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 7
We spent many hours poring over that catalogue, and remember the Rank catalogue contained vast quantities of titles they distributed theatrically from Universal, Paramount, Walt Disney and others, however we soon discovered that couldn’t even consider any of their product, it had to be Rank. So the week following our initial visit, we were back at Ranks offices in Wardour Street. The films we decided to issue were ‘Trouble in Store’, 1953; ‘The Chiltern Hundreds’, 1949; ‘Countess Dracula’, 1971; ‘Dangerous Exile’, 1957; ‘We Dive at Dawn’, 1943 and ‘The History of Mr. Polly’, 1949. There was a few weeks wait while they ‘cleared’ the rights and we were given the green light. Rank were insistent (as were most distributors of the time), that all six should have a minimum of 10% edited from them for their release on super 8. They were concerned, almost to a point of paranoia, that if we released them full length, they would interfere with their 16mm rentals! From our point of view it made the films less expensive when edited and therefore more attractive to the customer. At this time (1975) we were using 16mm prints for master material, as 35mm was far to expensive for us to consider and it meant another few weeks while Rank Laboratories at Denham made the prints and it seemed an age before the prints began to arrive. I was given two of the features as an exercise in feature editing. Derek, said “just cut out anything that doesn’t advance the main plot!”, which I discovered was easier said than done. I had to watch ‘We Dive at Dawn’ at least twice and ended up by cutting a good chunk out from the beginning. ‘The History of Mr Polly’ was easier as I’m pretty sure there was a voice over which helped considerably. ‘Trouble in Store’ was a favourite of Derek’s so he naturaly edited that as well as forging out two 200′ extracts, ‘The Window Dresser’ and ‘Don’t Laugh at Me’. ‘Countess Dracula’ was in my opinion a period drama rearther that a horror, but the Hammer name game it more life than it deserved. We issued that in both colour and b&w. The remaining four titles were slow sellers…. I think we both realised that we could have chosen newer and better titles.
…. to be continued.
Leave a Reply