A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 26
Known originally as British Movietone News, this popular weekly cinema newsreel ran from 1929 to 1979 and although I don’t recall these being as big a hit with our cutomers, we had a larger selection than that of our Pathe News series. There’s half a page of F.A. Cup Finals and Grand Nationals probbly released by Walton in our early standard 8 hire catalogue. I assume that Derek negociated via the telephone and began the relationship via Rank….. however I’m not sure of any of this. All I’m aware of is that by the time our 1984 sales catalogue was printed, there were twelve Movietone reviews of the year available for sale and their first one in sound. We did make an appointment with the head of Movietone (think this would have been the late 70s), whose office was in one of the outbuildings at Denham Laboritories. It was a late meeting after 5pm and went on till way after 7pm. He was an elderly gent that reminded me of scrooge and was insistant that we have a drink, after which he showed the vaults where they stored the historic footage. They were like WW2 bunkers, with thick concrete walls and iron fire doors every where! He admitted that there was some deterioration in both the negatives and prints (some 35mm and some 16mm)…. then he took us back to the office and plied us with further drinks! When we left Derek was non too pleased that he had to drive some distance to our hotel for the night.
By 1986 the sales catalogue lists twenty reviews of the year and specials ‘Return to the Channel Isands’, ‘The Queen Mothers Birthday’, The Treasure of Chartwell’, ‘Rolls Royce Air Display’, ‘The Cinema Reel’ and two of our most popular releases ‘Pinewood Open Day’ and ‘The Movietone Final Issue’. Like the Rank’s ‘Look at Life’ series there was no exclusivity with any of their contracts and as a result the same titles were sold to a number of UK distributors.
…. to be continued.
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