One of our most outrageous losses, and only because Derek didn’t understand their popularity or their notoriety, were the films of John Waters. Its possible that we may very well have been attending Cannes, Mifed or the AFM in L.A., but no, I believe we were in an office somewhere in London searching as was usual at the time, for video rights. We’d been going through the usual “batches” of films on offer, each presented in a portfolio filled with the standard stills and colourful pressbooks, when we were confronted with one filled with the early films of John Waters. I’d never seen one of his productions, but I was familiar with his work, however Derek, although he said he heard of the title ‘Pink Flamingos’, was somewhat at a loss as to what to make of them! Titles included ‘Mondo Trasho’, ‘Multiple Maniacs’, the infamous ‘Pink Flamingos’ and ‘Female Trouble’. They no longer owned the video rights, but they still had the 8 & 16mm rights, and knowing our ‘bootlace’ reputation they had presented an excellent deal to us! Our 16mm library was still popular, although by this time it was slowing down, and 8mm, although always in our minds, wasn’t at the top of our prioritises, as video cassettes was all anyone was talking about and wanted, so after forty or so minutes Derek decided he could not or would not take a chance on the product offered. He was probably correct, as I’m very much afraid that the UK 8mm market just wasn’t ready for drag artist, Devine, sold as one “the filthiest people alive”. And we weren’t prepared to be the 8mm distributor to disrupt the 8mm market.
While looking for video rights at Cannes, our stand was generally well visited and everyone of the visitors carried their product around ready to display their movies and TV shows and series. Often as one would leave the stand, another would arrive and begin their sale pitch only to reveal…almost the same product as the last! This is how we picked up the ‘Pathfinders’ TV series for video, but not before we did a little digging around to discover the rightful owner of the rights, as in just 8 hours we had been offered the rights at least three times, by different companies!. One Australian couple had tempted us with the rights to a number of TV series including ‘Skippy’ and ‘The Littlest Hobo’ at an excellent low price, then ruined the whole deal by showing us a number of U.S. TV movies that we had already issued on cassette. It was obvious that they didn’t own any, or very little, of the product that they were selling!
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