Finding Your Own Style as a Producer with Andrew Loevenguth
Andrew Loevenguth is the head of production at Cartwright in Venice, California. He also sits on the management team and is considered an ‘industry vet’, meaning he has no idea what adult life outside of advertising is like.
He currently lives in Sherman Oaks, home to some of the best stuff you never visit when you come to Los Angeles, and he would like to keep it that way. Andrew has also spent time at Wieden+Kennedy and Anomaly.
Andrew sat down with LBB to discuss his move from advertising to production, and the many lessons he learnt shadowing two very different senior producers.
When I got into advertising, I did not know much about production. I had a degree in advertising from the William Allen White School of Journalism at the University of Kansas, and I began my career as an account executive. Once I started going on shoots and saw the agency producer in action, I realised that’s what I wanted to do. The agency where I was working, luckily, allowed me to slide over to the production department.
I spent my first year and half working for two senior producers, and this is where I learned… wait for it… MY BIGGEST LESSON.
Both producers I worked for were very good at their jobs and worked on great projects. But the interesting thing was they operated in two very different ways. It was exhilarating and they both made me work my tail off, but it was kind of crazy how different they were.
Producer number one flew by the seat of their pants. To them, this business was about relationships, phone conversations, creative meetings, and a high bar of creative taste. It was a sort of ‘who you know’ and ‘who they know who will make this great’ approach to making work.
I shadowed this person on a massive 10-day shoot in New York City, a large production with multiple locations and some cutting-edge tech in play. There were some well-known commercial actors and a big time director from abroad. The creative directors and creatives were all heavy hitters. And while it seemed really stressful to me, the producer was calm, cool, and collected.
In a few of the production storms I witnessed, this producer was the person everyone turned to for the way out. And maybe they were kind of making it up as they went, and maybe that’s a superpower, but you could tell they were owning the moment and the project.
Since then, I have always tried to emulate that calm and confidence. Not easy – production is mostly never your fault, just your problem.
And then I switched over to assist producer number two. This person was almost in every way the opposite of number one, yet just as good and successful.
They were incredibly detail oriented. All the nuts and bolts of every part of a production mattered and had to be taken seriously. Lots of notetaking those first few months for me – it awoke my own list-making and journaling habits that, until that moment, had lain dormant inside of me.
To this day, I am a compulsive list maker, journal entry writer, and digital notes taker. I will never forget being asked about an invoice from a mix session early on in our time together. Not knowing the exact numbers of hours we were in the studio felt like a failure for me, seeing how diligent this producer was. Sounds minor and silly now, but it was the kind of learning moment where you realise all those details matter.
So, what’s the biggest lesson? There is no one perfect way to produce; we all find our own style. I’ve worked with and hired lots of great producers who all have their own way. For me, it’s doing the job over and over and working on putting those two philosophies together.
Calm in the storm, details matter.
Good work is hard enough to make, but great work takes Herculean effort. I think I learned early on how to at least go at it. And then, ever since, it’s the constant struggle to keep pushing for it.
