Cannon Films

~ the obit ~

The Cannon Group was incorporated on 23 October 1967 by Dennis Friedland and Christopher C. Dewey, who spent a decade making low-budget pictures with occasional real ambition and then ran out of money. In 1979 two Israeli cousins bought the shell for $500,000. Menahem Golan had directed in Tel Aviv and Yoram Globus had distributed there, and what they brought to Los Angeles was a method rather than a taste.

The method was pre-selling. Golan would arrive at Cannes or MIFED with a poster and a title, sell the distribution rights for individual territories to buyers in a hotel suite, and take deposits. Those deposits financed the shoot. The next year's deposits financed the shortfall on the last year's shoot. It worked beautifully for as long as the volume kept climbing, and it required the volume to keep climbing, because the deposits for a film that has not been made are the only thing paying for the film that has.

What the method produced was the contents of every video shop shelf in the 1980s: Death Wish II in 1982, Missing in Action in 1984, American Ninja in 1985, then The Delta Force, Breakin', Masters of the Universe, Bloodsport, Invasion U.S.A. and Ninja III: The Domination. Cobra was the biggest earner, $160 million off a $25 million budget in 1986. Golan also wanted respectability and went shopping for it in the same market, funding Cassavetes on Love Streams, Zeffirelli on Otello, Konchalovsky on Runaway Train, and Barbet Schroeder on Barfly, which competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1987. The same man green-lit that and the third Ninja picture out of the same office.

In April 1986 Cannon bought Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment from Alan Bond for £175 million, which came with Elstree Studios and a large British cinema estate and a 2,000-title library. Thirteen months later it sold the library on to Weintraub for $85 million because it needed cash. The biggest purchase the company ever made was being stripped for cash inside a year to keep the pre-sale wheel turning through the next quarter.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the parretti years ~

The SEC started looking at how Cannon reported its film revenues and the banks got nervous behind it. Superman IV had its budget cut from $36 million to $17 million partway through production, which is visible on screen in every frame of it. By 1988 the company needed a rescue large enough that it took a $250 million refinancing to clear the debt, and Crédit Lyonnais ended up holding the paper.

Giancarlo Parretti, an Italian financier with a waiter's biography and a talent for other people's credit, took control through Pathé Communications in 1989 with a $250 million refinancing. Golan resigned over it and left to run 21st Century Film Corporation, which went bankrupt in its own right. Parretti reconstituted the remains as Cannon Pictures under Ovidio Assonitis, then used the same Crédit Lyonnais money to buy MGM in 1990 and wrecked that too. He ended up convicted of fraud and perjury in Delaware. Cannon Pictures put out its last film, Hellbound, with Chuck Norris, in 1994, and the creditors pushed it into Chapter 11. The library was auctioned on 15 September 1997.

~ what the shelf remembers ~

The catalog is the part that survived, and it survived through a distribution channel Cannon did not build and barely understood. Video rental arrived at exactly the moment Golan and Globus were flooding the market, and a shop needed several hundred boxes on the wall regardless of whether anything good had been released that month. Cannon made the filler, forty-odd titles a year of it, and the filler is what people actually watched.

In Turkey those films arrived dubbed and retitled, on cassettes through the video shops of the 1980s and then in the afternoon movie slots of the private channels that started broadcasting from 1990. Missing in Action went out as Kayıp Aranıyor and The Delta Force as Delta Gücü. Chuck Norris in Turkish is a specific artifact of that decade, and the reason there was so much of him to dub is that somebody in a hotel suite at Cannes had sold the Turkish rights before the film had a script.

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