In last weeks post I mentioned the American International Pictures (AIP) product we missed out on when AIP closed their London office. Even though, like most London based offices their London agent, a good looking middle-aged lady whose name I can’t remember, had to constantly confer with her US offices, she had insisted that we would have to take one 1950’s movie for every 60’s colour one we acquired. We only had a few meetings and nothing was written in concrete, but we were progressing and as far as I can remember the titles at the top of the list at the time, were ‘The Day the World Ended’, ‘House of Usher’, ‘War of the Colossal Beast’, ‘Pit and the Pendulum’, ‘Attack of the Giant Leech’s and ‘Tales of Terror’, although I seem to remember ‘Invasion of the Saucer Men’ and ‘Attack of the Crab Monsters’ too. All would have been 400′ cutdowns. At EMI there were also further titles planned from the Avengers TV series, however, even the three we had issued had given us some problems, and I’m sure that a lot of customers were disappointed when we were only able to print a small number of prints of a fourth title ‘From Venus With Love’; and although there had been six titles all told, we had never released ‘The Winged Avenger’ and ‘The See-Through Man’. It wasn’t a rights problem this time but suitable master material had been a serious issue, and they’d not been at all happy with us using their 16mm negs. We’d also been having talks to someone, who had offices in Golden Square, for a contract with various newsreels, including Paramount and Gaumont British, but it never matured. We struggled hard with the small UK independent distributor Mark Associates for a number of titles, Derek wanted ‘The Bullet Train’ in particular, a Japanese thriller starring a young Sonny Chiba, with a story of a bomb on a high-speed train that will explode if the train slows down, (sound familiar?). There were also a number of dubbed movies that Derek thought might tick over, including some Paul Naschy horrors, but once more it never came to anything. There was also some early talks with United Artists regarding a third contract that would have included ‘Lord of The Rings’ (the 1979 animated feature), but as our full length features from MGM and Fox were doing so well, and UA were still in no mood to release features it stagnated and fell by the wayside. However out of the next four titles ‘633 Squadron’, ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Thunderbirds are GO!’ and ‘Now Voyager’, only the first two saw the light of day. ‘Now Voyager’ was a victim of the ongoing problems of black and white stock, and although I’m not sure what happened in the case of ‘Thunderbirds are GO!, but I believe that this was because of some problem with ITC. There were many others that never got anywhere, other than talk around an office table or over coffee or a pint in public house, but I really don’t remember specifics. Then of course we have the two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, ‘Oklahoma’ and ‘South Pacific’, there’ll be a post on their demise coming very soon.
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