A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 18
The road we traveled in order to aquire the United Artists deal was prolonged, stressful and only came about because I’d suggested “that we should give UA a try, we’d nothing to lose”. Their offices were situated at Mortimer House, in Mortimer Street which was just five minutes walk from Wardour Street, and our contact’s office, who was a tall fragile looking gent with a small goatee beard and a whisper of a voice, was on the third floor. It was apparent from the word go that it was going to be a tortuous process. We had more meetings at UA than with any other film distributor we’d ever dealt with up to that time. At one point we’d even been ushered into the MD’s office to be introduced, where we had been given coffee and presumably during this informal ‘chat’, he’d made up his mind as to whether we would get the deal or not. United Artists didn’t actually have anybody in charge of a department that handled 16m/8mm rights, in fact they didn’t have a department for these mediums at all, all our talks were made within the TV sales department. Both Derek and myself felt that our contact at UA was actually afraid of going ahead with any form of deal, without the OK from his American superior and it was only after a meeting with this spectre, a small Argentinean gent with a short temper and even less patience, who was over here supervising TV screenings of the James Bonds, that the deal began to move forward. We had originally chosen titles from the WB product they’d picked up in 1956, but there was some insistence on including some UA product.
Box art courtesy of Super8DataBase.
…. to be continued.
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