Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Cannon Films,

the home of high-powered, high-voltage

motion picture entertainment.

We're taking motion picture excitement over the edge,

and your box office over the top.

Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus

were the heavyweights.

They were the George Foremans and the Muhammad Alis

of the indie market.

I hold them in huge affection,

(CHUCKLING) even though they ruined our movie.

(ROARS)

It's hard to say the words "Cannon Films"

without laughing.

Nuts. Just crazy, nuts.

(ROARS)

Slightly to the sidelines of,

I don't know, serious filmmaking.

(SNARLING) Ugh!

The audience wasn't prepared for the craziness.

Looniness. (CHAINSAW WHIRRING)

Guys, really? I mean, that's insane.

I felt a little stupid doing it.

They put a stamp on pop culture.

You were rooting for them. (SCREAMING)

We had no idea what we were doing.

We were just making it up as we went along.

(GROANING)

How could it fail?

(SONG PLAYING)

(CAMERA CLICKING)

(HORSE NEIGHING)

(GROWLING)

(GUN COCKING)

(GUNSHOTS)

Menahem Golan is the father of the Israeli cinema.

Every three movies out of four

were produced by Menahem Golan,

some of them directed by him.

He'd made something like 40 pictures before I met him.

As a kid, he was in the theaters

watching the movies,

then he wanted to see the projector,

then he wanted to touch the film.

MENAHEM: This is where I met for the first time

the Hollywood of Humphrey Bogart,

Gary Cooper, Billy Wilder.

And I used to spend here at least four times a week.

I fell in love with Hollywood, right in this building.

He lived cinema.

He was shooting movies in Israel,

and he didn't have food at home.

ITZIK KOL: And he came and said, "Look, I don't have a car",

"I don't have a Frigidaire"

"and I don't have even a house."

"The only thing what I have is a wife and three daughters."

"If you can put a mortgage"

"on my wife and my three daughters,"

"it's okay with me."

Money was never a real issue for Menahem. Filmmaking was.

Then he brought Yoram into the business afterwards.

Yoram was a younger cousin.

Yoram Globus was the businessman

behind the movie-making.

Menahem Golan was the movie-maker.

They had a distribution company, a production company.

Menahem was directing.

And they were the industry.

They had a number of certainly very successful

domestic Israeli films

that threatened to break out.

Tevye and His Seven Daughters,

some kind of Fiddler on the Roof knock-off.

WILLIAM STOUT: Menahem's wife had brought

their new baby to the set,

and Menahem sees the baby.

"Oh, darling, the baby. Give me the baby, give me the baby."

(IMITATING MENAHEM) "Put the baby, put the baby in the basket

"and the basket in this wagon."

His wife is going like,

"Menahem, you know, you just can't put..."

(IMIATING MENAHEM) "Later, please, please."

"Not now." "Action!"

Boom, everything takes off, the horses go racing.

It looks like the baby in the basket

is almost about to fall off.

And his wife lunges to catch the baby

and he grabs her and he goes, "Darling..."

"Never in the middle of the shot, please!"

And that's Golan.

MAN: They already had their eye on an international market.

The Raid on Entebbe was a natural for them to do

because Israel was at their feet.

Put your hands on your head!

To the back! Keep going!

Menahem and Yoram were the kings of Hollywood in Israel.

This is a grenade, and we can blow the plane up!

SYBIL: They got the military.

SAM: We are shooting a scene

and four Hercules are in the background.

BOAZ: And the pilot was taking off and landing,

taking off and landing.

And he said, "Listen, I cannot work anymore. I'm tired."

SAM: So Menahem, he is very adamant about shooting.

He cannot take it that something will stop his momentum.

So he just picked up an Uzi...

Points it right at the head of the pilot.

And said, "You better go back to the cockpit"

"and do what I'm telling you."

You can't stop him.

QUENTIN: One of Menahem's young sidekicks

was a guy called Boaz Davidson,

who came up with the Lemon Popsicle series of films.

BOAZ: Lemon Popsicle was based on my escapades

and growing-up pains.

Since we were dealing with discovering of sex,

we had to go where people didn't go before.

Menahem didn't want to make this kind of movie.

Yoram was a little bit more daring

because he was a little bit younger,

but both of them were very conservative.

I think some of the intelligentsia

saw it as something which was very vulgar. (MOANING)

BOAZ: A neighbor told my mom that,

"Your son did Lemon Popsicle?"

