Jesse Hawken
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169: Cannon’s Prestige Pictures (with Jessica Ritchey)
🕑 Added 2024-05-28 00:03:38 +0000 UTCThe film writer Jessica Ritchey returns for a show about Cannon Films, and the aggressive attempt by “The Go-Go Boys” Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus to bring legitimacy to their schlock studio by financing projects designed to win them awards and prestige.
Despite the critical success of some of these offerings, and some high-profile wins and nominations, none of these films were financially successful thanks to Cannon’s hapless marketing strategies and their bad reputation within the film industry (including staggering money losses, a shareholder revolt and an SEC investigation into their accounting practices). Cannon would file for bankruptcy by the end of the eighties.
We discuss 5 of these prestige projects: the dark journalism thriller Street Smart (which Cannon financed for Christopher Reeve in exchange for starring in Superman IV, the film that put Morgan Freeman on the map), Andrei Konchalovsky’s masterful Runaway Train (the best film the studio ever made) and his followup, the American gothic drama Shy People (an award winner at Cannes which vanished without a trace), Nicolas Roeg’s Castaway (the film Oliver Reed was promoting the night he almost beat up David Letterman), and Barbet Schroeder’s black comedy about alcoholism Barfly with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.
Street Smart, Runaway Train and Shy People are currently available to stream on Tubi.
Follow Jessica Ritchey on Bluesky, and support her work on Patreon.
Trailers
Street Smart (Jerry Schatzberg, 1987)
Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985)
Shy People (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1987)
Castaway (Nicolas Roeg, 1986)
Barfly (Barbet Schroeder, 1987)
Comments
Jesper Ohlsson
..there was obviously other problems at hand (the entirety of Cannon as a barely-above-board-enterprise-writ-large) but it's odd to hear that they didn't try the "one weird trick" that actually works, which is that you make a daughter-company, call it something unrelated, and release all your movies through that brand. Prior to "the internet" (and wikipedia in particular), I don't think most people gave a shit or even registered that "movies come from this or that studio" (outside film-nerds). If anything, Cannon would be one of very few production companies that would be recognizable to audiences at the time ("oh, it's a Cannon-movie"). I don't know how many times I watched a movie as a kid, from Touchstone, and I had no idea that it had any connection to Disney. It was never going to work to make prestige-movies out of Cannon regardless of what they called themselves (it honestly just sounds like "we can do that too!" hubris from coked up carnies) but it's wild to hear that they didn't even try the most intuitive, low-cost-trick of "just change the name." Just change your name. It's super-easy, and really effective; whether it's benign stuff like film-making, or legally grey-area institutions like Blackwater.
