There are some things that you take for granted, and then you miss them when they are gone. Like your youth. Other things, they go and you don’t even know that they are gone. I’m thinking here of Cannon Films.

The eighties was a heady time for the American movie business. Foreign investors somehow decided that people would pay to see Americans in ANYTHING and all of the sudden independent film producers were flush with cash, taking 5k here and 20k there in pre-sale money, auctioning off the rights to their low-budget action picture in South Korea. As long as you had a pretty girl and a gun and a camera, you could turn a profit.

In 1979, it was into this burgeoning market that Menahem Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus inserted themselves. They had made their bones in Israel with a couple of hit movies: OPERATION THUNDERBOLT was an action picture and LEMON POPSICLE was a surprise hit teen comedy. They pursued a Roger-Corman-Like ethic of producing as many pictures as possible for as little money as they could spend. They were long tail guys.

And it worked for them. That is, in the sense that they turned a profit. They bought cheap, cheap scripts that no one else wanted. While other studios were boasting lavish Dolby Stereo soundtracks, Cannon opted for the adequate and less pricey Ultra Stereo. Movies from the early days of Cannon Films included DEATH WISH II, HERCULES (starring Lou Ferrigno), BREAKIN’ and THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES HOLLYWOOD.

As you can see, they weren’t above spending a little extra on a movie star now and then. Charles Bronson, for example, was a Cannon favorite, and even though he had seen his best days in the seventies and indeed, now resembled your grandpa from up north, they kept putting him in action pictures, including another three DEATH WISH pictures.

As the eighties went on, Cannon spent some of their cash on respectability. The same people who brought you AMERICAN NINJA and MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE were also churning out the final movies of John Cassavetes, a few Franco Zeffirelli movies, a Jean-Luc Godard version of KING LEAR (featuring Woody Allen as the Fool!) and TOUGH GUYS DON’T DANCE, novelist Norman Mailer’s truly awful directorial debut.

They also snapped up the sequel rights to Superman, producing the worst Superman movie. They signed Sylvester Stallone to a twenty picture contract, though the only product that came out of it was COBRA and OVER THE TOP, a little character study about professional arm-wrestling.

If you’re worried about that contract, you can relax. Golan and Globus split up acrimoniously in the early nineties. Hilariously they formed separate production companies and simultaneously released movies about the Lambada, a dance craze which was briefly popular then. I couldn’t tell you who came out ahead, but LAMBADA made about 4 million and THE FORBIDDEN DANCE made only 2 million.

What is fascinating to me about this studio is, where is backlog? There are two hundred channels out there. HBO and Cinemax have something like 14 between the two of them alone. Why don’t you ever see SAHARA starring Brooke Shields? Or NINA III, THE DOMINATION starring Lucinda Dickey? There must be someone, somewhere, who has a yen to see BREAKIN’ 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO. There was a massive amount of material put out by these guys. Has NONE of it survived the test of time?

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 28th, 2007 at 12:36 pm and is filed under General, Motion Pictures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.