EDWARD PRESSMAN Toronto 1990
Edward Rambach Pressman was born in New York City in 1943, the son of a toy manufacturer who went to Stanford and the London School of Economics where he met filmmaker Paul Williams. Pressman produced Williams’ first two films for United Artists before making Badlands with Terence Malick and two films with the young Brian De Palma – Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise, a personal favorite of mine. He had a big hit with Oliver Stone’s Wall Street and a critical one with Stone’s follow-up, Talk Radio. He was a big player when I was assigned to photograph him at the 1990 film festival, after the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel earlier that year, where was presenting Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that producer Edward Pressman had set himself up on the mezzanine lobby at the old Sutton Place Hotel on Bay Street underneath the big tapestry wall hanging that I’d come to rely on when I had a shoot at the hotel. I’m guessing that I brought my own light since the shoot was done on Kodak Plus-X – a relatively slow speed “portrait” film that I rarely used. A prudent photographer would have tried not to overuse this backdrop but I was never prudent and in any case I loved working with tapestries, in the hope that they’d help create an image that evoked 18th century paintings. Pressman had an interesting look, with his baseball cap, seersucker suit and deck shoes, and I thought that created an interesting contrast, especially in the full-length shot of him sitting on an antique sofa with his scripts and notebooks sitting on the velvet upholstery.
Edward Pressman had a rare reputation as a producer, working with great talents (Oliver Stone, Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara, John Frankenheimer, Kathryn Bigelow, Werner Herzog) and putting together pictures that ranged from classics (Badlands) to cult pictures (The Bad Lieutenant) to zeitgeist movies (Wall Street) to notorious bombs that turned out to be wildly influential (American Psycho). What he did was rare in the old studio system, where the closest you got to a creative producer was David Selznick, but independent producers who had a palpable sense of taste and vision – almost auteurs in their own right – started making their mark on Hollywood in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Pressman rarely repeated himself except with the Crow movie series that began with the cursed 1994 film starring Brandon Lee and continued right up a reboot in 2024, released a year after Pressman died in Los Angeles at 79.
