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On a slightly less sarcastic note:
Most jobs on a film set are governed by unions and very precisely defined. But "producer" and "executive producer" reallly are terms of art that mean whatever the folks in a given production want them to. Once upon a time, in the days of the old studio system, a producer actually produced a film, and there was no such thing as an "executive producer". Later a senior producer might oversee the work of several junior producers working on simultaneous productions - and involve him/herself to different degrees on each one, according to the experience of the producer and the complexity of the film.
But the end of the studio system, where everyone was under ocntract, and the rise of both individual actors and mega-agents as packagers of projects (the people who line up the actor, the script and the director, and bring the whole thing to the studio for financing, production and distributuion) anybody can be called a "producer" for any reason or no reason at all - although "line producer" definitely indicates someone who works for a living and "producer" still may. The deadwood usually gets the "executive producer" credit.
The classic example of this was Joh Peters, a hairdresser who was then Barbra Streisand's boyfriend, who "produced" her dreadful 1976 remake of A Star is Born. As I noted above in some cases actors in TV series are credited as executive producers or consultants and given some degree of script approval - sometimes in lieu of pay increases, or at least in exchange for smaller ones than they initially demanded. Alan Alda on M*A*S*H was one of the pioneers of this practice, William Peterson of CSI is a more recent example.)
Regards,
Joe
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