Horror Business: FANGORIA And Cinestate VP Of Production Amanda Presmyk
Nick Taylor
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Amanda Presmyk is the VP of production across Cinestate and FANGORIA’s film division. Having started her career in TV with the drug-cartel drama, Queen of the South, Amanda joined Cinestate towards the beginning of its inception, shortly after the release of Brawl in Cell Block 99. In the past two and a half years, she’s worked on such films as Dragged Across Concrete, The Standoff at Sparrow Creek, Puppetmaster: The Littlest Reich, Satanic Panic (out now!) and FANGORIA’s exciting upcoming slate of features including: VFW, & Castle Freak.
Amanda and I caught up and talked about her career history, strategic advice for aspiring producers, and what it’s like working across FANGORIA & Cinestate. Before diving in, here’s an advice summary of key takeaways from Amanda:
- Resourcefulness is the best resource. Amanda mentions that one of the most valuable qualities that producers look for in directors is resourcefulness. In the case FANGORIA’s upcoming V.F.W, the team observed how much director Joe Begos was able to accomplish in production value and storytelling on his first two films (Almost Human & The Mind’s Eye) which both had tiny budgets. This ability to maximize your budget is a huge part of being a director and a very desirable quality in the eyes of producers.
- Get experience on TV sets. The breakneck speed and brutal hours that come with filming TV shows can make or break most would-be producers. Getting through it is like getting through producer hell-week, which can transform you into a Navy Seal of production, with the ability to handle even the most grueling of film sets.
- Embrace being a manager & a fast learner. Amanda states that one of the least talked about but most necessary skills of being a producer is a heightened ability to manage people. Demanding shoots, crazy hours, sleepless nights, dangerous special effects, and temperamental actors are some of the day to day challenges of making movies. Producers have to manage all of that while keeping films on time, on budget and of high quality. This requires a dynamic and multi-faceted combination of organizational and people management skills as well as the ability to rapidly learn new skills, since each movie brings its own new set of challenges.
Dread Central: Hey Amanda, how’s it going?
Amanda Presmyk: It’s going well!
DC: Satanic Panic is out now! What can you tell us about it?
AP: The reception has been really great so far. We’re excited to share it with everyone. It’s a really heartfelt, special, fun, girl-power movie, that is also a full-blown kooky gore-fest about Satan. I think it’s an awesome movie and I’m really proud of it. So, I’m excited for that to come out. And next, we have the premiere of VFW.
DC: How did VFW come about?
AP: The way that Dallas (Sonnier) begins the VFW story is that he saw Almost Human and The Mind’s Eye, which are Joe’s two previous films. And immediately wondered, who is this filmmaker who did this with, I think it was $35,00 on the first movie. How did he pull that off?
So, ever since Dallas has been aware of Joe, he’s said, “I really want to do a movie with you, but I want you to direct somebody else’s script.” So, Dallas came across the VFW. script by Max Brallier and Matthew McArdle, he was like, “this feels like Joe would have written it.”
We had previously worked with Josh Ethier, who’s Joe’s filmmaking partner, because Josh edited The Standoff at Sparrow Creek. So, we were all ready to jump in on one together, just because it had been building towards that for a while. But yeah, that’s the history of how we tracked Joe down and said, “let’s do it.”
DC: Very cool. So when you’re looking for new directors, you’re clearly looking for resourcefulness. People who are able to do a lot with a little. Is that accurate in terms of how you guys find new voices and new directors?
AP: Absolutely. We had seen Joe do that before. He had proved that it was possible with his previous two movies. When we first spoke with Chelsea Stardust on the phone, she had a similar background… she came up under Blumhouse.
Every decision becomes important. Every decision between ‘do I spend extra money on a fourth PA?’ versus ‘do I spend that couple of thousand dollars on screen?’ Those decisions become critical and whether they’re logistical or creative, every amount of money that you can help put into what you wind up seeing on-screen is so crucial and so important.
That’s the background I come from too, is ‘I’ve never had enough money to hang myself with.’ And so, I am very good at and enjoy the process of stretching something to make it worth so much more than I’m actually able to spend on it…And sometimes that means I’ll carry out a few bags of trash. That’s fine. The movie is what we’re all here to do, and we’re all here to make tough decisions about how to pull it off.
DC: So how’d you first get involved in the Dallas film world?
AP: It’s the classic saying of ‘90% of the battle is just showing up.’ And so, I studied film at SMU, not that anybody needs a film degree to go out and do this, but I had several years here in college to start putting in my time, working as a free ‘anything on anything.’ So, I did that for a while and my plan was always to head out to New York or LA once I graduated.
