Package Deals and the Producers Who Assembled Them
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As the old contract system loosened its grip, a new kind of producer emerged, one who assembled a project piece by piece, pairing a script with a director and cast before ever approaching a studio for financing, rather than working within a studio's existing, fixed roster of contracted talent already under salary.
This package approach shifted considerable power toward talent agencies, who could now offer a studio a complete, ready made proposal rather than simply supplying names for roles a studio had already decided to make on its own terms, timeline and budget entirely, without any outside involvement at all.
The shift changed the entire economics of filmmaking, since studios increasingly financed and distributed work rather than generating it from within their own walls as before, on their own soundstages. That change, gradual but decisive, marked one of the clearest signs that the old vertically integrated studio era had genuinely come to an end at last.