EDWARD R. PRESSMAN
(11 April 1943 - 17 January 2023)
The US film producer Edward R. Pressman, who has died from respiratory failure aged 79, had a more than 50-year career as a producer and executive producer on over 80 films. As a producer he worked on such notable titles such as Phantom of the Paradise, Plenty, Wall Street, Blue Steel, Bad Lieutenant and American Psycho, and was executive producer on Badlands, Das Boot, Conan the Barbarian, True Stories and Judge Dredd. He was known for giving new talent a chance to succeed.
Edward Rambach Pressman was born in New York to Jack Pressman, a Toy Corporation owner, and his wife Lynn. He graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in philosophy, attended the London School of Economics and began making films in 1967. Two years on he produced his first feature, the comedy-drama Out of It with Barry Gordon and Jon Voight. The film won awards at Berlin for its writer-director Paul Williams and Voight was in Pressman’s next film, The Revolutionary (1970). He then made Sisters with Margot Kidder, Badlands, written and directed by Terrence Malick, and Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise with Paul Williams. He let Sylvester Stallone write, direct and appear in Paradise Alley in 1978.
It is doubtful that Pressman’s early films could have been made without him, a fact that was to feature throughout his career. Other examples are Oliver Stone’s The Hand with Michael Caine, Kathryn Bigelow’s Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, Barbet Schroeder’s Reversal of Fortune for which Jeremy Irons won the Oscar, and Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant with Harvey Keitel. He also worked with such European filmmakers as Wolfgang Petersen on the director’s cut of Das Boot, the Taviani brothers, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bo Widerberg, Zhang Yimou and Werner Herzog.
The range of Pressman’s films was vast, from Alan Rickman’s family drama The Winter Guest, the futuristic Judge Dredd, the mystery City Hall, the actioner The Crow, the biopic Hoffa, the corporate greed depicted in Wall Street, to a thriller about a Talk Radio host, the dopey sci-fi comedy Martians Go Home, the action-adventure Street Fighter and the historical Amazing Grace.
Edward Pressman was married to the actress Annie McEnroe from 1983 and they have a son, Sam, who aims to follow his father into films. Overlooked by the major US awards, Pressman had seasons of his films at the National Film Theatre in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Pacific Film Archives and the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cinematek. In 2003 he received a Gotham Film & Media Award for lifetime achievement and was honoured with a retrospective at the French Cinematheque who awarded him the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres medal.
MICHAEL DARVELL