The first-rank producer at credit level: Sydney Pollack — the producing filmography separated from the directing and acting record, credit by credit

1934–2008 · born Lafayette, raised South Bend (boundary)

The tie first, exactly: Sydney Irwin Pollack was born in Lafayette, Indiana, on 1 July 1934, and reared in South Bend, where he fell in love with theatre at South Bend Central High School under drama teacher James Lewis Casaday, went straight to New York's Neighborhood Playhouse instead of college, and died at Pacific Palisades, California, on 26 May 2008. (One aggregator's header prints his birthplace as South Bend against its own text's Lafayette; the Lafayette birth and South Bend raising is the consistent record — Britannica, the obituaries of record and the Academy — and the conflict is noted rather than smoothed.) Nothing in the record puts a Pollack home, school or formation in Granger.

The producing record, separated: Pollack directed some twenty films and acted in more than thirty, and those records are not this article's. As a producer he won the Academy Award for Best Picture as producer of Out of Africa (1985), the film he also directed. As producer only — not directing — his closing credits are Michael Clayton (2007), in which he also acted, and The Reader (2008). As executive producer — a distinct credit, senior in name and lighter in hand, and never to be flattened into "produced" — the credit records place him on, among others, Sense and Sensibility (1995) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999), whose producer credits proper belong to William Horberg and Tom Sternberg; the same separation runs back through the AFI Catalog's Pollack filmography, which lists his producing titles year by year with "Prod" and "Exec prod" distinguished (producer from 1975; executive producer first in 1980; producer and executive-producer titles interleaved thereafter, 62 titles in the AFI filmography in all across cast, director and producer). Obituary summaries that credit him with "producing" the whole list — The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), Presumed Innocent (1990), Sense and Sensibility, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Iris (2001), Cold Mountain (2003) — are printed here as what they are: a true list of his production-company titles, in which his personal credit varies title by title between producer and executive producer, exactly as the AFI-pattern record distinguishes them.

The company, the partner, the deal, and the credits through death: Pollack founded Mirage Enterprises in 1985, just before Out of Africa's release, naming it — he was a pilot — after an aeroplane. Anthony Minghella joined him as partner in 2001. In December 2003 Miramax Films signed Mirage to a three-year first-look deal covering all of Pollack and Minghella's film-production activity, a relationship running back to Sliding Doors (1998) and forward through Cold Mountain (2003). The credits run through death and past it: Minghella died on 18 March 2008 and Pollack on 26 May 2008; The Reader, the last film they produced together, was released posthumously in 2008, and the Academy took the rare step of allowing four producer nominees for it — Minghella, Pollack, Donna Gigliotti and Redmond Morris — because its two original producers had both died during production; both men received posthumous Best Picture nominations, as they had been nominated for Michael Clayton the year before. That is a first-rank producing career entire — and it is Lafayette-born and South Bend-raised, carried here at boundary size because the audit requires the county's first rank printed whole and its Granger share stated: the share is none.

Sources:

1. AFI Catalog, Sydney Pollack person filmography (62 titles; the producer section's Prod / Exec prod distinction); Mirage Enterprises company record (founded 1985; Minghella partner 2001; the Mirage title list); Screen Daily, 14 December 2003 (the Miramax three-year first-look deal); Academy / press record of the The Reader producer-nomination ruling, January 2009; Britannica and the obituaries of record (birth, raising, death); full-cast credit record for The Talented Mr. Ripley (Horberg and Sternberg, producers; Pollack, executive producer).