This report comes from the Official
Star Wars Site!
Answered by: Rick McCallum
I
noticed that Mr. Lucas is credited as "Executive Producer"
of the Star Wars movies. What's the difference between an
executive producer and a regular producer?
Unfortunately right now, there isn't a uniform standard of how
producers are credited in the film industry.
For Star Wars, George Lucas is the Executive Producer
because he finances the movie and is also the overall architect of
the picture. He's the one we work for. Whereas I'm in the
traditional producer role of coordinating the thousands of tiny
details that need to come together to get a picture made.
That's the way it should be. On other movies, however, those
titles may mean other things.
One reason why a lot of movies are bad is that they have 8-12
producers. Sometimes it will be as arbitrary as an agent of one of
the actors, who then wants some level of control because he doesn't
want to be known just as the agent anymore. The Producers' Guild is
being run by Kathleen Kennedy now and she's doing a great job to try
to stop that kind of crediting because it devalues the contributions
of the actual producers.