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 11
The ‘royalty returns’ following our first deal with Rank must have hit the right note at their offices, because in less than six months we received a telephone call from our contact there, enquiring as to whether we would like to proceed with the next contract! Derek was as surprised as myself, but we didn’t waste any time and within two weeks the next contract was ready to sign. As the ice had been broken with previous visits, most of the conversations we held this time round were of a general nature, with both Derek and our Rank contact relating various tales, all film related, some deep and far reaching, some very amusing We had already decided that this time around we would go for newer titles than those we’d included in the first contract, with only one older movie, so the second contract consisted of ‘The Ghoul’, 1975; ‘I Don’t Want to be Born’, 1975; ‘Night Hair Child’, 1972; ‘Above us the Waves’, 1955 and two films that out-sold the rest combined, ‘Carry on Camping’, 1969 and ‘Carry on Abroad’, 1972. The Carry on series success on Super 8 was a surprise to us all, we had expected a good response to their release but the sales were exceptional and we would continue to release further titles over the next few years. We had the choice of two Tyburn productions ‘The Ghoul’ or ‘Legend of the Werewolf’…. The ‘Ghoul was the winner. As before we used 16mm for the master material and issued all the titles as 4×400’ edited features, however we ‘milked’ the ‘Carry ons’, releasing two 400′ featurettes (cunningly called part 1 and 2), and just for foreign territories, we sold a colour and B&W, 200′ silent short from each, which sold extremely well in north Africa. The big surprise here was that we were offered the 16mm rental rights for a number of titles. They’d never been included in their own 16mm rental catalogue and so over the next six months or so we were able to add the following titles to our own 16mm catalogue…. ‘The Ghoul’, 1975; ‘I Don’t Want to be Born’, 1975; ‘Night Hair Child’, 1972; ‘Manhunt in Milan’, 1972; the now much appreciated ‘Death Line’. 1972 and just for laughs ‘Beware! The Blob’, 1972. They had several dozen other titles available some new and a number which had been taken out of their own 16mm rental catalogue, due to damage. However the handful we had didn’t set the world on fire and we didn’t proceed with a second batch.
…. to be continued.
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