Zero Mostel as Max Bialystock in The Producers (1968).
You don’t have to look hard in the arts sector to find numerous unkind clichés about producers. Bossy, greedy, venal, monstrous – from Kirk Douglas’s much-loathed Jonathan Shields in MGM melodrama The Bad and the Beautiful and Zero Mostel’s avaricious Max Bialystock (described by the accountant Leo Bloom as ‘the most selfish man I have ever met in my life’) in Mel Brooks’ The Producers, to Tom Cruise’s parodic Les Grossman in Tropic Thunder, producers generally get a bad rap. But they play a vital role in realising artists’ dreams; nor is their role just about raising money, as the following producers tell us:
