A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers, or obtain 16mm for our library.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 10
Our first contract with EMI was for just six titles, however as most of you will remember a number of episodes of the popular 60s TV series ‘The Avengers’, were also released. Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg were the stars of the most popular seasons and we decided that we would give our customers episodes with Steed and Mrs. Peel from the sixth series, which had been aired in 1967. For reasons that I believe were mainly due to them being TV productions rather than theatrical, the lawyers took their time ensuring all the “i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed”. We began with ‘Return of the Cybernauts’, ‘The Living Dead’, ‘The Positive-Negative Man’ and ‘From Venus with Love’. We were given access to their original 16mm negatives, only to discover the test prints arriving in 200′ 8mm rolls, 6 rolls to each title. This was apparently how the negative had been made, with each TV segment (three, with two breaks for adverts) having two rolls. Just trying to match it to the magnetic sound master tiurned into a nightmare, and at that time we didn’t have an editor for such problems. We asked for acces to the negs in question and eventually had the negs spliced into 3, 400′ rolls and cut the soundmaster to match on the first three titles. For the 400′ editions we had a 16mm print run off and used that for our master marerial, which actually turned out rather nice. I printed some of our first four colour (full colour) labels and wasted hundreds getting the registration for each colour run absolutly right… in fact if you own a copy you probibly still need a pair of 3D glasses! Meanwhile it was also noticed that Steed’s bowler hat was white, due to some mistake with the artwork and the word ‘Cybernauts’ had been spelt incorrectly and read ‘Cybonauts’! This spelling also appeared on many early adverts. We never proceeded with a fourth title ‘From Venus with Love’, whose test prints were sold off and are as they say ‘as rare as gnats teeth! But our splicing did not go un-noticed and EMI were more that a little ‘upset’, by our ‘mutilation’ of their negs. We never proceeded with ‘Venus’ or a second batch of titles we’d chosen, which would have included ‘The Winged Avenger’ and ‘The See -Through Man’.
…. to be continued.
Leave a Reply