Steady. Keep it there. It's growing.

She said, "Yes". She spitted on the floor

and she said, "Wow. This is horrible".

You all right? Could be better.

"Horrible."

It was a population of 3.5 million people,

and the first run of the movie,

1.3 million people saw it.

BOAZ: The number one box office success of Israel

until this very day.

So Menahem and Yoram made huge amount of money.

They had a goal, and it was a dream,

and the dream was to be successful all over the world,

and mainly in Hollywood.

It happens they bought this small company

which was called Cannon.

We ran the company for 13 years.

It created something like 70 pictures.

JOHN G. AVILDSEN: They were doing various skin flicks,

exploitation,

or buying Swiss skin

and adding some extra scenes to it.

CHRISTOPHER: We made Inga in Sweden,

and when you're shooting in a foreign language,

in Swedish, in this case,

it becomes Bergmanesque, it becomes an art film,

but our art film had lots of nudity in it.

NARRATOR: Don't bother to translate it.

It means the same in any language.

Dewey said, "We've raised some money"

"to make this other picture,"

"but we've realized it's a terrible idea"

"and we've got to make something"

"or otherwise we're going to have to give the money back."

"Have you got any ideas?"

JOE: You goddamn nigger-loving hippies

getting away with murder.

Sex, drugs, pissing on America,

fucking up the music.

I'd like to kill one of them.

(GUNSHOT)

Joe turned out to be one of the biggest pictures of 1970.

It reflected the headlines.

Hippies and hardhats and the war,

and whether Nixon was a good guy or a bad guy.

People said, "Gee, you've gotta see this, Charlie.

"It's terrific."

JOE: All you gotta do is act black

and the money rolls in.

I sweat my balls off 40 hours a week

in front of a fucking furnace.

They get as much money as I do.

When we started making movies, Inga was $50,000.

Joe cost us $372,000.

And by the time we did The Happy Hooker,

it was $1.2 million,

and that was just a heck of a lot of money to have to raise

from individuals.

And Menahem and Yoram came along and said,

"We want to make movies now in the United States."

They came to town,

for lack of a better term.

MAN: They just wanted

to put together an instant library

of films that had their name on it.

"Here's the thing, it's 17 January today."

"You're shooting on 4 March with Klaus Kinski."

NARRATOR: Sick with revenge.

Twisted with hate.

You make me sick.

Don't! (SCREAMING) No!

NARRATOR: Schizoid.

MAN: So at the beginning, they started to do

the same kind of movies.

MAN 2: Low-budget movies with a hint of sex.

MAN 3: Horror movies.

Help me!

BOAZ: The movie X-Ray

was one of those slasher movies.

Barbi Benton was the star

and you couldn't do a movie with Barbi Benton

without showing her body.

MARTINE BESWICK: Their idea of films at that time

had to have a lot of nudity,

because that's what the public wanted,

according to their mentality, their thinking.

MAN: When they were shooting.

The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood

I remember Martine saying

that when she would walk off the set

they were bringing fucking into the thing.

BESWICK: There in the pool,

they had all these extras at it,

and I was absolutely furious,

because this is not what I signed on for.

What I want is a boffo socko, kiss my grocer's movie.

BESWICK: It was about a conniving studio

who were really rotten and horrid,

and, of course, that's exactly what I was dealing with

with Golan and Globus.

RUSTY LEMORANDE: They either piled gifts on you

and treated you like a favorite child,

or they were mean and bullish

and made you fear for your career.

They carry with them the Israeli temperament.

MAN: They would go through walls

in order to get what they want.

Menahem had no trouble yelling.

Up would come the hands,

and the Israeli accent would get thicker and thicker.

They were screaming at each other,

just screaming.

"(MUMBLING) Chris! (MUMBLING) Chris!"

You know, my name kept coming up.

I kept saying to this reporter,

"What are they talking about?"

"What are they talking..."

And they were deciding which deli to take me to lunch.

It wasn't anger, it was just fierceness and robustness

and passion.

MAN: They were extremely fond of each other.

Clearly they were family.

MENAHEM: We are unique partners, I think.

It's more than brothers.

We forge each other's signatures on checks,

if you understand...

That is the maximum way you can get to.

You couldn't break that relationship that they had.

They trusted each other completely.

