In accepting the Milestone Award tonight at the 37th annual Producers Guild Awards, producer Jason Blum thanked many, beginning with his longtime friend Barry Diller, the billionaire chairperson of IAC, who presented him with the prize.
Referring to himself humbly as “this lowly middle-aged producer,” Blum said Diller’s “been a friend of mine for a long time and a mentor of mine, and someone I admire so, so much, and he’s changed my life in a lot of ways.”
The mega horror producer also thanked his wife Lauren, who “supports me in everything I do”; CAA’s Bryan Lourd, “who believed in before anyone else did”; Universal’s Donna Langley, “who gave Blumhouse a home when we had basically produced a half a movie”; and his “partner” in the newest chapter of his career, “one of the greatest artists I’ve worked with in my life, “James Wan.
The crux of Blum’s speech, though, was a story about his parents — and his father, specifically — who while running The Ferus Gallery on La Cienega decades ago, somehow convincing the artist Andy Warhol not only that his iconic 32-piece set of Campbell soup can paintings needed to remain together, but that he should sell them to him for just $2000.
“That story has stayed with me and it’s in my bones, and it taught me that good taste doesn’t come from consensus. That belief has to come before validation,” Blum told the crowd. “In hindsight, it seems like what my dad did seems easy. But it wasn’t, it was impossible. Everyone was making fun of these paintings. They hung them in their kitchen. And my dad is like, ‘I’m eating tuna fish sandwiches, and I’m going to spend all my money and buy these paintings.”
Similarly, Blum said, good producing is “impossible” — and producers, themselves, are impossible.
It’s hard to pin down the job of the producer, he suggested, and how they pull off what they do. But he said he believes we can define their craft as the effort “to somehow bring all of us impossible people together. To keep the team intact. To keep the soup cans in tact — even when it would be easier, faster, and more lucrative to sell them off one at a time.”
Today, Blum continued, “we’re living in this time where machines are very confident that they can pick what will work, that algorithms can tell us everything we’ve ever watched and what we should watch next, and AI can tell us what to stream and the mood we’re in next Tuesday.”
What machines cannot do, however, is “fall in love with something,” or “have instinct.”
Said the producer, “If you had asked an algorithm a few months ago to predict how a low-budget gay hockey romance with zero known stars would perform, I promise you the algorithm would’ve been like ‘Do not make that show.’ But that’s why Heated Rivalry needed us; it needed producers.”
The show’s key creatives, Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady, believed in it when perhaps no one else did — and it’s that belief, Blum said, “in artists, in stories, and the road it takes to get things made” that producers as a community do “better than anyone else.”
In the past, Blum said, he wasn’t one to tell stories “about people who believed in [someone] before anyone else.” But he’s come to realize that “those stories are really, really important because they tell the next generation that producing matters, that passion matters. That belief matters. That sometimes —oftentimes — the market is wrong.”
In winding down, Blum left his audience with the message, “Keep believing in your stories, and in your impossible directors and impossible actors and impossible writers, and most of all, impossible producers, even when we are at our most impossible.”
The PGA’s Milestone Award recognizes individuals or teams who have made historic contributions to the entertainment industry. Other contemporary recipients of the prize, once given out to the likes of Louis B. Mayer, Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, include Steven Spielberg, Sherry Lansing, James Cameron, Bob Iger, Donna Langley, Ted Sarandos, George Lucas and Kathleen Kennedy, Charles D. King, and Dana Walden.
The founder of Blumhouse, the horror powerhouse that merged with Wan’s Atomic Monster in 2024, Blum’s recent producing credits include Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Black Phone 2, The Lost Bus, and the USA Networks series The Rainmaker, based on the novel by John Grisham.
This year’s PGA Awards are taking place at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles. Other honorees include Amy Pascal, who’s receiving the David O. Selznick Achievement Award, and Mara Brock Akil, who’s being recognized with the Norman Lear Achievement Award.