By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
What? And give up show business?: Anthony Bregman on producing
At Gothamist, Rafie Frank gets Anthony Bregman to define what a producer does, as well as his history with Good Machine and This Is That [while racking up an impeccable number of misspelled proper names]: “Well, here’s a story. The first movie I produced was Love God in 1997, which was one of my favorite production experiences. It definitely was a pioneering film. It was the first digital film ever made… It was about this guy with mental issues, released from an overcrowded insane asylum and he comes to a hotel in the Meatpacking district… and he starts to have hallucinations of, among other things, dinosaur parasites that have been released into the sewers of New York and come up through the toilets…. it was a really difficult production. Really ambitious. We worked for 6 months creating monsters… We shot in… crack hotels with 2 cameras most of the time… The day we started shooting, Ross Katz, who is a producer, a very big producer now… had been working out in Los Angeles, working for Sydney [Pollack’s] company, living pretty well, but he wanted to move to New York… So he came in and it was his first day working with Good Machine and my first day of shooting Love God… So, at the end of the day I get back to the production office and the toilet, which is an illegal toilet, had overflowed and, basically, everyone is so tired and the toilet is overflowing and turds start pouring out and everybody says “Well, that’s it. I’m going home ” and I’m left there at midnight on a day we’d started shooting at 5 in the morning and I’m brooming shit out the front door into the street. And it’s right as I’m doing this that Ross comes by.. [I tell him] I’d love to talk to you… but at this point if I stop brooming we’re going to get overcome with shit. So, if you want to hang out, great… grab a broom.”