Yet there was a real Yin and Yang quality.

They seemed to approach filmmaking

entirely differently.

Menahem is a dreamer and he's a grown-up kid.

And he's doing everything he's always wanted to do.

He would sit and dream about projects

and people and stories.

And Yoram was a shrewd businessperson

who had to keep everything tight

so Menahem can work.

He wasn't ebullient, he wasn't loud,

he wasn't a center of attention.

He stood in the shadows.

Maybe the best film salesman

the world has ever known.

I'm Yoram Globus. He's our president.

Nice to meet you.

Dour, watchful, a little bit suspicious.

Cold and hard and tough.

YORAM: It's Yoram. Where is my money?

You promise and promise and promise and you are not paying.

They were opposite, but together when they went to banks,

it was exactly the combination you needed

to raise money for this dream,

and they did.

We came to America to make American movies

that could be sold to independent distributors

around the world,

with production values...

(SCREAMING) With a good story,

with... call it star system,

and bring it to the world, not via the major companies. (SCREAMING)

They invented the way the independent company work today.

They create a poster

of a movie they intend to make.

They sell it to foreign buyers.

They take that money, they make the picture

and deliver it the following season.

NARRATOR: Now a special experience

in movie-going entertainment.

The Apple. (GRUNTS)

The Apple, the Mount Everest of bad musicals,

and Menahem directed it.

* Magic Apple, mystery Apple

* Take a little ride Let me be your guide

* Through the Apple paradise *

The Apple was going to be Menahem's Tommy.

* Hey, hey, hey.

DEL VALLE: It was his attempt to be Ken Russell.

"I'm better than Ken Russell!"

He thought it was going to be incredibly commercial,

He thought it was incredibly imaginative and creative.

I can't explain, The Apple to you. Can anybody?

It's the story of creation, according to Menahem.

STEWART: A classic story of good and evil

set in the music industry in the future.

NARRATOR: In 1994, the world is controlled by one power.

The Apple is success.

DAVID: Menahem's idea of the future

is 2025, Tel Aviv.

ALAIN JAKUBOWICZ: He wanted to show the world of the hippies,

except Menahem is not a hippie,

so he didn't really know how to approach it.

ALL: Peace.

In every way, it is bold.

It will have a song called 'I'm Coming'.

* Ooh, coming

* Coming for you

* Feel me coming.

STEWART: I was perfect for the role of Bibi

because I was so naive. (LAUGHS)

I was like, "Oh, he's coming over here for me. Okay."

That's how I read it, even with the dance and everything.

Pretty bad. I know it's pathetic.

He was so sure that the movie is going to be a hit,

a big hit.

STEWART: So when we were at the screening

and the opposite happened,

he was devastated. (BOOING)

They gave complimentary soundtracks,

and when the movie was over, they threw them at the screen

and they were embedded in the screen.

ALAIN: I think he was in advance of his time

when he did The Apple.

(LAUGHS)

One of the great things that we are all looking for

is more life,

life, another life,

life beyond what we are limited

to on our earth,

life beyond E.T.

Life up there.

And that's what cinema provides us.

They loved film more than any,

like, executive or mogul

that I'd ever talked to.

You were talking with them about something else,

they'd say, "Listen, talk with me about movies."

They'd have four hours free, they'd go to a movie,

even though the film was in German

and they didn't speak German, they would go to the movies.

Cannon is the only company who loves cinema.

We don't have other hobbies. Cinema is our life.

"When can you start?" I said, "Well, I'm getting married on Saturday."

(MIMICKING MENAHEM) "How long will that take?"

NARRATOR: They run their company like a factory,

a no-frills operation

where long hours and low pay are the norm,

where every penny ends up on the screen,

not on an expense account.

"Boys, we'll eat lunch in the office."

Menahem ran down the hall,

went to the assistant's room,

grabbed his plate of Chinese food,

and said, "Give me that."

And ran back and said, "We got you some Chinese food."

The door would open

and an assistant would bring in some Styrofoam cups

and a couple of those Styrofoam carry-out trays.

Meetings took place

while he's shoving pickles in his face.

99% of the budget of a picture

is going to the screen,

not with all the limouisine-shmimousine,

lunches-bunches and all this nonsense.

They're not about the schmoozing,

they're about getting things done.

We are not the kind of people

of Ma Maison or Jimmy's in Hollywood,

the restaurants, you know.

