I f you’ve been following these posts you will be forgiven for assuming that every contract we signed was for a minimum of six or so titles, however that wasn’t always the case, as the following three will demonstrate.
“TODO POR NADA”
Does the title ‘Todo por Nada’ ring any bells, you may know it under the title ‘Minha Vingança Sera Sua Morte’, perhaps ‘Le quattro croci di El Paso’ or ‘Everything in Vain’. No. What about ‘Bullet for a Deadman’ a Derann super 8 release of the late 70s’ This was the only film we purchased from a vast catalogue of foreign movies from an office in London, who not being one of our usual contacts I’m unable to enlighten anyone. But at the time Derek and myself both thought that edited and repackaged it might sell as ‘Spaghetti Westerns’ were still popular. We re-titled the movie, it took me sometime to come up with, what I thought was a good Italian title, even if this 1969 movie was a Mexican production and Marianne Frost came up with an Italian style label.
“FIRST OF THE FEW”
‘The First of The Few’ was the “baby’ of Mike Dimmock! Derann had issued a number of WW2 dramas over the years and Derek never tired of watching them. Therefore it was only natural that young Mike Dimmock would find himself influenced and found himself in front of an editior with the job of condensing this war drama of almost two hours, to around 26 minutes. I’m unsure as to whether the master was 35 or 16mm, but judging by the quality it looks like it was 35mm. Mike was disappointed, as it never sold in great numbers but he was continually receiving congratulations on his editing skills by those who did.
“ROAD TO BALI”
Showbiz legends Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, along with their regular glamour girl Dorothy Lamour, starred in a series of comedies that today we have given the nick-name ‘The Road Movies’. There were seven in the series, beginning with ‘Road to Singapore’ in 1940 and ending in 1962 with ‘Road to Hong Kong’, with co-star Joan Collins replacing Miss Lamour. 1952s entry, ‘Road to Bali’ was the only one to be photographed in colour. ‘Bali’ was jointly made by Hope and & Crosby as was ‘ Road to Rio’, however due to an oversight the copyright was renewed late and lapsed into the public domain in 1981. We were offered the rights to this feature several times by various companies and agents, for both 8mm and video, before we signed the dotted line and issued the title as a 3 x 400′ mini feature and a 400′ selected scene version. We were lucky in finding very nice master material and the release prints were very pleasing.
…. to be continued.
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