A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers, or obtain 16mm for our library.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 4
Within a few days of my joining Derann, Derek had wound up negotiations with Sidney Tagar, of Ivy film in New York and had signed the contract when Sidney had made a visit to the shop at 171 Stourbridge Road. Sidney was an affable gent, with a quietly spoken voice and whose face would come back to me when the ‘cigarette man’ appeared in TV’s “The X Files” nearly 20 years later. We’d taken him to a local pub for lunch where they’d immediately began discussions for ‘The next deal’. The contract for the first deal had contained the twelve chapter serial ‘The Adventures of Captain Marvel’, two wonderful animated features from producer, Max Fleischer ‘Gullivers Travels’ (1939) and ‘Hoppity Goes To Town’, (1941), ‘Wake of the Red Witch’ with John Wayne, ‘Copacabana’ with Groucho Marx and Carmen Miranda, from 1947 and ‘Kronos’ a science fiction thriller from 1957, starring Jeff Morrow. Ivy Film had purchased many of its titles from NTA (National Telefilm Associates), which had closed down its TV distribution the previous decade. Much of NTAs product was from Twentieth Century Fox (who owned 50% of NTA), and Republic, hence the choice of titles and TV programming was pretty diverse. ‘Kronos’ had been produced by Robert L Lippert, with his company called “Regal Pictures” which in reality was part of 20th Century fox and shot using CinemaScope lenes loaned from Fox, but due to 20th Century-Fox insisting that only its “A” films would be labelled CinemaScope, Regal’s product used the term “Regalscope” in its films’ credits, however our master material would turn out to be a flat print. We were still using 16mm for our master material at this time, but as anybody who purchased ‘Captain Marvel’ or ‘Copacabana’ can testify, even if the master is 16mm, if the quality of the material is excellent then the results can be more than satisfying. Upon release the films proved to be as popular as he had hoped and sold very nicely, especially the Captain Marvel serial. Derek and Sidney, started to put together a second contract which began with another 12 part Republic serial ‘Radar Men From The Moon’, but Derek felt that Sidney was getting a little too greedy and even after a visit to see him in his New York office, we never went ahead with a second batch of features and only released the second serial.
….. to be continued
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