We are not going to Apollo Lounge.

We do not play tennis. Look at me.

I don't, I'm sorry.

"I don't go to tennis courts,"

"I don't go to big, lavish parties in Malibu."

Well, the reason he didn't was because he wasn't invited.

I just had in my head what a movie producer should be

and Menahem just didn't quite fit that picture.

(CAMERA CLICKING)

The shirts were too tight.

The end of the screening, he'd be trying to button his pants.

You know Jabba the Hutt? Menahem Golan.

If Jabba the Hutt were on meth or something.

The only thing that motivated and guided these two men

was the love of movies,

and this goes back to when they were kids in Tel Aviv

watching American movies.

He wanted to remake

the picture he had seen as a young guy and loved.

Menahem said, "I have a wonderful idea."

"I want all the monster men."

"Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi."

I said, "But they're dead."

VINCENT PRICE: Welcome to the House of the Long Shadows.

The masters of horror are moving in.

Vincent Price, that's me.

Peter Cushing. Christopher Lee.

You're not going to make a movie with these guys

that is going to frighten anybody.

(GIRL SCREAMING)

It's not going to be a horror movie.

(BOTH SCREAMING) (BAT SHRIEKING)

It's going to have to be a nostalgia piece.

(OPERATIC SINGING)

But I think they were happy to send themselves up.

Piano wire. He must have heard her singing.

I knew it wasn't going to be successful as a theatrical movie.

With all those horror stars and a kind of horror title,

it got a PG rating.

(SCREAMS)

So you've got a family horror movie.

There were cinemas out there that needed to be filled

with something, and that's what Cannon did.

Really what they made

was whatever they could put together

that had an actor in it, that had a name

that they could pre-sell.

OLIVER: Dutch, Sylvia Kristel.

She was huge, and a big name.

She exuded quiet, erotic desire.

"I'm horny, but stay away."

She was famous for the Just Jaeckin films.

NARRATOR: The first time since the original Emmanuelle

that these two outstanding talents

have been brought together in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

They sold Sylvia Kristel in a sexy picture. That's what they'd sold.

NARRATOR: D.H. Lawrence's classic masterpiece

is now a major motion picture.

They were blown away. They liked it.

They thought it was a great picture.

NARRATOR: Sylvia Kristel is Mata Hari.

Dancer. Lover. Spy. (GASPS)

When I met her, she was addicted to cocaine.

By the time she got to Budapest, she was addicted to booze.

OLIVER: The Italian hairdresser would go, "Oh, Madonna,

"look at the way she looks!"

She came in looking like a gargoyle.

She couldn't act...

Your friend Karl

may have already engaged me to seduce you.

OLIVER: It's an important role, and she struggled.

The commercial pushing

of erotic scenes in this film, ruined it.

They called from LA saying,

"Now she's got to get laid in the trenches as well."

She's getting laid enough.

It's all to do with taste in the end.

That's sort of the Cannon way.

It completely resembles

something, minus good taste.

I've taken the script, you know, I'm opening the first page,

and then so I start reading, and it says,

"Na-na, na-na, suck my banana."

This was one of the first lines of the film.

What they didn't have in taste, they made up for in enthusiasm.

Alright, let's cut this shit,

and now let's all get serious.

* Dance all night, play all day

* One, two, three

* Don't let nothing get in the way *

Last American Virgin was a...

Almost by-the-numbers remake of Lemon Popsicle.

They changed very little.

They just brought the plot to America.

When I first got the script, I thought, "What is this film?"

"It's... it's got two different tones."

On one hand there's this sexploitation aspect to it,

and then the other half of it

was this really wonderful love story.

It had all these controversial issues

with the abortion and the prostitution.

Alright, cowboys, who's gonna be first?

I wanna get this over with.

FRANKLIN: Then the crabs, there's cocaine

and there's high-schoolers doing all this stuff.

Now, you two have fun. (SIGHS)

WOMARK: The good guy and his best friend who's super good-looking

who always is with the young ladies. Gets somebody pregnant.

It's actually the girl he gets pregnant

is the girl that our hero really loves

and, of course, the good-looking guy bails on her

and our hero has to basically take her to the hospital

the day of the abortion,

and in order to pay for the abortion,

he's a pizza delivery guy.

An abortion is being played with U2 music under it,

and you go from a doctor performing an abortion

to some guy cutting a pizza.

