TASTE MAKERS : ED PRESSMAN

Calendar’s choices of Taste Makers--people who move and shape our arts and entertainment in 1988--run the gamut. If the eight faces on the cover form a rather curious collection, it’s because creative abilities come in many forms.

As a result, our group’s pursuits range from directing the distinguished PBS series “American Playhouse,” to fronting the hard-living, hard-rock band Guns N’ Roses. All eight individuals have been significant players in 1988 and we feel will continue as leaders and creators in the future--as have the Taste Makers of previous years.

In this fourth annual survey, we hope to present an insight into what stimulates and influences these people of influence.

Independent producer of such movies as “Badlands,” “True Stories,” “Talk Radio.” His concern: Looking for films whose subjects will take him to a “new world.”

When Ed Pressman was still in his teens, enamored of beat poetry and philosophy, he was reading Jack Kerouac and Bertrand Russell. Now, at 45 and perhaps the film world’s most adventuresome independent producer, Pressman is studying the annals of his own turf--Hollywood.

It’s no wonder that Pressman particularly identifies with a tastemaker from movieland’s heyday--maverick producer David O. Selznick.

“He’s always fascinated me,” says Pressman, who just finished reading “A Private View” by Irene Selznick--wife of Selznick, daughter of mogul Louis B. Mayer. “That whole period in Hollywood has a great appeal, because it involved the ascendancy of the second generation of movie people. Selznick was special. He was an independent--a man on the outside--but a major player in Hollywood. And for a brief period he made some of the best movies of his time.”

Also a man on the outside, Pressman has produced 26 films in less than two decades, ranging from early efforts like Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” and Brian de Palma’s “Phantom of the Paradise” to more recent gems like David Byrne’s “True Stories” and Oliver Stone’s current “Talk Radio.” The roster of gifted directors who have also been at the helm of Pressman projects includes Fred Schepisi, the Taviani brothers, Alex Cox, John Milius and Werner Fassbinder.

Pressman runs his 16-person production company out of a crowded suite on the Burbank lot where he has an office decorated with a French poster of his Arnold Schwarzenegger film (“Conan le Barbar”), a framed Time magazine cover of David Byrne and a David Levine New York Review of Books calendar. In an era where producers take pride in black Porsches and macho swagger, Pressman wears bow-ties and rides around town in a Chrysler convertible (“I drive, but I tend to bump into things so the first job people get at my company is taking me around”). Armed with a grade-school composition book where he keeps tabs on his production schedule, Pressman has the shy, meditative air of an accountant about to tumble into a Technicolor Walter Mitty fantasy.

“This is a very vicarious field of endeavor,” he explains. “And that’s probably my strength as a producer--I can identify with different perspectives. I look for films which allow me to enter a new world, whether it’s with the inventive imagination of David Byrne, the moralistic thrust of Oliver Stone or the fascination with film and its place in history that you see from the Taviani brothers.”

A man who prizes his rapport with strong-willed directors (“I think my strength is that I’m not afraid of them, that I sense their vision will produce something very special”), Pressman has always been enthralled by rebels and outsiders. “When I got to college I was very taken with Jack Kerouac,” he says. “That’s why I went West to go to Stanford. I wanted to see the bohemian life style he represented. I ended up hanging out at lots of jazz clubs, going to see Lenny Bruce and Thelonius Monk, all of which left a big impression on me.”

Other early influences included Philip Pearlstein, a colorful history teacher Pressman had at the Fieldston School who introduced him to German Expressionist film (and as Pressman recalls was later arrested for running guns to Cuba). Film director James Toback was also a childhood pal. “He was a real neighborhood character--I discovered lots of strange places through him. He was always taking me to these dens of iniquity.”

Attending the London School of Economics, Pressman met Paul Williams (who went on to direct three films for Pressman, including “The Revolutionary”). “He thought I was a movie mogul because I’d worked a non-paying job at Columbia Pictures and I thought he was Orson Welles because he was so gregarious and had already made a short. Through Paul, I really gained the experience--and self-confidence--that I could produce movies.”

Outside of the film makers he has worked with, Pressman has been influenced by everyone from Cocteau and Jerry Lewis to George (“Road Warrior”) Miller and Stanley Kubrick (“I remember walking for miles after seeing ‘2001’ because I was so knocked out by it”). Current favorites include Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Betty Blue” and Erroll Morris’ “Thin Blue Line” which excite Pressman because “they expand the form--and vocabulary--of film making so much.”

A favorite moment? Pressman saves Monday nights for himself. “I go to a restaurant with a bar and organize my week. I find it easier to work in a public place where I don’t know anybody. It’s the French cafe syndrome. I get a sense of warmth from the anonymity that allows me to concentrate better.”

Though he works in a commercial medium, Pressman feels he has retained an artistic impulse as a producer. “It’s more interesting to accomplish something that seems somehow significant or original,” he says with a wry grin. “If I feel I’m not being creative, I get very edgy.”

This project was edited by David Fox, assistant Calendar editor.