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.
EMI: The 1st contract. #1Contracts & Rights Chapter 8
Once we had our foot in the door at Rank Film Distributors and the sales of most of their titles were available and selling nicely, especially ‘Trouble in Store’, ‘Countess Dracula’ and ‘We Dive at Dawn’, Derek and I felt it was time to visit EMI Film Distributors Ltd. EMI had many strings to their bow with their product ranging from Associated British Picture Corporation, Anglo-Amalgamated, Warner – Pathe, as well as a growing catalogue of their own projects, many of which had won much acclaim for their newly formed “EMI Films” arm. Our contact their was Ken Troy, he was a rather timid and indecisive gentleman who wrote everything down, in order that he could have all our queries at hand when he consulted his superiors. It was an enormous catalogue, although a fair percentage, films from American International Pictures and the like, would turn out to be unavailable, as they had only 35mm theatrical and 16mm rights. After just the third or fourth meeting with Ken, we had already decided which titles we would suggest for our first contract and were confident enough to have chosen around 20 titles in all, which in reality would run to around 3 or 4 contracts, spanning the next 18 months or two years. It seemed that all our contacts would consist of six or more movies, whoever the distributor, and once more there was ‘that’ clause insisting on feature releases being edited, by a minimum of 10%! The first contract consisted of seven films, ‘Scars of Dracula’ and ‘Horror of Frankenstein’; both 1970, ‘The Cruel Sea’; 1953, ‘The Ghost of St. Michaels’; 1941, ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’; 1953, ‘No Limit’; 1935, ‘Dead of Night’, however there was such a quick succession of contracts with EMI, I can’t be 100% sure and I’ve studdied the Movie Maker adverts to aid in my choice. Studying the adverts in Movie Maker it’s also plain that we also picked up the rights to TVs ‘The Avengers’ at this time as ‘Return of the Cybernauts’ and ‘The Living Dead’ feature alongside both Dracula and Frankenstein. Derann was still using 16mm for it’s masters and they were duly ordered and then edited one at a time. I think we both knew that ‘Ghost of St Michaels’ and ‘Dead of Night’ would only give us moderate results, even after having returned the first 16mm print and asked for the contrast to be cut for the 1945 supernatural drama, so when the final prints arrived we weren’t entirely suprised, but we weren’t yet in a position to spend big money on new 35mm prints, for masters, although I seem to recall us taking delivery of a 35mm print for George Formby’s ‘No Limit’!
…. to be continued.
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