Guys, really? I mean, that's insane. That's just nuts.

They had really high hopes

that this movie would kind of cross over,

teenage movie, this would be it.

NARRATOR: The Last American Virgin.

See it or be it.

ALL: Yeah!

I thought it was an odd script for America.

Hi. How's it going?

Are you here to interview me or to fuck me?

I think a lot of the traditions or customs

didn't translate so well.

For instance, after the abortion

Gary brings her a Christmas tree and a bag of oranges.

It must have meant something in Israel. I have no idea.

DAVIDSON: My goal was to do a real story,

and I think it was very dangerous,

especially for the American market,

because in America, everything has to end up

really, really happy.

American movies are so American

that when they're not American, everybody picks that up.

We will always do films that are a little different, I think,

because of our background and mentality.

They were foreigners,

and I think we needed some American element.

They did bring over a lot of Israelis,

um, that were not gonna help them

infiltrate the domestic market.

They all spoke English,

but they didn't really understand the American idiom.

I think that was a problem,

you know, judging the material.

When they tapped into, or stumbled into,

the right idea, it worked.

(MIMICKING MENAHEM) "David, it's Menahem."

And I said, "What?" And he said, "I want to offer you a great opportunity."

He said, "We're going to make a sequel"

"to one of the great movies of the 1970s."

I said, "What, are you going to do Godfather III?"

And he goes, "Close."

NARRATOR: Death Wish II.

He's doing it for you. Aarggh!

Death Wish II, was the first legitimate,

real Hollywood film they made.

An anticipated sequel to a hit movie,

with a movie star.

MICHAEL WINNER: Death Wish, was on many of the 10-best-of-the-year

film lists in America,

was treated very seriously,

and I think society has now changed enough,

eight years later,

which is a long time to wait for a sequel,

to make a story of some relevance.

I was trying to deal with a character

who did not want to go back to where he had been.

He had lost his wife,

his daughter was in a mental institution,

he has his outing with her,

he's harassed by these punks,

they pickpocket him, they come back,

they ravage his maid, his daughter dies,

and because of her mental illness,

the police won't prosecute as a homicide.

The violence in the second film was there

so Bronson can get to work.

NARRATOR: When murder and rape are the crimes,

Bronson is the only punishment.

Do you believe in Jesus?

Yes, I do.

Well, you're gonna meet him.

DAVID: My script was original, it was clever.

It was much better than the film itself,

which I was somewhat appalled by when I first saw it.

I was upset about the amount

of violence mixed with sex.

It moved it into a different type of film

that I did not want to be in.

Rape is a terrible thing, but it does happen.

It is very much on the minds of the public,

and I see no reason why any subject

should be excluded from drama.

This was just to get his rocks off.

The script did not need it.

The rape scenes of the British version

have been cut by four minutes

by the British film censor James Firman,

who had this to say, "This is about as irresponsible

"as a filmmaker could be"

"in the treatment of rape for purely commercial ends."

"This director is simply trying to stir up"

"as much controversy as possible"

"because he's in desperate need of a hit."

The critics really were very, very outspoken

about how they were really upset about the film.

WOMAN: It is obviously very much on Mr. Winner's mind

to be sodomized.

I hope it happens to him soon.

He loved that. He loved to get people talking.

Michael thrived on controversy.

HARTMAN: Menahem and Yoram,

they gave him the carte blanche to do a lot of things.

"You say you want to shoot this film like that? Fine."

"You want to shoot another one? Fine."

Winner's films make money.

NARRATOR: This is the lusty, bawdy, epic story... (CROWD CHEERING)

Of England's most legendary robber, the Wicked Lady.

Wicked Lady was his opportunity

to go up a rung

on the director's ladder of respectability.

They had Faye Dunaway, they had Sir John Gielgud,

they had Alan Bates,

they had A-list names in this movie.

And yet he had to put naked girls in there.

It was almost like he was sabotaging himself.

Mike wanted to put a bit of spice into the film

and there was a scene where they whipped one of the girls.

MARINA SIRTIS: Michael came up with a pair of scissors

and literally just cut my costume off,

and said, "Get on with it."

That was the scene that the movie was sold on.

It didn't really fit in the film at all.

ALEX WINTER: Michael was a pathologically brutal,

strange, sadistic, insecure,

egotistical character.

