A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 23
Derek’s soft spot for Ethel Merman, a Broadway star who’s voice could fill the Albert Hall without a microphone, really paid off. ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World’ was a great success, as were all of the first batch, with the exception of the 1977 Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro musical ‘New York, New York’, which was somewhat of a dissapointment to U.A. It was also one of the two titles that we had decided to release only one 400′ extract, the other being ‘Key Largo’, which our editor Keith Wilton said would prove to very difficult. However the prize for best seller went to the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckler ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’. United Artists were generaly happy with the figures and the next round of talks concerning our second contract went far more smoothly than the original, thank goodness. Not only that, but the clauses that had caused us so much trouble were dropped and we were given the go ahead to release two abridged 400′ reels that could be joined end to end to form a very nice thirty minute featurette. Titles chosen for our second deal were,’The Great Escape’, 1963; ‘The Magnificent Seven’, 1960; ‘Footlight Parade’, 1933; ‘Dames’, 1934; ‘Golddiggers of 1935’, 1935; ‘Captain Blood’, 1935; ‘They Died With Their Boots On’, 1941 and ‘Trapeze’ 1956. There had been some talk of releasing an extract from the 1978 animated ‘Lord of the Rings’ but when this failed to ignite much interest at the box office the idea had been dropped. It was relativly easy to persude them to allow us to release a third extract from ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’, however we were stupid enough to use a 16mm print for ‘Trapeze’ and the resulting flat prints were very soft. As with so many of our titles, we now used the talents of both Keith Wilton and Ken Locke to produce the beautifully edited 400′ versions. ‘The Great Escape’ and ‘The Magnificent Seven’, were released in both Scope and flat editions.
Box art for first three images courtesy of Super8DataBase. If you are able to add an image, please do.
…. to be continued.
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