A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 27
Avco Embassy’s offices where situated on the ground floor of “Hammer House” in Wardour Street and as we entered I was more than just a little excited at the prospect of seeing just a glimpse of it’s former days, but there was nothing to remind anyone that this had one been the London headquarters of the the greatest horror film production company in the UK, if not the world. We’d approached Avco Embassy without having an appointment, on the offchance that we might get them interested in a deal, just look how successful hat had turned out at United Artists. Chris, their young and energetic UK MD, was very excited from the word go but his heads in the American offices were slow and proved to be a difficult nut to crack. It took many months of telephone icalls, before they finally agreed and a contact was signed. It added some exclusive releases to our 16mm library, Hammer’s final Peter Cushing entry as Dr. Frankenstein, ‘Frankenstein & the Monster From Hell’, 1974; as well as ‘Village of The Giants’, 1965; ‘Billy The Kid Vs Dracula’, 1966; ‘Jesse James Meets Frankensteins Daughter’, 1966; ‘The Thief of Bagdad’, 1961; ‘Mad Monster Party’, 1967; ‘The Wacky World of Mother Goose’, 1967 and not forgetting that giant of a movie ‘Santa Claus Conquers The Martians’, 1964. They were far from being classics, but they were all notorious in their own way and rented out extremly well and I was in seventh heaven with all those ‘B’ movie titles!! However try as we might, we could never get them to release any rights for 8mm. Avco was a good example of the many UK offices who had their hands tied and weren’t able to do anything without first consulting their parent offices in the states, Derek and I felt so sorry for Chris, who’d once said to us “Can’t even go for a damn pee, without phoning them first”.
…. to be continued.
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