Ed Pressman Dialogue with Julie Solomon, 1991 Bruce Jenkins: We've decided to end this season. This is our first year of such dialogues with a visit not by another director or actor/director, but by a producer and not just any producer. Management hailed in a recent issue of American Film as ​ a producer of the decade and I believe the single most interesting producer in the US, someone who has a sense of what is possible and a sense of how to make visions of filmmakers actually happen on celluloid. It's Edward R. Pressman who is very, very kindly agreed to come and talk about the work he's done for the past 20 years. I had an opportunity to see him in action a year ago at Berlin where he was doing a premiere of a new film. Bruce Jenkins: He has continued to work at an extraordinary pace making two, three, sometimes four films in a year. He is as we know right now beginning work with a native son, someone whose career we followed here at the Walker, Mark Frost who will in about a week's time be making his feature film directing debut under the production of Ed Pressman, a new film called Storyville. We're very, very pleased to highlight not only another aspect of what makes interesting, ​ ​ engaging, lively cinema possible, but a particular figure who's been a catalyst for filmmakers like Brian De Palma, Oliver Stone, Charles Burnett, Barbet Schroeder, and hopefully Mark Frost. Bruce Jenkins: With Ed tonight is a critical... I know many people who have read but have never seen or have not widely known about her other work. We have Julie Solomon from Wall Street Journal whose career dates back to writing fiction of ​ first novel who has been writing for the journal since the late 1970s, who has a degree in law, has a broad range of interests. Her work at the journal though I think is of singular importance. The general began covering film in 1983 and she was allowed to begin working on the film beat and has in that time a master or rather astonishing array of film reviews of feature coverage on a whole range of issues, of aesthetic and cultural importance in film. Bruce Jenkins: She has been working for the past two years on a book documenting the production of a major film of the past year. Major film that regrettably didn't make very much money in the past year, Bonfire of the Vanities and will in about six ​ months time have her first major nonfiction book, this case study of Bonfire of the Vanities published. We're very ​ pleased that she's taken time out from her reviewing duties at Wall Street Journal and finishing up work on this ​ actually major, major book study to be with us and to spend some time really over the last two months looking at work that has been done under the auspices of Ed Pressman, making their final dialogue visit or making our final dialogue visit possible tonight. Bruce Jenkins: It is a great deal of pleasure to welcome here to the Walker, Ed Pressman and Julie Solomon. Julie Solomon: Hello. Is this okay? Good. Well, before we came out here, I decided I should do a little research about Ed Pressman outside of what I knew about his film career, so I called his mother up. I said to her that we were going to be here in Minneapolis and I wanted her to know when she first thought that Ed was going to go into the movie business and Apr 20, 1991 1 she said she never thought he was going to go into the movie business when he was a kid, but she had a couple of good stories that she thought I should tell you about them. She thought it gave them insight into his future as a somewhat eclectic film producer, and she said that when he was a kid, he went to the Ethical Culture School in New York City, and he used to go off to school every day and everything didn't match all the time. Julie Solomon: Like when she would be from one pair of shoes and the other shoe would be from the other pair of shoes, and she was quite concerned about this. She went to talk to one of Ed's teachers and the teacher said, "Don't worry about it. Just means he's very interested in everything. He'll be like Benjamin Franklin." Mrs. Pressman thought, "Well, okay, we'll see about that." Then she sent Eddie off to camp. Eddie, she called and she said he came home from camp that summer and her little quiet boy comes home and he's mister all around camper. She says, "I always wondered how they knew that because he's such a quiet person. How did they know that he was so great?" Julie Solomon: She said I should tell you that her all around camper may not look like what your stereotype of a film, but you're expecting some guy with a ponytail and all of that and then in comes Ed, but he is the mister all around camper. I think as you look at some of the films and listened to his career, you'll see that he has really been all over the map. Guess I wanted to start a little bit about how you ended up getting into the film business. Ed's family is in the toy business, was in the toy business, and one could say that might be fun enough, and yet you chose to go into film. You certainly don't fit the stereotype and what was it that first attracted you to movie making? Ed Pressman: Well, I think it was a similar process to what I guess brought me to major in Philosophy in college. It was a process of elimination. Philosophy seemed to be the most encompassing subject and film brought together very diverse aspects of my interest. I was brought up to go into the toy business and film is a business, and I think that strain was very much a part of me, but I didn't want to go into the toy business. Julie Solomon: Why was that? Ed Pressman: I used to try it out in the summer times. I don't know, I just never was excited by it. I can't give a reason, but just, it didn't fulfill me and I also didn't want to just pursue, I shouldn't say just, but I didn't want to pursue an academic career in philosophy, but film seemed somehow to subsumed the whole and encompassed all those aspects of our culture. I couldn't think of anything else I ever wanted to do and that film itself seemed totally remote and impossible to pursue I guess. When I was at Fieldston High School, I had a teacher that taught modern European history through German films, Dr. Caligari and Mädchen in Uniform and Der letzte Mann, and I guess that impressed me on ​ ​ ​ ​ the power of film. Ed Pressman: I had an uncle when I was growing up in New York. I guess that's first thing. When I was maybe eight years old, he owned two movie theaters up in Washington Heights. I used to sell popcorn and see four movies a day and loved the movies, but again, it seemed totally remote. When I was at Stanford, I had a roommate whose father was a director Apr 20, 1991 2 and we talked about making films endlessly but again, it seemed impossible. When I went to graduate school in England at LSE, while I was going to school, I got a non-paying job, an attache with an executive at Columbia Pictures and I met a filmmaker who was American studying at Cambridge named Paul Williams, and he had done a short film at Harvard the year before. Ed Pressman: The two of us started talking about film and he thought I was a great movie mogul because I had a job on Orr Street. I thought he was a, yeah, D.W. Griffith. We were totally absorbed with each other's dreams and we spent the whole night talking about... We formed a partnership that day and we were together for seven years, and Paul really was the way I got into film because Paul had great confidence. He was the outside man, I was the inside man. It was through Paul I guess ultimately that the possibilities seemed real. Julie Solomon: Well, that's great, and so then you went from that to becoming a producer, and I think one of the things that has always somewhat mystified me, even though I've been writing about film for a long time, you always hear about producer and I think they're all different kinds of producers who really run the gamut from having a very minimal effect on what the actual film is. They just pick a project and then leave to producers who are very much hands on all the way through what we think of as a David Selznick type. I guess what I want to ask you is, what does a producer do generally, and I guess more specifically, what is it that you do and how does that differ from somebody who's working within the studio system? Ed Pressman: That's a lot of questions.