A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 19
The first part of this U.A. post, oiled the cogs in my ‘brain’ and I can now add the following to the first entry in the series. My suggestion that ‘we visit U.A as we had nothing to lose’ was a spur of the moment thing and was the result of us suddenly finding ourselves at a loose-end as our first two appointments that day had to be cancelled, both due to illness, in fact our contact at Rank had unexpectedly passed away. We had no appointment at U.A. and after some simple enquiries at the U.A. reception desk we had found ourselves in the office of the head of TV sales. They didn’t have a department to handle sub-standard rights and it was this contact that we would see throughout the on-coming months. I’m still unable to recall his name, however the christian name of his Argentinean boss in America was “Rolf”.
That first contract was a tight one with a number of firsts for ourselves, including having copyright notices spliced into the academy leader of the negatives and more irritating was the inclusion of a clause stating that although we could issue two ‘selected scene’ editions from each title, those cutdowns must not be consecutive, in other words the second cutdown must not continue on from the first. Our final selection, much to the satisfaction of “Rolf”, was ‘The Treasure of Sierra Madre’, ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘Angels With Dirty Faces’, ‘The Sea Hawk’, ‘Key Largo’, ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’, ‘Golddiggers of 1933′, ’42nd Street’ and the four titles from U.A. were ‘New York, New York’, ‘Rollerball’, ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ and ‘Carrie’. ‘New York, New York’ was almost forced upon us, while ‘Rollerball’ and ‘Carrie’ were my suggestions (I always went for fantasy). ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ came from Derek, as it was one of his favourite comedies, solely because of Ethel Merman slipping on that banana skin at the end of the film! ‘Carrie’ posed additional problems for us, when actress Sissy Spacek had demanded a second contact in which she had insisted that we could not use any of the scenes in which she appeared nude, for any other use than in the credits, (i.e for publicity or on the product labels). Although this deal had been a headache, once the deal was signed we found that many doors that had previously been closed to us were now opened, just at the mention our U.A. contract!
Box art courtesy of Super8DataBase.
…. to be continued.
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