The MGM Features

In reality this entry should be headed ‘The Ken Contract’! Read on and you’ll understand. Bob Lane of Ken Films, must have decided it was time to slow down and take it easy, for it was his offer to let us print and distribute the MGM features, beginning with ‘Gone With The Wind’ that heralded a new era for Derann and the beginning of the end for Bob, as his Ken Films releases became a trickle and stopped with the second extract of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’. Bob and Derek had always had a good business relationship, one that turned into a mutual respect and genuine friendship, and one that had prompted Bob to make a trip to the shop, at 171 Stourbridge Road, around September 1977, to present to us a preview of the cutdown to ‘Star Wars’ using a 16mm mute black & white print and then ask whether we could sell it and how many units could we move! (As you all know Mountain Films scooped the title because Bob really likeed their London location). The first prints of ‘Gone With The Wind’, (1939) were ‘sounded’ (recorded) with a French track Bob had supplied and were duly dispatched to the U.S., we never found out where they were bound for. Due to the running time of around 230 minutes and mounted on 8 x 600′ spools, it was expected to be a slow burner in the sales department, but it turned out to be a surprisingly popular catalogue item and the  jewell in our crown. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939), followed after just a few months and from then on as regular as clockwork a new neg and sound master would appear. During the following two years or so we received numerous MGM titles that included ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’, 1944; ‘The Three Musketeers’, 1948; ‘Showboat’, 1951; ‘Tom Thumb’, 1958; ‘Gigi’, 1958; ‘That’s Dancing!’, 1985; ‘Anchors Aweigh’, 1945; ‘High Society’, 1956; ‘Royal Wedding’, 1951; ‘That’s Entertainment II’, 1976; ‘On The Town’ 1949 and ‘That’s Entertainment III’, 1994. As if that wasn’t enough MGM had recently acquired United Artists, which obviously included the early Warner Brothers product, so we were able to release ‘To Have and Have Not’, 1944; ‘Rocky’, 1976; ‘The Secret of NIMH’, 1982; ‘Goldfinger’, 1964 and ‘Some like it Hot’, 1959, yes it was a highly impressive release schedule. There were often calls from Bob, checking on things over here and confiding to Derek as to what MGM were suggesting or offering as an up and coming release, in the meantime the releases just kept coming and the quality was generally superb, gaining us much praise, the first five titles were particularly spectacular. As I said at the beginning Ken Films had the contract with MGM… our contract was with Ken.

…. to be continued.