Television producer David E. Kelley has known producer-director Michael Pressman for a long time. So he had to admit that he was surprised when Pressman told him and other friends last year that he had decided to turn his recent adventures in L.A. theater into a movie -- written, directed, financed by and co-starring himself.

“Most people said, ‘You’re crazy,’ ” Kelley recalls. “But,” he adds, “they didn’t say, ‘Don’t do this.’ The reaction was, ‘You’re crazy, but good for you.’ ”

Pressman is an Emmy-winning television producer (“Picket Fences”), much in demand as a TV director (“The Guardian,” “Chicago Hope”) and has directed feature films as well (“To Gillian on Her 37th Birthday”). His new film’s working title is “Frankie and Johnny Are Married” and it is, according to Pressman, “a dramatic fiction” based on the events surrounding his brief, tumultuous foray into local theater.

Kelley calls Pressman’s script “very clever, smart and funny.” So good, in fact, that he agreed to do a cameo in the film -- as did CBS President Les Moonves and former “Chicago Hope” star Mandy Patinkin, all playing themselves and all part of the inside joke of the script.

The back story: Pressman and his wife, actress Lisa Chess, had talked for years about doing something professionally together in the theater. In late 2000, they finally decided on Terrence McNally’s “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” she acting, he directing.

But it was 99-seat theater, so when the actor playing opposite Chess got a movie role a week and a half before opening, he walked. The understudy lasted three days, they lost their theater, and Pressman was out his $25,000 investment.

No curbing his enthusiasm

Pressman went off to Canada to direct the pilot for “The Guardian” and came back with an even crazier scheme. He would not only direct, he would play the role opposite his wife -- even though he hadn’t been on the stage in decades (“she thought I was nuts,” he admits). The play opened in July 2001 at Hollywood’s Tamarind Theatre to favorable reviews.

“The play is a great play, but I thought the story of how they came to do the play together was even more interesting than the play itself,” says actor Alan Rosenberg, another longtime friend of the director who is playing an over-the-top version of the actor who dropped out early on.

The movie, according to Pressman, is “about revitalizing a marriage. How do you keep a marriage alive?” But it’s neither a serious film nor a comedy, he says. “I think there’s satire in it,” he adds over lunch outside the North Hollywood theater where the film was shooting late last year. “This really has to fall into the category of human comedy.”

Pressman cites HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (in which writer-producer Larry David plays himself, sort of, in a variety of humorous and often embarrassing predicaments) as a precedent for what he’s attempting, “a new form of fictional reality.” In Patinkin’s scene, the actor plays himself in his “Chicago Hope” trailer in the midst of a meltdown. Moonves’ scene was shot at CBS, where the network executive (and ex-actor) expresses disbelief that Pressman is turning down a network pilot to act in a play with his wife, and throws him out of his office.

Kelley did his scene at his 20th Century Fox offices. Asked why, after all his TV shows, he made his first on-camera appearance for Pressman’s movie, he replies: “It was the spirit of the piece. Everybody was coming together to help him make this project. He felt the scene was important, and it was kind of fun at the same time. So I said yes. I guess that’s the beginning and the end of my acting career.”

Chess, Pressman’s wife of 10 years, says she thought the notion of turning their experiences into a movie “was a pretty insane idea. I knew that there were a lot of entertaining things that happened, a lot of highly dramatic things. I didn’t know what he was going to have when he sat down to write it.”

Although the financing is theirs, they’re out surprisingly little money, even for an independent film. The budget is a minuscule $75,000.

Practically everyone is working for free. “There are a lot of people who are taking deferred money because they believe in the project,” says producer Alice West, another longtime TV colleague. Much of the crew was enthusiastic but inexperienced, recruited from a production- directory Web site.

Paramount, which owns the rights to “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune,” will get first-look rights to the film. Rehearsals of the play figure in the script and its finale has Pressman and Chess doing scenes from the play.

“There was, or will be, nothing scarier, or more risk-taking, than going on stage,” notes Pressman. “Having weathered that experience, being onstage nonstop for two hours in a two-character piece, and succeeding, gave me the confidence to do the film acting.” And, he points out, the film constantly references moments from “Frankie and Johnny,” through rehearsals and ultimately playing the scenes before an audience.

“There was something about the play that, I said to Lisa, are mirrors for what you and I are going through: a struggling actress, issues of dealing with adoption, trying to prove how much one loves one another, the passion of that relationship.”

By the end of the play, “it becomes this blur. Is that Frankie and Johnny or Michael and Lisa? We can’t tell.”

But wouldn’t it have been easier to cast these parts with other actors?

“I think it would have been hard for two other people to do this,” Chess says. “We’re the best people for it because we experienced it.

“I had tried desperately to convince him not to do the play,” she concedes. “Not as a director; I knew he’d be great as a director. And I knew that he had acted. But I said, you don’t get on the stage for the first time in almost 30 years and do a two-character play where you don’t leave the stage for two solid hours. But then he proved me wrong, and he was really good.”

