A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 32
Some things are never meant to be and our deal with Iver Film Services was one such case. I can’t recall how or why, but whatever the reason, all I know is that we had an appointment with George Davis and his business partner at their offices, a porta cabin, at Pinewood Studios. George had been a film producer and had, through his various contacts, aquired the rights to a number of films, including the notorious horror ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ and ‘Dark Star’ an early John Carpenter film. He planned to release the two titles as full features, and we talked about the 8mm trade and what we felt the future was going to hold. After quite some time he offered us the rights to issue a 400′ cutdown of both titles, as well as two films on which he had been an associate producer, namely ‘Call of the Wild’, with Charlton Heston and ‘Treasure Island’ with Orson Welles both made in 1972, we were also able to secure the 16mm rental rights for all four. So the contract was signed and over the next six months or so we released our 400′ editions. We thought we were pretty savvy, with each of the cutdowns having a teaser trailer to one of the other three at the end of the reel and the packaging was very nice. Both ‘Texas’ and ‘Dark Star’ were great sellers, with ‘Call of the Wild’ performing valiantly, however ‘Treasure Island’ struggled way behind. I’m not absolutely sure of why or when business relations began to sour, although I’m fairly sure it was when George saw that we had picked the video cassette rights for ‘Caravan to Vaccares’, another film that he had been involved with and he believed it was his film, anyway he’d stormed off and things were never the same. We were forced to withdraw the cutdowns and later Iver themselves produced their own 400′ ‘selected scenes’.
As a by line to this tale let it be said Derek always said that Iver’s cutdown of ‘Texas’ was far superior to our own!
…. to be continued.
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