Prompt: "A movie producer sent the following memo to the head of the movie studio. “We need to increase the funding for the movie Working Title by 10% in order to ensure a quality product. As you know, we are working with a first-time director, whose only previous experience has been shooting commercials for a shampoo company. Since the advertising business is notoriously wasteful, it stands to reason that our director will expect to be able to shoot take after take, without concern for how much time is being spent on any one scene. In addition, while we have saved money by hiring relatively inexperienced assistant producers and directors, this savings in salary will undoubtedly translate to greater expenditures in paying the actors and unionized crew overtime for the extra hours they will spend on the set waiting for the assistant directors and producers to arrange things. If we don’t get this extra money, the movie is virtually assured to be a failure.”"
The movie producer makes a case for requiring to increase the funding for the movie without convincingly justifying why it would in the end ensure a quality product. The reasons included in the memo are filled with series of assumptions that would have been better explained had they been followed up with reasons as to why the producer thinks they are valid.
Firstly, the producer assumes that increasing the funding would translate to a quality product. In the later part of the memo, it looks like he/she ends up attributing the increased cost to the overtime paid to the crew and actors. Even if these were to be a valid series of assumptions. It remains to be argued why the increased funding would translate to quality. An explanation by the producer as to why quality would be affected (either directly or indirectly) would have helped. In the absence of it however, one could even go as far as to argue that just working overtime may in fact hinder the quality of the movie itself due to associated fatigue and lack of creativity from the actors and crew involved. The producer even provides a 10% number, which is largely unsubstantiated or unaccounted for in the memo. An exact cost breakdown to which the increased funding would be put to use would have been useful in clarifying what the producer meant.
Secondly, even if we were to take the producer's assertion that people in the advertising business are wasteful, it seems presumptuous to assume that all people coming from that industry would be insensitive to the tighter budgets and time that maybe available for a movie. If the producer had cited number of prior instances where hiring a director from that had indeed resulted in such a wasteful attitude, it would have been easier to see where he was coming from.
Thirdly, the producer assumes that the assistant directors and producers would take an inordinate amount of time arranging things. The movie itself may not have involve arranging of many things. If the producer had described the kind of sets involved, it may have been easy to see that this amount of arranging would in fact be involved and play an important role. Further it is not clear why even if the directors and producers were arranging things, why an efficient use of actors and the crew cannot be made to optimize use of their time or why a regular crew would not be sufficient for this time. Another major assumption in this minor series of assumptions is that the crew would be unionized. Reasons for this assumption would make this series or minor assumptions seem more rational.
And finally the producer makes the assumption that the extra money pumped in would be used to pay for overtime of actors and crew and that it would not instead be used for other expenses.
Thus a series of assumptions are made by the producer that go unsubstantiated. Each of which could have been better illustrated or rationalized with prior experiences that would have made for a more convincing read to the head of the movie studio.
