Unsung Auteurs: Michael Pressman

By Erin Free

FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Michael Pressman, who helmed The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, Boulevard Nights, The Bad News Bears In Breaking Training and To Gillian On Her 37th Birthday.

Director Michael Pressman boasts a career trajectory that runs counter to many of the creatives featured in the Unsung Auteurs column. Unlike many of his fellow under-celebrated filmmakers, Pressman didn’t begin his career in television and then break through with the odd film here and there, or make a shift between mediums altogether. Pressman got off the blocks early with a flashy debut, and stayed on the big screen for a substantial time before a financially unsuccessful feature saw him sample and then succeed enormously in the field of episodic television. So while he’s now an appropriately highly regarded figure on the small screen, Pressman’s early big screen successes now remain sadly under-discussed in film commentary circles. Michael Pressman was practically born to create, and he’s crafted a handful of interesting and highly original feature films.

Michael Pressman was born in 1950 in New York City to mother and modern dancer Sasha, who was an original member of Martha Graham’s first dance troupe, and father David, a highly successful theatrical and television director credited with discovering Grace Kelly when he cast her in an episode of The Actors Studio Anthology Series in the late 1940s. David Pressman’s impressive career in live television in the early 1950s careered off the rails, however, when Commie-bashing, witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy caught him in his cross-hairs during his notorious blacklisting of alleged communist sympathisers in the film and television industries. Shunned and unable to work for nearly fifteen years, Pressman took to teaching before finally returning to the industry in the early 1960s, eventually directing the popular soap opera One Life To Live for nearly thirty years.

Michael Pressman’s social consciousness was raised early by the experiences of his father, who also inspired his son’s love of film and television, and his desire to create. “At first, I wanted to be an actor, and was lucky enough to act professionally as a child in the theatre in New York,” Pressman said in a 2014 interview. “But I also fell in love with the movies and, at the age of fourteen, I made my own little ten-minute silent film comedies with my father’s 16mm movie camera. It was a simple wind-up primitive camera, and I made spoofs like ‘The Fall Of Count Dracula’ and a James Bond spoof. I played Dracula and my younger brother who was thirteen played James Bond.”

That love for and fascination with cinema continued to grow, and Pressman – like so many others almost too numerous to mention – was gifted his first major opportunity by producer Roger Corman via his successful exploitation outfit New World Pictures. 26-year-old Pressman was handed the keys on the deliriously souped-up 1976 action caper flick The Great Texas Dynamite Chase, and he well and truly drove it like he stole it, delivering a hard-charging, ridiculously entertaining drive-in flick of the first order. Even with material like this, Pressman showed his obvious intelligence by balancing the script’s potboiler elements with quirky touches and interesting characterisation.

Claudia Jennings in *The Great Texas Dynamite Chase*

A proto-Thelma & Louise about two female bank robbers on a crime spree, The Great Texas Dynamite Chase stars famed cult actress and 1970 Playmate Of The Year Claudia Jennings, who had prior starred in 1972’s roller derby belter Unholy Rollers, the now forgotten 1971 post-Vietnam drama Jud, and the wonderfully lurid 1973 swamp-set actioner Gator Bait. Jennings shares great chemistry with her on-screen partner in crime Jocelyn Jones, and The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (along with exploitation classics like Moonshine County Express, Deathsport, Fast Company, and one of the best ever episodes of The Brady Bunch) helped turn Jennings into a true 1970s cult figure up until her tragic death in a car accident in 1979.

The freewheeling energy and filmmaking skill he displayed on The Great Texas Dynamite Chase saw Pressman get noticed by the studios, who offered him the chance to direct a sequel to the 1976 kids sports comedy classic The Bad News Bears, about a baseball team of misfits who become unlikely winners. There were, however, a few drawbacks, namely that the original’s popular and toplining stars would not be returning for the proposed follow-up. “The Great Texas Dynamite Chase turned out funnier than I thought it would, and it was off of that movie that I got the sequel to The Bad News Bears, because Don Simpson, who was recently hired as an executive at Paramount, and Michael Eisner, who was the new head of the studio, were looking for a young director,” Pressman explained to Filmmaker Magazine. “They had no script, they had no Walter Matthau, they had no Tatum O’Neal…but they had a release date! I remember screenwriter Paul Brickman [who would later write and direct the Tom Cruise winner Risky Business] and I going to our first meeting, where we were told, ‘Okay guys, you have a release date and you’ve got a franchise. The rest is up for grabs.’”

