The producer Bob Fagan, ‘people alchemist’ BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Bob Fagan really wanted to be able to make it to Newport by last Thursday. Not only does he have a lot of family around here and likes to visit at least a couple of times a year, but he had a film he produced screening at the Newport International Film Festival.

However, things weren’t working out that way, his phone-tag messages were making clear early in the week. Pitch-meeting delays, day after day, were keeping him in Los Angeles. Hollywood deals are top secret, hush-hush until it’s time to use the megaphone, but: "Suffice it to say that it concerned doing an original episodic program with one of Hollywood’s funniest and most popular actors," Fagan eventually explained in an e-mail.

So what it’s like for a 38-year-old local boy to become a movie producer? The answer was getting clearer and clearer by the time we settled for a lengthy phone conversation on the day he was hoping to be here.

Frenetic and unpredictable. Is this crazy week typical?

"I don’t know if it’s due to my lack of an assistant that I’m so busy, or that I don’t manage my time well," he replies, after we switch from a scratchy cell connection to a land line. Then he thinks about it for another beat. "No, I do think it’s fairly typical of the industry. Things change very quickly. Meetings you need to take that you didn’t expect — when certain people say, ‘Let’s meet,’ you make it happen."

Fagan started out in the movie business in 1992, after studying theater at the University of Wisconsin, in Milwaukee. Those were heady days, three years after the surprise success of Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape had every dentist and tax-shelter opportunist dying to invest in a low-budget independent film. His school friends talked him into helping to make a horror flick, the most commercially viable genre. So the straight-to-video tale of Aswan, about vampires in the Philippines, came into being. That experience parlayed into work in Chicago making commercials, first as a production assistant, then production coordinator, then production manager, and eventually a line producer. Before long he was able to put aside the technical tasks and scutwork and take on more interesting responsibilities.

"I think my strengths and interests are much more on the creative side of producing, and that is really where I concentrate now, the projects that I get involved with and the projects that I’m currently putting together," he says. "I’m very much involved at the creative level."

A producer is not a producer is not a producer, you know. An executive producer credit might mean only that the person invested much of the money, and an associate producer may be nothing more than a pal of the star. That is a far cry from being a line producer, who handles all of the nitty-gritty daily decisions on a movie set that have price tags attached.

Fagan is a real-live producer.

"I will hire a writer to write a script, commission a script to be done based on an idea that my partner and I will come up with, or various other business partners that I meet along the way," Fagan says. "So I have numerous scripts out there in various stages of development. But all of them are projects that were conceived at my production company in Manhattan, Bright Pictures."

So while his film credits as producer or co-producer may not be footnoted, Fagan has done heavy lifting on the Newport Festival’s Dummy — a quirky film about a guy who uses ventriloquism to express his anxieties — as well as the upcoming Last Man Running. Those are in addition to his producer debut, the 1998 comedy Totally Confused, and subsequent films Kwik Stop, MechCommander 2 and MechWarrior 4: Vengeance and Bring It On Again, which just wrapped.

"Totally Confused was my first feature film, and it was made for little to no money," he says. "Because I had been working in the industry on a commercial level, I had developed some relations with vendors and suppliers and crew, largely hiring them for more-high-paying jobs, which the commercial industry affords.

"It was the dead of winter in Chicago and quite slow when Greg [Pritikin] and Gary [Rosen], the writers of Totally Confused, approached me to do that script," he continues. "Initially, I said I wouldn’t be able to do it. I saw the budget and it said, ‘Zero, zero, zero, $100 craft service, zero, zero, zero,’ and I said, ‘Good luck!’ And he said, ‘Well, at least read the script.’ And I did, and I laughed very hard."

Of course, getting money from backers never is a laughing matter for movie producers. Fagan points out that between shorts, documentaries, and features, there were about 2000 films submitted to Sundance this year, a glut that has allowed distributors to try to get away with not putting money up front, only as a "back end" deal. Needless to say, potential investors don’t like the sound of that.

The Greg Pritikin who wrote and performed in Totally Confused is also the writer and director of the NIFF film Dummy, and Fagan says that the main challenge he and co-producer Richard Temtchine faced was the usual one — working within the confines of a budget.

"We didn’t have a lot of money for locations," he says. "Constantly trying to find a good place to shoot that had good production values became trying at times."

But all in all, despite the pace and discouragements of being a producer, Fagan continues to enjoy the work. He describes himself as a "people alchemist," finding the right people to put together and mix well.

"I love what I do," he says. "It’s a great profession, a great industry. There are a lot of smart people in this business. At the end of the day, it’s very fulfilling."

By the way: at the end of the Saturday of the film festival, Fagan never did make it to the second and last screening of Dummy. The uncertainties of Hollywood deal-making being what they are, he had to stick around LA longer than expected. Nobody cared that Father’s Day was coming up.