OLIVER: He seems to have used his job as a director

to, frankly, abuse people.

They always seem to call for me if things have to be blown up,

people have to be killed, raped or shot, you see?

I don't know why they call for a nice, charming chap like me.

(SCREAMS)

MARINA SIRTIS: We're shooting in a leaky garage,

the rain's coming in through the roof,

and I'm lying naked.

He wouldn't even let me get up.

He wanted me to lie there to be lit,

and I was freezing, and the director of photography

came and put his coat on me

and Winner screamed at him to get the coat off,

how was he supposed to light me?

Completely illegal, by union standards,

and total sadism.

Mike would say to the special effects man,

"Where's a good place for me to be, John?"

And the crew used to say, "In the back of the car, Michael."

I think that he was in a way the perfect Cannon director

because Cannon was this weird bubble

and everybody in it

had this, sort of, wink and a nod,

and we do love the movies, but we want to make money,

and we don't care about your work conditions

or the quality of the product,

and it was kind of a weird carnival.

It was, like, movies are an unreal environment

at the best of times.

And the Cannon movies were like that times 100.

NARRATOR: The Cannon Group

is proud to introduce the practitioner

of the oldest and ultimate martial arts,

the ninja.

Before Menahem, I didn't,

and I bet you that millions of people

never knew the word 'ninja'.

Aarggh!

He took a title from Bruce Lee

and a director was sent to do it.

They sent a batch of the first three days of dailies.

I remember him saying,

"It looks like a hundred-year-old television show."

"This movie's a disaster."

"Look how he's shooting this! This guy can't... He's a piece of wood."

He decided to take the picture over and direct it himself.

He fired the main ninja.

Don't worry. The Manila Film Festival is on.

There must be somebody here we can go to.

He said, "Listen, Franco. We need you."

"You are to replace Mike Stone,"

"because he's a great athlete, but he cannot act."

GOLDBLATT: Pretty good casting,

considering he just happened to be at a restaurant in Manila.

He is no ninja!

He is a ninja!

He is no ninja!

He's so not ninja.

I don't know. I've never seen a ninja.

Aarggh!

His character's name was Cole

and he was from Texas,

and, of course, Franco speaks... (ITALIAN ACCENT) like this.

Menahem says, "Don't worry. He'll still be Cole."

"I can't... I don't have time to change that now."

He re-dubbed me with an American voice,

but not my... a voice that was similar to mine.

(AMERICAN VOICE) A true ninja doesn't kill.

He eliminates, and only for defensive purposes.

He loved American actors, he loves American accents.

Maybe he wanted to be an American.

MARK GOLDBLATT: Enter, the Ninja made money, it was a hit,

a popular international success.

Interesting outfit. Who's your tailor?

I think that movie made, in a way, Cannon.

Ninja is a big deal.

And Menahem is the one who did it.

They wanted immediately to cash in and to make a sequel.

NARRATOR: Revenge of the Ninja.

WOMARK: "Here's $700,000."

"Come back in seven weeks with a ninja movie."

"By the way, the script's not too good."

This is no job for the police.

It's something I'll have to do.

Only a ninja can stop a ninja.

The story's kind of a loose story.

It's not a heavy drama...

With philosophical ideas...

And character depth.

(GIRL SCREAMS) No!

There was a script, but once they shot it

and we edited it together, and we looked at it,

it didn't make any sense.

If you want to work out, you forgot your pants.

We had a screening of it. It was a complete disaster.

And we're all called into Menahem's office,

and he starts making up a brand-new plot of the movie.

"We have to shoot a beginning"

"and, uh, the baby, uh, is being held,"

"and ninjas come, surround, 100 ninjas,"

"and they kill everybody except the kid and the father,"

and he's just making this up,

and he had this uncanny ability to just make up shit

and then we'd shoot it,

and it's the movie that you see.

Menahem Golan is a very creative man.

He said, "Let's make another",

"but this time, I want the hero to be a female."

Ninja III: The Domination,

which starred Lucinda Dickey.

She was hot for that year.

She was the Cannon go-to girl.

Ninja III: The Domination,

managed to take, The Exorcist, a ninja movie,

and combine it with Flashdance.

SAM: We figured that the only way

that a woman will have the ninja ability

will be if she will be possessed

by a spirit of a male dead ninja.

