In more than three decades as a studio executive and producer, Kevin Misher has worked on some of the most beloved movies in Hollywood, including “Rudy,” “Meet the Parents” and “Public Enemies.”

As recently as 2012, his production company, Misher Films, supported three development executives and three assistants. It had a studio deal worth more than $1 million in many years, which allowed it to acquire scripts and hire writers while meeting payroll.

But today — even as Misher continues to produce high-profile movies like “Coming 2 America” and “You People,” as well as television shows, documentaries and podcasts — his company has slimmed down amid the industry’s changing economics. Years often pass between the time producers start a project and the time they are paid. Deals for producers have dried up as studios have sought greater efficiencies. Misher’s six employees have dwindled to one, along with a partner who earns a portion of his fees.

“Those deals sustained you — they were a paycheck,” Misher said. “They allowed you to make a basic wage while waiting for a payout.”

The unraveling of these arrangements has not only made life harder for an accomplished producer like Misher, whose job is to originate movies by identifying promising material, and to oversee the hundreds or thousands of people involved in writing and filming. It has also hollowed out the field’s middle tier and made it almost impossible for young people to enter the profession.

“It starts to self-select for people who come in already with money,” said Misher, part of a group of more than 100 producers called Producers United, who are seeking more favorable financial terms through discussions with Hollywood studios. “The perspective gets narrower, it isn’t as innovative or diverse.”

The pressures are hardly unique to Hollywood. Across the economy, once-valued jobs requiring a high degree of skill and experience have been reined in during an era of consolidation and technological change, trends that promised efficiency gains.

Doctors and pharmacists, whose interactions with patients once defined their jobs, struggle to carve out face time or exercise judgment under the performance metrics imposed by their large organizations. Local journalists, whose reporting was once subsidized by the high-margin business of classified ads, have been laid off in large numbers amid acquisitions and the rise of digital advertising and free online competitors.

But in some ways the demise of the Hollywood producer — a storied figure in an iconic American industry — is most surprising.

“I won an Oscar in 2006,” said Cathy Schulman, who has produced such movies as “Crash” and “The Woman King” and is part of Producers United. “But even that gold star isn’t fully durable.” Schulman said she recently spent the better part of nine years making a movie for which her earnings came to under $60,000 a year.

In the early days of Hollywood, studio executives typically oversaw the making of a film. But after government antitrust litigation forced studios to scale back their businesses in the late 1940s, they increasingly turned to outside producers.

Under an arrangement that became common, a studio would pay an outside producer a fixed fee, part of which could be an advance, as well as a share of the movie’s revenue or profit, giving the producer a potentially large payday if the project succeeded.

By the 1980s, many studios had added overall deals — ongoing payments that allowed producers to support themselves and their companies between projects.

The system reliably generated moneymakers into the early 2000s, and came to rely on the producer as a bridge between the studio and the cast and crew. It fell to the producer to pitch the movie or TV show to a studio; assemble writers, actors and directors; and deliver the project on time and on budget.

“You read a script and a good producer can say, that’s a $55 million move, that’s a $60 million movie,” said Lynette Howell Taylor, who has produced such movies as “A Star Is Born” and “The Accountant.”

Producers competed aggressively to find and develop the next project.

“I’d have two breakfasts, a lunch, a drink, dinner,” said Misher, who stepped down as a Universal Studios executive in 2001 to become a producer. “You had to develop a network” that included agents, studio executives and talent. And they were compensated handsomely when their projects succeeded — often earning millions of dollars from a hit.

Over the next decade, however, studios began to scale back spending on outside project development, according to J.D. Connor, an expert on studio economics at the University of Southern California.

As entertainment companies got bigger, they pushed their studios into an arms race of sequels and superhero spectacles, which could be developed internally and drive profits more reliably. Declining revenue from DVD sales, along with a Hollywood writers’ strike and a recession and financial crisis, dented companies’ bottom lines and squeezed producers’ deals further.

Then, during the 2010s, it became less common for producers to receive a meaningful share of the revenue or profit from a movie. At the same time, their fixed fees were frequently eroded by stars and even managers who demanded a producer credit, too, which both conferred prestige and entitled them to a cut of the producer’s fee.

Today, a typical fee for a movie project that takes five to seven years to shepherd ranges from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million. But these fees are often parceled out among actors, directors and managers, in addition to what Producers United calls the “career producer” who shoulders the traditional responsibilities of that role.

The career producer sees little or no money until the studio gives the project an official go-ahead, a timeline that many producers say has ballooned over the past few decades from a year or two to several years. “You end up working for free for years till it gets greenlit,” Howell Taylor said.

Those financial challenges have reverberated through the business. While established producers like Misher, Howell Taylor and Schulman can no longer afford a team of producers-in-training whom they groom for larger projects, younger people find it impossible to enter the profession unless they are independently wealthy or willing to endure years of financial hardship.

And the problems have worsened in the past few years because of cost-cutting demands from investors and last year’s prolonged actors’ and writers’ strikes, which delayed or derailed many projects.

After Stephen Love graduated from the University of Southern California’s master’s program in producing in 2014, he drove for Uber and received government assistance while trying to produce his first movie.

That movie, “The Land,” came out in theaters two years later and helped put him in a position to produce several more, including the coming “Shadow Force,” starring Omar Sy and Kerry Washington.

But he has continued to struggle financially at times, partly because of the time it takes to be paid for a project. “In 10 years I’ve made five movies, and that’s great,” Love said. “But here I am back in survival mode again.”

To preserve their profession’s viability, Misher, Howell Taylor and Love have become active in Producers United, which began last year as an informal alliance of prominent producers who normally compete with one another. Members have met with executives at many studios and streamers and asked them to pay career producers an advance on their fees while they are developing a project, so they don’t go unpaid until the film or television show gets the go-ahead, and to help fund their health insurance more consistently.