Peter Burt the founder of Mountain/Portland/Mailmaster Films started in the package movie business by selling his own self made 50ft standard 8mm film of Kew Gardens from his photographic shop in the posh Burlington Arcade, London, W1 located near Piccadilly Circus. Peter’s own personal interest was in 16mm film collecting and he was able to supply an interesting selection of films on this format to serious collectors. He then went on to establish the largest UK based Super 8mm distribution company along with his business partner Aubrey Ross, which effectively brought home movies to the masses as they advertised their films very successfully in the national press including the popular Sunday tabloid newspapers offering a cheap 8mm projector and a package of 6 X 50 ft. silent B/W films.
Just to clarify Portland Films was the retail shop arm of Mountain/Mailmaster Films who generally sold films to the general public via mail order. As a child I can distinctly remember ordering a pack of 6 X 50ft black & White silent Horror movies as advertised in the short lived World of Horror magazine along with the cheap 8mm projector and finally receiving my package many, many months later which included NO horror films but just a selection of 50ft Charlie Chaplin extracts and a couple of sub par American Television cartoons!! As these were the days before the advertising complaints commission I didn’t bother to complain as the simple fact was they had sold out of the 50ft horror film selections and had no more to sell to the public.
In the mid-seventies Mountain/Portland Films owned at least three shops in the West end of London including prime locations such as 55 Shaftesbury Avenue, Coventry Street near Leicester Square and 45 New Oxford Street near Centre Point. The sales in the Shaftesbury Avenue shop, based near the then very seedy and lawless Soho district of London were mostly soft porn titles such as the 400ft of “Emmanuelle From Bangkok” which was filmed at Peter Burt’s flat in London using the Emmanuelle trade mark wicker chair and footage from his holiday home movies!! The tagline read : MAKES DEEP-THROAT LOOK LIKE A FAIRY STORY!
This was allegedly one of Mountains top seller’s too, however the biggest seller was Ken Films/20th Century Fox release of the original “Star Wars” which was first released as a 200ft and then later a 400ft with prints imported directly from the USA to meet the high demand just before Christmas too.
The incredible thing here is that the film hadn’t even been released in UK cinemas yet, as the film opened in the USA on 25th May 1977 but was held back by the UK distributors 20th Century Fox for a Christmas release on 27th December 1977.
This was of course long before the days of video piracy.
Mountain Films were also the official UK distributor for the USA based companies Columbia Films & Ken Films run by a chap called Bob Lane who owned the Super 8mm rights to release extracts from major film distributors such as 20th Century Fox and American International Pictures. The first batch of 20th Century Fox titles sold extremely well in the UK due to heavy tabloid newspaper advertising and included edited 400ft highlight 16 minute versions of there blockbuster hits such as “The French Connection”,” Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “The Sound of Music”, “The Poseidon Adventure” and “Mash”. Mountain called these 400ft versions “Jumbo Giants” with an orange sticker on the front of the box. You could also purchase a shorter 200ft version of the films above which ran about 8 minutes and were just labelled “Selected Scenes” these were just heavily edited down versions of the 400ft Jumbo Giant releases in the main but Ken Films USA did release a 200ft stand alone extract from Patton with George C Scott doing his patriotic opening speech. The downside of the initial UK release’s were that they were printed in the UK and appeared to be a few generations down from the Ken USA releases in picture quality. Later batches were imported directly from the USA by Mountain Films to avoid this particular problem and to also meet the high demand for Super 8mm package movies at the time. This also led to a few 400ft abridged movies being released ahead of there UK cinema release such as “Star Wars”, “Alien”, “Damien: Omen 2” and “Mako: The Jaws of Death”. The U.K. Distributors were of course unhappy with this and the irony was that one of their main shops was virtually on the corner of Wardour Street that was the heart of the British film industry back then. In 1976 Mountain Films also negotiated the UK Super 8 rights to the whole of the RKO Radio films back catalogue of over 700 classic films and released full length versions of “King Kong”, “Citizen Kane”, “Top Hat”, “Flying Down to Rio” all which proved to be big sellers in the UK. Later releases included a full-length feature of Val Lewton’s Classic “Curse of the Cat People” and well abridged double album’s 2 X 400ft of “Cat People” and “Isle of the Dead” starring Boris Karloff.
Mountain Films also very early on purchased the 8mm Heritage Film label from exploitation filmmaker Pete Walker who released many of his early films including “Oh Carol!” AKA “Cool it Carol”, “For Men Only”, “Man of Violence” AKA “Moon” and “The Big Switch” on Super 8mm as 4 X 400ft abridged feature films and numerous shorter 400ft and 200ft extracts along with a selection of 8mm glamour movies. Portland Films moved into the video cassette business around 1979 releasing mostly concerts, soft core porn, horror, exploitation, Kung Fu and public domain titles such as “4D Man”, “Jaws of the Dragon”, “The Blood Splattered Bride” and a dodgy bootleg VHS of 007/James Bond trailers taken from the Super 8 release in the USA. They also pioneered the release of abridged versions of film on both VHS running at around 60 minutes, so they basically just chopped a reel out of the film’s randomly to fit onto the cassette. The main reason for this was to save money as a 60 minute videocassette was cheaper than using a 120 minute videocassette at the time. They released 60 minute cut downs of Derann’s Pete Walker collection too including “Frightmare”, “Die Screaming Marianne” and “The Comeback”, not sure if these were official though? Mountain films ceased trading in the mid eighties when the boom for videotape was over and super 8mm film collecting had long bitten the dust too.
© Mark Williams
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