(ROARS)

DICKEY: I had to do a possessed ninja scene,

and I was like, "I didn't learn how to do that in acting class."

(DEMONIC VOICE) You fool!

You cannot stop me! I am a ninja!

Did my head spin around? I think my whole body spun.

(NORMAL VOICE) Help me, I'm scared!

(SHRIEKS)

FIRSTENBERG: In everyday life, she is aerobics instructor.

When the dead spirit takes over,

she goes out and she kills

until the master, Sho Kosugi,

comes into the scene and he helps to free her.

The result is a very strange movie.

NARRATOR: Where Revenge of the Ninja left off,

Ninja III begins.

An epic struggle of superhuman strength

and supernatural forces.

Ninja III: The Domination, was quite a failure,

because the audience did not buy the idea of a woman ninja.

It's over now.

When I took over MGM

it had just come out of its roughest period.

We had a cap on what we could spend on any motion picture

and we needed product.

The day I heard

that MGM was going to be distributing Cannon films,

I thought, "Okay, this is the end of civilization as we know it."

"Did Nostradamus predict this?"

This changed the playing field for Cannon.

But pressure to deliver big movies...

NARRATOR: Sahara.

ALL: Whoo-oo.

NARRATOR: Only one girl dares to drive it.

The Sahara World Rally.

I want to see the thing race straight through hell.

When Sahara was being made,

we all thought, "Hmm, this may be something."

Brooke Shields was still close to her stardom.

ALEX: Menahem started talking about

how Brooke Shields was going to win

the Academy Award for Sahara.

I wish we could stay here forever,

but we risked our lives taking this shortcut,

and now we're losing all that we've gained.

The idea that that was going to win an Oscar was so absurd,

and I just was like, "Really?"

"Where in your lexicon do you honestly believe that?"

Sahara is Menahem's attempt to make Lawrence of Arabia

and combine it with Blue Lagoon

meets The Great Race.

(CANON FIRES)

Menahem loved the intersection

of ideas that should never meet each other,

so he assembles, like Frankenstein,

parts from other movies, and creates a disaster.

It was as dry as the Saharan Desert.

It was awful.

It started the wheels turning in my head

that we just couldn't continue with these people.

We released it, we did the best we could,

we put on a campaign, we spent a little money,

and the film, of course, died,

because it was a bad film.

It was a shame for the little girl

because she deserved better.

(MIMMICKING MENAHEM) "Brooke Shields, Academy Award. Sahara, Academy Award."

Every picture that he does,

he think that the picture's going to make $100 million.

(MIMMICKING MENAHEM) "This will be an epic of cinema."

Menahem told me once that they went to, on New Year's Eve,

to Times Square,

where the millions of people are standing there,

and they had tears in their eyes

and they hugged each other, and they said,

"Next year, we're gonna get the Oscar."

NARRATOR: The incredible Lou Ferrigno is

Hercules.

SYBIL: Lou spoke to Menahem

and said he wanted to have it be more of a family movie.

I disagreed. I could have seen

a version that would have been more sexy.

LUIGI COZZI: He had the script in his hand, and he said,

"This piece of shit!" Boom!

And threw the script in the basket and said,

"I asked for a movie for kids with Hercules"

"and here is Hercules getting blow jobs."

You know, he was crazy about that.

I told, "I wanna do fantasy Hercules, not realistic."

It was kids' stuff. I wanted to do kids' stuff.

(ROARS)

But it did have the bombshell girl, like Sybil Danning.

LUIGI COZZI: She was gorgeous. Beautiful costumes.

I was told, "When you're in that costume, it becomes dangerous."

(GROANS)

Luigi convinced everyone to do a special effects Hercules

with the most crude special effects in the world.

Done very simple because they had to be done cheap.

SYBIL: Hercules on a budget.

Maybe there are some special effects which work better,

and some special effects which are worse.

I wanted them all to be perfect,

but they could not be all perfect.

But if you have the sense of wonder, who cares?

MGM put a lot of marketing money into that. They believed in it.

Hercules did very, very well at the box office

all over the world.

FRANK YABLANS: Maybe it was a hit in comparison

to all the other garbage they gave us,

but it was not a major hit, no.

The good thing about Menahem

is he could hear an idea from somebody,

like his daughter seeing a break-dancer on Venice Beach,

and in a relatively short amount of time,

there is a movie being made about it.

This, this is a new dance, this will grab the whole world.

