A very entertaining piece, and especially as it highlights how Golan and Yoram Globus (the names Golan-Globus almost sounds like some obscure wrestler) were kind of the creators of their own destruction - taking the model that Roger Corman had done quite well for himself for decades and taking it to extremes: going to places like Cannes and pre-selling movies that didn't exist based on just a poster that would sell a product, not to mention with stars like the "Two Chucks", Bronson and Norris (someone in the film even says that script readers would put scripts that were submitted into columns for these two chucks, and it was almost like Wuthering Heights - one is for Chuck, and one is for the other Chuck").
But why did Cannon fail? Reaching farther than they could reach, as it tends to happen in rise-and-fall type of stories. The producers were keen on creating pieces of product that more often than not had a lack of quality: low-budgets, films often made for very little, and aimed to make a new 'thing' into something very quickly (the Breakin' movies came about just by Golan's daughter seeing break dancing on the street). And of course when you got Charles Bronson, even if he really doesn't want to do Death Wish 2-3-4-5, you'll still get them anyway, not to mention a Bevvy of theaters and the Thorn/EMI distribution chain in the UK apparently (this was news to me and kind of shocking).
The doc shows these people very fairly, especially Golan who was really more of the guy front-and-center - by that I mean that the interviewees don't mince words about their reputations and how they could be: schlock-meister is one such term, and wheeling-and-dealing would be the nice version. They would pre-sell many movies sometimes that never would get made, as sequels and based around concepts and ideas that were so loose (again, the poster-concept or who might be in it) that quality wasn't of concern, and as another interviewer says, they didn't necessarily have the patience to take time with a film, to work out problems with a script or even really in post-production. A theater needs to be filled, fine, here's Ninja III: The Domination, which gives us a girl who becomes a demon at times but it's also a Flashdance rip-off and there are ninjas in there somewhere, probably.
Oh, and why not make a 'stable of stars' like in Golden Age Hollywood, so get Norris and Bronson and Sylvia Kristel and many others to round out the bunch? In other words, they aren't shown as paragons of artistry: they made crap, and probably knew it, but loved movie-making in the abstract way of 'Hey, you can get an Oscar for playing this role, Brooke Shields!' And yet it's strange as they did try to get artistic cachet from time to time - among filmmakers they worked with in the 80's were Cassavetes (Love Streams, one of his best works), John Frankenheimer (a much-touted and underrated Elmore Leonard adaptation), and Franco Zefferelli (an adaptation of Othello which, according to the director interviewed for the doc, he thinks is his best film!)
Perhaps this was to off-set the view that they *only* made schlock; not that they didn't make schlock with art-house directors as well, and one of the funniest sections of the movie (right along-side the anecdote about Golan selling a movie idea to Clyde the Oragutan - no, really) is the story of Godard's King Lear, and how the director practically trolled the producers by secretly recording Golan on the phone touting how successful the movie would be with a nonsensical plot (and I've seen the movie, oh man).
But why did they fail? The documentary posits that, much in the way that the initial goals of Miramax got away from the Weinsteins after Disney bought them, Cannon tried to make bigger movies and break into Hollywood; Over the Top, Superman 4 and Masters of the Universe bombed on budgets that combined neared 90 million, a figure that Golan in the past would've been able to make 50 films out of (at least) - they made the same lack and rushed quality for products that probably weren't very good anyway.
And yet there's a fascinating moral at the end that, in a way, a lot of the crappiest of Hollywood action-spectacles and how they somehow get made can be traced to the model that a company like Cannon made (semi) successful. But through all this, Mark Watley (also director of docs on Ozsploitation and Filipino trash flicks) makes these interviews fly by with plenty of humor and some real pathos to it. These guys are not saints, but they're not absolutely abhorrent either: they loved movies, or at least the idea of them, and I like how the film shows Golan/Globus in some not-totally-flattering lights, amid clips of grade-C-through-Z trash (and with stories on occasional good movies, like Lifeforce and guilty pleasures like Texas Chainsaw 2).
But why did Cannon fail? Reaching farther than they could reach, as it tends to happen in rise-and-fall type of stories. The producers were keen on creating pieces of product that more often than not had a lack of quality: low-budgets, films often made for very little, and aimed to make a new 'thing' into something very quickly (the Breakin' movies came about just by Golan's daughter seeing break dancing on the street). And of course when you got Charles Bronson, even if he really doesn't want to do Death Wish 2-3-4-5, you'll still get them anyway, not to mention a Bevvy of theaters and the Thorn/EMI distribution chain in the UK apparently (this was news to me and kind of shocking).
The doc shows these people very fairly, especially Golan who was really more of the guy front-and-center - by that I mean that the interviewees don't mince words about their reputations and how they could be: schlock-meister is one such term, and wheeling-and-dealing would be the nice version. They would pre-sell many movies sometimes that never would get made, as sequels and based around concepts and ideas that were so loose (again, the poster-concept or who might be in it) that quality wasn't of concern, and as another interviewer says, they didn't necessarily have the patience to take time with a film, to work out problems with a script or even really in post-production. A theater needs to be filled, fine, here's Ninja III: The Domination, which gives us a girl who becomes a demon at times but it's also a Flashdance rip-off and there are ninjas in there somewhere, probably.
Oh, and why not make a 'stable of stars' like in Golden Age Hollywood, so get Norris and Bronson and Sylvia Kristel and many others to round out the bunch? In other words, they aren't shown as paragons of artistry: they made crap, and probably knew it, but loved movie-making in the abstract way of 'Hey, you can get an Oscar for playing this role, Brooke Shields!' And yet it's strange as they did try to get artistic cachet from time to time - among filmmakers they worked with in the 80's were Cassavetes (Love Streams, one of his best works), John Frankenheimer (a much-touted and underrated Elmore Leonard adaptation), and Franco Zefferelli (an adaptation of Othello which, according to the director interviewed for the doc, he thinks is his best film!)
Perhaps this was to off-set the view that they *only* made schlock; not that they didn't make schlock with art-house directors as well, and one of the funniest sections of the movie (right along-side the anecdote about Golan selling a movie idea to Clyde the Oragutan - no, really) is the story of Godard's King Lear, and how the director practically trolled the producers by secretly recording Golan on the phone touting how successful the movie would be with a nonsensical plot (and I've seen the movie, oh man).
But why did they fail? The documentary posits that, much in the way that the initial goals of Miramax got away from the Weinsteins after Disney bought them, Cannon tried to make bigger movies and break into Hollywood; Over the Top, Superman 4 and Masters of the Universe bombed on budgets that combined neared 90 million, a figure that Golan in the past would've been able to make 50 films out of (at least) - they made the same lack and rushed quality for products that probably weren't very good anyway.
And yet there's a fascinating moral at the end that, in a way, a lot of the crappiest of Hollywood action-spectacles and how they somehow get made can be traced to the model that a company like Cannon made (semi) successful. But through all this, Mark Watley (also director of docs on Ozsploitation and Filipino trash flicks) makes these interviews fly by with plenty of humor and some real pathos to it. These guys are not saints, but they're not absolutely abhorrent either: they loved movies, or at least the idea of them, and I like how the film shows Golan/Globus in some not-totally-flattering lights, amid clips of grade-C-through-Z trash (and with stories on occasional good movies, like Lifeforce and guilty pleasures like Texas Chainsaw 2).