Michael Pressman with Ronny Cox and Richard Pryor on the set of *Some Kind Of Hero*

In a true feat of ingenious imagination, Pressman and Brickman cooked up a fun and very entertaining sequel with 1977’s The Bad News Bears In Breaking Training, which pumped up the roles of the young actors who returned to revisit their indelible characters (created by the original film’s screenwriter and Unsung Auteur Bill Lancaster and director Michael Ritchie), and provided an engaging new character for actor William Devane, who plays the father of the first film’s delinquent bad boy, brilliantly played by Jackie Earl Haley, and takes on the team’s coaching position vacated by Walter Matthau. Though not as warmly received as the now legendary first film, The Bad News Bears In Breaking Training performed solidly at the box office and prompted the production of another sequel in 1978’s The Bad News Bears Go To Japan, which Pressman did not direct.

After the comedic double-shot of The Great Texas Dynamite Chase and The Bad News Bears In Breaking Training, Pressman shifted gears considerably and returned to the sense of social consciousness that he’d developed during his youth with 1979’s groundbreaking Boulevard Nights, which was produced by Unsung Auteur Tony Bill. One of the first major studio productions to forefront Latin-American characters, this gritty drama takes an unflinching look at the violence and desperation of gang life in the Mexican-American barrios of Los Angeles. While a film like Boulevard Nights would today almost certainly be directed by a Mexican-American filmmaker, it was a game-changer for its time, and Pressman created something rich and authentic, helped immeasurably by Desmond Nakano’s bristling and well-structured screenplay and a cast of largely unknown Latin-American actors, all of whom are excellent. The cultural significance of Boulevard Nights cannot be understated, and Michael Pressman should certainly be given more credit for the film.

Michael Pressman with Frank Langella on the set of *Those Lips, Those Eyes*

The director moved on to more fascinating material after this, with 1980’s Those Lips, Those Eyes (a love letter to the theatre boasting strong turns from Frank Langella and Tom Hulce), 1982’s Some Kind Of Hero (a highly effective comedy drama starring comic titan Richard Pryor as a Vietnam vet struggling to fit back into society) and 1983’s Doctor Detroit, a wild comedy starring Dan Aykroyd. “We had no script,” Pressman explained of Doctor Detroit to Filmmaker Magazine. “It went through many drafts, and it was tough because it was a mix of high style comedy and a sort of French farce, with a fantasy fable and this broad Saturday Night Live-type sketch humour. It was kind of a mixed bag, but maybe that’s why it has aged better than some comedies. It lives in its own time and space.” The film, though largely forgotten, is indeed a true off-the-wall original, but its box office failure saw Michael Pressman move sideways into the world of made-for-television movies, where he directed solid, superior efforts like To Heal A Nation (1982), Shootdown (1988), Incident At Dark River (1989) and Joshua’s Heart (1990).

While reapplying his focus to the telemovie form, Pressman has occasionally returned to the big screen, directing the surprise 1991 sequel Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret Of The Ooze (“I had directed the successful sequel to The Bad News Bears and at the time, sequels were not all successful, so they approached me because of my credits,” Pressman has explained of his involvement. “I was very hesitant at first, but did my research and watched the first movie and heard how much kids had fallen in love with the Turtles”) and 1996’s To Gillian On Her 37th Birthday, a stylish, involving family drama based on Michael Brady’s play and starring Michelle Pfeiffer. The screenplay came courtesy of Pfeiffer’s husband and famed TV producer David E. Kelley, who became a key collaborator of Pressman’s, with the director ultimately taking on major behind-the-scenes roles on his popular series Picket Fences and Chicago Hope.

Now fully ensconced in the world of high-quality episodic television (working on series like Damages, Weeds, Blue Bloods, The Closer, Justified, Law & Order, Chicago Med and NCIS), the hard-working Michael Pressman’s last big screen credit remains 2003’s Frankie And Johnny Are Married, a keenly intelligent and highly “meta” comedy drama. In a rare acting role, Pressman plays himself opposite his real-life actress wife, Lisa Chess, with the couple embroiled in a complicated stage production of Terence McNally’s gritty and romantic play Frankie And Johnny In The Clare De Lune. Thanks to a difficult leading man (Alan Rosenburg, again, playing himself), things get complicated quickly. Dotted with cameos, and filmed partly on the set of Chicago Hope, Frankie And Johnny Are Married is a very smart movie about the American entertainment industry. He might now be a television fixture, but Michael Pressman is also a very talented and consistently fascinating filmmaker. “Directing films is like making dreams come true,” Pressman has said, and he’s certainly made some good ones.