At some point during the late 70’s, Derek came down from his office and said “that was the head of Canterbury films in the States and he wants us to buy him out!” It would seem that he had decided to call it a day and felt that we could be just the company to take over all of his many trailers and short subjects that up to now had been imported by Dorset Street based Widescreen Center. We knew they had a fairly large catalogue, but we were still surprised when the consignment of negatives and soundmasters arrived a few weeks later and on unpacking discovered that he’d thoughtfully taped each neg and corresponding soundmaster together, saved us a great deal of time. We hadn’t even begun cataloguing the material when Derek received a second call, this time from the head of Steel Valley film offering him the same deal! This too we accepted, and I understand that The Widescreen center were non to happy as it meant that they had lost two nice ranges from their sales lists! Steel Valley’s negs and soundmasters came (mixed this time around) and there was even more than from Canterbury Films. Dave Worrall designed a special sales catalogue “The Movieola Series’ to list many of their titles. Many had never been used when we closed down ourselves in 2011!
Also available, but doesn’t seem to be in any of our sales catalogues were F/X: Murder by Illusion, 1986 and Rock-a-Doodle, both of which had been released by CEC, Gary Watson’s company. He gave Derek permission to use the negs, we already had the sound masters as we did his sounding for him.
As the 1980s drew to a close we were asked for a face to face meeting with Susan Turner, head of Universal 8 and we arranged it so it coincided with a number of other appointments over there. We we treated royally at Universal Studios and then were asked point blank if we would be prepared to take over the UK sales and distribution of the Universal 8 catalogue! Derek said yes. Only a few months earlier we had flown to Germany for a meeting with Manfred Menz, head of Marketing Film and after a short preamble he had offered us the same deal, the take over the UK sales and distribution of the Paramount catalogue! Derek had said yes! In both cases we were well aware that the best titles had been released, but they were offers we could not refuse and it was a further two feathers in our cap! Our big worry was where were we going store all the incoming stock and how were we going inform Margaret Crook, head of Capitol Films… as they were the current UK distributor!
We decided from the beginning that we would concentrate on importing the 400′ and 2 x 400′ from Universal 8, it was only after Universal 8 closed their operations that we deliveries of numerous 200′ at knockdown prices, a similar practice from Techno Film and ie International of Italy arose where we were also able to buy ‘close outs’ cheaply.
…. to be continued.
Leave a Reply