around, so it has to be delivered in early November.

How long have you been a PM?
It must be around 25 years – I’m at the mature end of the scale! Although I am being referred to as a line producer now, which I don’t agree with. I think that you are only a line producer when you are working on very high-end drama.

Have you always stuck within the documentary genre?
No I have also worked on other things. It has largely been factual, but I have done some live television, which was fun – with Jeremy Paxman as it happens! I have done magazine programming in my early days, but more recently I have been doing a lot of drama documentaries.

What does the job tend to involve? If someone were looking to be a PM, what sort of things would they expect to be doing?
It is largely the nuts and bolts of production, putting together a team and making sure that it runs properly. You also are responsible for hiring crew, so you need to know something about the contractual side of things. None of which is particularly difficult, but you need to have a handle on it. You are running the budget, so you must know how your budgets operate. You also run a cost monitor, to know where your money is going, so that at any point in time if someone asks you if the production can afford an extra day’s filming, you can look at your cost monitor and say yes or no.

It largely involves money, budgets, finance and sometimes dealing with the broadcaster. When I started teaching production management I realised how much of it is actually about people management, and having a flare for being able to deal with difficult people. You help to get the teams working together and get the best out of them. You must play to people’s strengths as opposed to their weaknesses – this seems obvious but is surprisingly hard to do.

I think a lot of the success of running a team comes when you have some control over who is hired, so that you get the right people working for you. You must, therefore, be good at quickly assessing people’s character in interviews, and looking at their CV’s thoroughly.

Production management is all about details; you have to check the call sheet and make sure that you have everything in place and don’t leave anything to chance. And also being able to deal with problems as they arise and not being thrown by them and then placing blame on other people.
What qualities do you feel that someone needs in order to be a good PM?
Well you have to be anal really! It doesn’t mean that you have to do everything yourself, but you have to make sure that your coordinators do everything, and then check their work and make sure everyone is doing what they should be doing, writing everything down and checking all the aspects of things that can go wrong.

You can organise a terrific shoot and then you can forget to put the taxi in place to collect the director from the airport after he has had an overnight flight from LA!

Do you have any particularly challenging situations in your experience as a PM?
I have managed to send a shoot off without any stock! There is so much to do and you have so many things going on that things like that are remarkably easy to do. I think all PM’s should realize that no matter what you do something will always go wrong, and you just have to be able to put it right.

It will always be the one thing that you didn’t think of, like when I sent a crew out to Iran once, I took out extra insurance to cover the rushes being taken by customs on the way back, as well as terrorism and hostage insurance, and they went out and walked straight into an earthquake.

How do you feel that the role of PM has changed?
It has changed enormously. When I first started working as a PM one had a lot of contact with the broadcaster, and I don’t really have that anymore because there is another layer now. Obviously it depends on the size of the company, but it has been a long time since I have worked for a small enough company for me to be able to ring up the finance director at Channel 4 and ask to have my invoice paid.

It has changed from an editorial point of view as well; when I started working in the business, if you came up with an idea, you could send it to the BBC or wherever, and they would come back and say “that’s a nice idea, do us a treatment” and then perhaps give you a bit of development money and it goes from there. They don’t do that sort of thing anymore, they tend to ring up a large independent and say “we have a slot that we need to fill at 8pm on Wednesday, 5 programmes, something scientific, what can you do?”        

Do PM’s tend to get creative input in the projects that they work on?
I think if you are a line producer you do have much more say in the editorial side of things. But I tend to think that it isn’t my role. I have my own opinions, and I will sometimes say “as a punter watching this programme I think that…” but I tend to stay out of it.

Do many PM’s aspire to be producers?
I think it is a natural progression to a certain extent, but I find that ‘producer’ is a very rare role in the productions that I work on: they all tend to be Producer-Directors [PDs]. I have known a couple of PM’s who have become PDs, but I think that people tend to go in one of two directions – they either go editorial or they go production, and then they tend to stick with that. I have always seen a big difference between the two, but that may also be because of my background and history – the way that I have come up through television – but also the documentary genre that I am involved in.

What do you particularly enjoy about being a PM?
You come into work everyday and don’t know what to expect. You can turn up thinking you know what to be getting on with and then something happens, like a big insurance claim for example, and everything changes. I sent a crew off to Florida a couple of weeks ago, and they walked straight into Hurricane Faye! You can’t anticipate that really – we started to learn of it when they were on the plane, but by then it was too late to do anything about it. We just had to try and figure it out when they got there.

What advice would you have for someone that was considering becoming a PM?
I think you need to know yourself well, know what you are good at, play to your strengths and know what your weaknesses are. If you are not a naturally organized person, you are not going to be very good at it! It also seems to be that if you are a director, or an AP, or someone on the editorial side of things, you are more likely to be out of work quite a lot.

On a purely practical level, if you are a PM, you tend to find that you are in work all of the time. If you are any good, it is unusual to be out of work for any length of time – there is work there and you can move from job to job. Sometimes if you get to a company, you can end up getting offered things at the end of each production, so your contract rolls. It means that you can spend quite a long time at one company doing a whole load of different things.  

Do you have any final thoughts?
I think being a PM is a great job; it is really interesting. Many people look down on it and say that if you are smart then you should go into editorial and I don’t agree. You need a brain to do this job – it’s not a numpty job! It is a fantastic role if you are fit for it; it is very rewarding, and reasonably well paid. Once you have got some experience you can make it what you want it to be, and hang out for the jobs that you want, be picky about what you do and have more control over your life!

Related Pages

Linda Stradling is the lead tutor on DFG's Intensive Production Management Week (22nd - 26th September). Find out more here.

Back to Articles