Pressman insists that the real risk was in doing the play, not in making the movie. “This is my world,” he says, talking about staging, lighting, cameras and the minutiae of filmmaking. “The nightmare was the new world of the theater which, in terms of what could go wrong, I didn’t know anything about.”

Notes Kelley: “We all said, ‘What’s going on here? Most people take up fishing for their midlife crisis, and he’s going to act.’ ”

Rosenberg, meanwhile, is billed as himself in the film but plays a very different Rosenberg from the usual nice-guy parts he does on TV: “a psychopathic, egomaniacal, stoned-out actor.” It worried his manager just a little, he says.

No one seems to have a clue if this will play outside the insular show-biz world of L.A. But, Kelley says, “Michael is a very endearing and engaging person. When people watch him, he’s this kind of underdog that you root for. If that comes across on screen, it could be delightful.”

“Ultimately,” says Pressman, “it’s a success story, and I would love it to be viewed as such. At the end of the day, there’s something very positive about working with your loved one.”

Reality and play: a blurring of lines

By Kevin Thomas
May 26, 2004 12 AM PT

“Frankie & Johnny Are Married” is a bittersweet, wryly amusing “dramatic fiction” about producer-director Michael Pressman’s true-life tribulations while trying to stage the play “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.” Pressman had decided that, after a decade of marriage, he and his wife, actress Lisa Chess, should at last work together in the theater, where they both started.

The Pressmans, who live in a handsome home on a Venice canal with their young son, found themselves at a juncture all too common to entertainment industry couples. Pressman had found success as a writer, producer and director in television, most notably with “Chicago Hope,” while Chess was still struggling to establish herself as an actress, at times auditioning for roles that she admits she never wanted and yet loses to actresses with bigger names. With “Chicago Hope” winding down, Pressman figured 2001 was a good time to realize the couple’s long-deferred dream. Terrence McNally’s play seemed a good choice for a modest small-theater production: two characters, a single set. Over his wife’s admonitions never to use your own money, he invested a $15,000 tax return to stage the play in a small local theater.

As they proceed, Chess recalls that 10 years earlier in acting class she had played the hard-bitten waitress Frankie opposite a fellow student as short-order cook Johnny in a scene that had been well received, and she recommends him to her husband. The actor Pressman cast in his real-life production remains anonymous for reasons that swiftly become clear; it also should be made clear that Alan Rosenberg, who portrays Frankie for the movie, is not that actor. Rosenberg may be using his real name, but he is not playing himself, while Chess and Pressman are, in effect, playing themselves.

At first all goes well. Rosenberg has an earthy, blue-collar, middle-aged masculinity that seems ideal for Johnny, but his outsized ego and professional frustrations start short-circuiting his performance. In his own mind, he’s right up there with Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman but never got his due, which has left him pretentious, angry and undisciplined. “I didn’t become an actor to learn lines,” he declares haughtily, explaining that subtext and spontaneity are what counts. Chess and Pressman soldier on, and while Chess is shaping up to be a wonderful Frankie, Rosenberg spells almost certain disaster.

As a writer, Pressman has thought a lot about the ordeal he and Chess endured and the bold decision he made in an attempt to save the day. Enough time had passed so that he was able to take a comic look at the venture, with humor setting off the anything-but-funny unexpected risks that Pressman takes with his family’s financial security, not to mention the strain he places on his marriage. He affectionately satirizes the pressures of working in television and the vicissitudes of 99-seat theater, starting with an overconfident producer (Jillian Armenante) and a vulnerable novice stage manager (Morgan Nagler) -- the actor Rosenberg plays is by no means the production’s sole crisis.

Pressman, who brings an effortless flow and style to his film, further heightens its verisimilitude by casting a number of friends and associates as themselves, including Hector Elizondo, Mandy Patinkin, Kathy Baker and Barry Primus. Stephen Tobolowsky plays Murray, an amusingly obnoxious actor pal of Pressman. It is hard to imagine how Chess and Pressman could improve upon their performances as themselves, both in their professional and private lives. Rosenberg is not merely hilarious, for he is able to suggest that were his actor not so screwed up he could have been fine as Johnny.

Pressman reveals an astute sense of when to go for laughs and when to hold back.

*

‘Frankie & Johnny Are Married’

MPAA rating: R for sexuality, language and brief drug use

Times guidelines: Adult themes, suitable for mature older children

Michael Pressman...Michael Pressman

Lisa Chess...Lisa Chess

Alan Rosenberg...Alan Rosenberg

Stephen Tobolowsky...Murray Mintz

An IFC Films presentation in association with Ridea Productions. Writer-director Michael Pressman. Producer Alice West. Cinematographer Jacek Laskus. Editors Jeff Freeman, Michael Rafferty. Music Don Peake. Costumes Van Ramsey. Production designer Lauren Hersholt-Nole. Set decorator Bianca Ferro. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes. Exclusively at the Westside Pavilion Cinemas, 10800 W. Pico Blvd., West Los Angeles. (310) 281-8223.