The audience is the new studio
Sam Pressman runs Pressman Film, and he has a heretical idea about how movies should get made: let the people who watch them help pay for them.
Under his watch, the company closed a $2 million raise on Republic from roughly 370 ordinary investors. Not a fund. Not a hedge. People. His pitch is disarmingly simple, and it borrows the vocabulary of a tech accelerator more than a film commission. "Each movie is its own startup, and the money is raised to see each of those movies, and so the community will get to watch and participate in the evolution." It is the kind of sentence that makes traditional financiers wince and twenty-somethings lean in.
That instinct - close the gap between the maker and the watcher - runs through everything he is building. Television, where he sees "some of the most provocative narratives." Virtual reality, where he produced Marshmallow Laser Feast's Evolver. And AI, the third rail of the modern industry, which he picks up with both hands.
I'm hopeful that rather than seeing AI as the end of days, it's just the beginning of new days.
At Tribeca in 2023 he premiered In Search of Time, a short he and his collaborators billed as the first AI-generated film to play a major festival - iPhone footage run through open-source Stable Diffusion. His argument is a history lesson: photography was supposed to murder painting and instead set it free. "We need to embrace learning about it rather than categorically rejecting it out of fear."
Where Pressman Film is pointing its camera
Illustrative weighting based on public interviews, 2023-2024. Not company figures.
He learned on his father's sets - literally
Before he was a CEO he was a kid in a folding chair. He watched Danny DeVito and his father work together on Hoffa. On the set of The Island of Dr. Moreau, his daycare was a room of actors still wearing creature costumes. "As a little kid, I got to be on set a lot and feel that beautiful sense of live shoots."
The lessons got more formal. At Stanford he majored in Film & Media Studies and ran the Film Society and the Advanced Film Workshop. Then he apprenticed for real, producing under his father on a run of pictures with a notably eclectic shape.
Herzog. Levinson. Mary Harron. A Salvador Dali biopic. A VR experience. It is not a tidy resume, and that is rather the point. "Getting to work for my father and learn from him was the greatest privilege and opportunity," he said. The privilege came with a standard: Ed Pressman believed his job "was to be the ally and the champion of the filmmaker." Sam now repeats it almost word for word - to be "a ferocious ally and champion of the filmmaker and the storyteller."
He didn't have to say a lot. I could feel it in the slightest curl of his smile or the gesture of his hands.
A library most studios would kill for
Edward R. Pressman founded the company in 1969 and spent five decades backing films that were too strange, too daring, or too early for the majors. American Psycho. Wall Street. Badlands. The Crow. More than 100 pictures, and a long list of careers he helped launch. When Ed died on January 17, 2023, with family and company gathered around him, the catalog and the question both passed to Sam: how do you honor a legacy without embalming it?
His answer was to keep the creed and change the machinery. He held on to his father's motto - "every film is a miracle" - and went looking for new ways to make the miracles happen. The first big test arrived fast. Rupert Sanders' reboot of The Crow, a property Sam guards fiercely.
The movie is just going to blow people away. It's such a unique property - it's not a Marvel film, it's kind of an anti-Marvel film.
To really go to bat for and be a ferocious ally and champion of the filmmaker and the storyteller.
Tradition and the toolbox, side by side
Talk to him long enough and a pattern shows up. He is not interested in choosing between the old craft and the new tools. Vintage film methods and emerging technology, he argues, can sit on the same shelf. He raises money like a founder, talks about community like a platform builder, and quotes his father like a custodian of something sacred. The combination is unusual in a business that tends to pick a lane.
The Pressman name, for what it is worth, was attached to invention long before celluloid. His great-grandmother Lynn ran the Pressman Toy Company in the 1950s - one of the few women running a boardroom in that era. Reinvention, it seems, is a family business older than the film company.