Many of you may have checked your bank balances on seeing many of the new titles that have appeared in the Derann sales catalogues over the years and from time to time there have been occasions where some titles have just never materialized on our shelves. However the one that most customers recall is the perplexing case of two of the finest musicals Hollywood ever produced. In one of the late 1980s sales catalogues, (the one that had Supergirl flying from its cover), there were two whole pages devoted to these Todd AO productions, no dates for their release were given, but as usual Derek just couldn’t wait to tell everyone of our latest acquisitions, he could never keep good news to himself for very long. Here’s what I recall of this extraordinary story.
When Derek and myself saw the adverts in the trade magazine ‘Screen International’, placed by Eagle-Lion Film Distributors announcing their forthcoming theatrical re-release of the two Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, ‘Oklahoma’ and ‘South Pacific’, we made visiting their Soho offices a priority on our next business trip in London. Eagle-Lion were owned by Rank Film Distributors, so we were hopeful that already having several contracts with their parent company and having dealt with themselves previously would cut the ice. Sure enough just one visit secured the two musicals and they were given a page each in the new 1987 sales catalogue, with the heading “availability to be announced!” But within weeks disaster struck when we received a phone call to say that upon checking their contract on the titles, it had become apparent that they only had U.K. theatrical rights. They apologised and suggested that perhaps we might contact, The Rodgers and Hammestein Estate, the company who now owned all interests in these musicals, and were even kind enough to phone ahead and introduce the name of Derann to them. There were several of months of letters and finally a series of calls to and from the USA, but nothing ever matured, as the were asking big money for the 8mm rights and substantial royalties…Derek Said to me ‘They think we’re the Rank Organisation and they’re talking telephone numbers!’ You win some, you lose some.
The tale of the lost “Columbia” deal was one of our most spectacular, prior to the Disney contract, however it’s also one of our most heartbreaking periods! There had been long and sometimes difficult negotiations to get the deal put together to start with and we were like children in a ‘cookie store’ as we cherry picked our first six titles that included ‘Jason and the Argonauts’, ‘The Jolson Story’, ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’, ‘First Men in the Moon’, ‘Papilion’, ‘Jolson Sings Again’ and ‘Oliver’. The first three titles were on the shelves within around eight weeks and we had just sold our first order of ‘Close Encounters’, when we had a phone call from Columbia, telling us to halt all operations and calling us in for an urgent meeting. It would seem that they were “very annoyed” following a small number of calls from “Collectors” asking about future releases and specific titles. It may not seem a great deal to you or ourselves, but our female contact was absolutely bloody furious and decided to end the contract then and there!
Strangely enough her husband was our contact at Warner Brothers and the one who sold us the rights for the hugely popular and highly successful Warner deal!
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