But when it came time to graduate, I had a really good offer to go work at an advertising agency as their producer. So, immediately out of college I was making $40, $50, $100,000 commercials that were for Papa John’s and fun stuff like that. But that wasn’t ever the goal. That was just a place to cut my teeth.
I did that about a year and a half and then I jumped ship. I went and worked as an assistant to a line producer on a TV show called Queen of the South. I knew that that was the opportunity to get my toes in the narrative world which is where I wanted to be. I’m still grateful to this day that I jumped into television from the get-go because television is the most breakneck-paced thing you can possibly conceive of. If you think it’s hard to prep a 20-day movie in eight weeks, try prepping a seven-day TV shoot in 24 hours for which you didn’t get the script until yesterday, and the show starts shooting today.
At some point, one of the guys I worked with forwarded me an email from a guy named Dallas Sonnier that said, “I’m starting a film production company in Dallas and I’m looking for an assistant.” I emailed back and said, “Hey, I have other plans. I’m leaving town. I’m going to Atlanta for six months, but if I wasn’t, this would be me. So I would love to just meet you before I head out of town.”
And so, I just went and had a meeting in the Cinestate office which barely had new paint on the walls. Dallas and I chatted for a while and I told him that I wanted to be a producer. But then I kept in touch with him while I was gone for 6 months and by the time I was coming back for Thanksgiving, he offered me a job and now it’s been two-and-a-half years and it’s like a combination of right place, right time, hustle and just knowing somewhere in my gut that I need to pounce on this. Whatever this is, I need to pounce on it and we’ll see where it goes.
DC: How do you describe the difference in brands between FANGORIA and Cinestate?
AP: FANGORIA films are your straight-down-the-middle horror films, gorefests, and horror comedies. Whereas Cinestate has been all about the quiet thriller/crime drama, out of the box something-or-other that doesn’t fit into that category of pure horror or any of those things. But has some, what we like to call, “outlaw cinema” element to it.
So, with a movie like Sparrow Creek, that’s a pretty quiet, dialogue-heavy film, but the outlaw part of that is the subject matter which really spooked people … Our goal is not to poke people, our goal is to be true to the identity of the things that we create, meaning we want to make something that an author and a director are so passionate about and is so good, that we don’t even need to touch it. I don’t need to come in and give notes. I don’t need to make this fit into any box. It’s just a matter of, “here’s the script. It’s awesome. Let’s go make the movie.” And that’s true of both brands.
DC: Are there any boxes that certain movies need to check, in order for you guys to want to make them? Any Cinestate/FANGO litmus test?
AP: The litmus test is really only how do we feel and react when we read it? Other than meeting some genre element, be it a thriller, crime, or true horror. Other than that, the only litmus test that we have is: ‘is this fantastic and would we want to watch this movie?’
DC: It seems like we’re in a time in cinema history where there’s a lot more opportunity for voices that probably wouldn’t be making big, huge Hollywood movies, to get films off the ground because of this new frontier of digital and VOD. What does this new era feel like to you as a producer?
AP: I think it feels very exciting. We are making movies that are challenging to a lot of people. If I were to approach a studio and say, “we want to make a Nazi puppet movie,” I’m not going to get very far down that road. But, we don’t have to compromise. It means that we don’t have to report to anyone other than ourselves and of course whatever partner we happen to have on the specific movie. RLJ has been really good to us in the past, but apart from that distribution deal, when it comes to making the movie, it’s us. And at the end of the day, it’s the director.
The goal is to make the movies that you recognize as having a strong vision when they first pass your desk. If a script is going to take months and months of development and six people thinking about it, then to us it doesn’t really feel like there’s a strong reason to make the movie in the first place.
Dallas and I, we have our lanes, and we love them. I love physically making movies and Dallas is really good at making movies, and he’s good at putting deals together and a million other things. And so, there’s plenty for us to do as producers, apart from puffing our chests out and saying things that we think are important creatively. That’s not what we’re interested in. We’re interested in supporting the director to the fullest. And the only notes that we’ll ever give are technical; we’ve noticed a cable in that shot, you should paint it out. It’s those kinds of things. And we just always want to be very supportive of the singular vision of what we’re making.
So, that’s what I think is the best side effect of what’s happening in the movie business right now, which is that truly anybody does have the ability to go out there and make something and get eyes on it. I think it’s increasingly way harder to get attention in any way. The accessibility of gear and streaming services is a great thing, but at the same time, the challenge for any filmmaker is, if you’re just quietly being streamed on Netflix, did the movie even get released? Does anybody even know that it’s out there? And so, while there’s a lot of opportunity, the double-edged sword there is that if you don’t work up word of mouth and attention and all those things for your movie, it’s a lot harder for it to actually be seen or to generate money.
The festival becomes the way for us to make a splash and to get people talking and give our filmmakers the experience of having their work out there and appreciated and talked about before it does ultimately land on VOD, where hopefully it continues to be talked about and appreciated. But when things land on VOD, it does tend to take people longer to find them…
With VOD, we’ve been able to really make that successful because of our fan base and because of our grassroots marketing. But it’s a lot of work, and it’s not as easy as getting a deal with Amazon. It’s a lot of hustle and self-generating our own marketing and things like that. But definitely well worth it to have the freedom that we have to make the things that we want to make.
DC: Yeah, I was curious about how you guys approached marketing…
AP: Well for starters, we make the movie for one to two million dollars max, and then spend about $20,000 marketing it, which is not very much. So, we’re really relying on the festival run truly to generate press, to generate critical response to the movies. And then, we take that stuff and run with it.
So, the FANGORIA fan base is huge and that’s been incredibly helpful in establishing ourselves as legitimate in what we do because those fans are so generous and online and ready to talk. The FANGORIA fan base has been a huge part of the conversation, but we’re equally diligent about building the Cinestate brand and all of those conversations online. So it’s more social media than anything else. We’re not taking out billboards in Hollywood ever. It’s word of mouth, FANGORIA the magazine, FANGORIA online. And just really knowing that a combination of our hustle, and the movies just being really damn good, is all that we need for them to get out there.
DC: I’m sure you have people sending you scripts left, right, and center. For all of those who are attempting to get on your radar, how do you guys typically discover your scripts and filmmakers?
AP: It’s a combination of cold, blind submissions and submission from talent agencies and people that we’re already in touch with. Filmmakers and writers that know someone who are already in our world. So, it’s a combination of both of those things. But Dallas and I are both always happy to read every single email in our Inbox and to thoughtfully consider anyone who has thoughtfully considered sending a script to us. If you send a script to us that you truly feel is a great fit for FANGORIA or Cinestate, we’re happy to read it and we will.
We have a story editor in the office named Preston [Fassel], who is the fastest reader I’ve ever met in my life. And not only is he the fastest reader, but he’s so adept at understanding Dallas’ brain and the kind of movies that we want to make, he can cover scripts faster than anyone out in LA, I’m sure.
DC: What are some of the uncommon skills required to be a producer in this day and age that are probably not taught in film school, but that people really need to have?
AP: One of the things that I don’t think was every really blatantly said to me in college is that film producing really requires the highest level of personnel management that you can possibly conceive of. I liken producing a feature film to basically starting a company, hiring a staff, doing a giant project and then dissolving that staff entirely and folding up the company within a matter of three to four months. So, you really have to think about producing as being the boss of 50 people out of nowhere.
You go from sending emails and reading scripts and doing the office part of the job, to 48 hours later you got a staff of 50 and you have to manage all of them. And you’re not just managing people in a calm 9 to 5 environment. You’re managing people who are working 12-14 hours a day, overnight, dealing with dangerous effects and you’re dealing with actors. Producing really is more and more just being a personality and management ninja and being able to deal with the heightened scenarios that happen all the time on a film set when you throw so many people together so quickly.
So, I would say that’s one of the key elements to the job… There’s never been a day when I haven’t had to figure out something that I literally knew nothing about the day before. So, that’s showing up and learning how to do makeup effects for arguably one of the most beloved horror franchises ever, and you’ve never done makeup effects before. Or you have to ship a rare type of flower from a bizarre country and get it to set the next day. There’s always something completely random that you know nothing about and you have to calmly and coolly say, ‘okay, yeah sure. I’ll make that happen.’ And just go do it.
DC: Were there any resources or books that were particularly formidable for you on your career path, either creatively or from a business perspective or that you’d attribute your success to?
AP: I don’t know if I would attribute my success to any particular book that’s out there. I would attribute my success truly to just going out there and doing it and just throwing myself in the deep end, which I think is what is necessary for anyone who wants to direct, produce, anything. You have to go, just jump in, feet first and start figuring it out. So, whether that means you track down your idol, and you send them an email, and you ask to shadow them on set, or you become free PA on the movie that, a producer that you admire is making. That’s really the only way to get out there and do it.
I did start reading a lot of books throughout college. I really loved Christine Vachon’s books about indie filmmaking, Shooting to Kill had a lot in common with what we’re doing at Cinestate… all of the things in their catalog have been boundary-pushing and singular in their own ways. She was a big inspiration to me and so I read all her books and I would recommend them to anyone.
DC: Very cool. Amanda, this was so much fun! Thank you so much.
AP: Thank you so much. It was a joy to talk about what I love doing!
Categorized:News