ALLEN DEBOISE: He just said, "Okay, we're making this movie",

"we're going into production in three weeks."

We didn't have a script, a cast, we didn't have anything.

* Breakin' and you just don't stop

* Here comes the movie that's fresh and hot

* With high energy, dancin' to the beat

* With a scratch-mix sound that comes from the street *

Breakin' was like the Enter the Dragon of hip-hop,

'cause he had the best of the best.

There were no stuntmen, and we weren't actors, we were all green.

They just said, "Put 'em on camera."

PIETER JAN BRUGGE: Boogaloo Shrimp and Shabba-Doo.

I don't even know what their real names are.

I played the leader, the straight guy.

I was the Dean Martin role

and he was the funny little sidekick, Jerry Lewis.

The way people perceived me in the neighborhood

or just around the world,

they perceived me as some sort of urban superhero.

We look up to him because a lot

of what has been invented

has come from him.

Boogaloo Shrimp was a sensation.

(HEAVY BREATHING)

The whole place would just stop and just watch him.

He would just start going and going and going and it was like...

I don't even know where he came up with that stuff.

(HEAVY BREATHING) (MUSIC PLAYING)

Lucinda Dickey was no more than a gymnast,

but Menahem liked her.

He called and he's like,

"I'm gonna make you my next big star."

Lucinda Dickey didn't really fit in the Breakin' film from our point of view.

We resented her.

LUCINDA: It was hell at times. I'm not gonna lie.

He made it known from the very first day

that I walked into rehearsals that he was superior.

He couldn't do what I did,

but it didn't matter because the movie wasn't about jazz dancing.

It was about breakdancing.

SAM: Obviously she was an outsider,

but I believe, when you see the movie today,

this element works

because that's how the story goes,

that she's an outsider that has to be accepted in.

There are lines in the movie that were just so true and real.

She ain't no street dancer.

She knows nothing about what we do.

There was a high drama

because Orion Pictures

was making a movie called Beat Street at the same time.

Menahem at the time famously said...

(MIMICKING MENAHEM) "We must beat Beat Street!"

This was the race to be the first breakdance movie.

Whatever could be assembled

in enough time to make the release date

was what the movie was going to end up being.

That movie had to make it in that year, in 1984, it had to make it.

If it didn't, we wouldn't know hip-hop as we know it today.

The rest is history

because it became one of their most popular and highest-grossing films.

It showed leadership and it showed camaraderie

between the different races,

so it really did something the United Nations was unable to do so far,

is bring nations together under one groove.

Our movie did better numbers than Beat Street.

NARRATOR: This year, the big hit for Golan and Globus is Breakin'.

It cost just over $1 million to make

and has so far taken in more than $56 million.

Unfortunately, it led to Menahem thinking,

"I've figured it out."

* This story's through but wait till part two *

Menahem comes in and he says,

"We're going to do a sequel."

"The name of the sequel is Electric Boogaloo."

And so it was.

(MIMICKING MENAHEM) "We will do what Fred Astaire did.

"Shrimpy will dance on the ceiling."

And he got it.

* Take me high.

Breakin' II was more of a cartoon.

The whole hospital scene, it was silly.

It missed the grittiness that the first one had.

MICHAEL: Were over here at East LA with pastels.

(CHUCKLING) That was Cannon.

"Let's really make LA clean and beautiful like a rainbow."

It really took away from the authenticity.

(RECORD SCRATCHING)

I cried about it.

We had lost sight of the message.

PIETER: I simply thought it was a fad,

it was over, but the movies actually did make an impact

upon the youthful audience of its day.

So they had their finger on the pulse of something, once in a while.

But most of the time,

the pulse was on something that was so misguided.

(MIMICKING MENAHEM) "We are going to New York,"

"we are making my movie,"

"great, great title."

And were all sitting there,

were all like, "What's the title, Menahem?"

"My Darling Shiksa."

You can take your darling shiksa

and you can spend the rest of your fakakta life

in Brooklyn in a candy store.

You idiot!

ELLIOTT: An audience would say, "What's a shiksa?"

A shiksa is a woman that isn't Jewish,

and the character is with a woman who isn't Jewish,

which causes great chagrin to the family.

The second day we were working,

Golan came up to Elliot

and it was somewhat of a critical scene.

It was the point in the movie

where Elliot is going to confess to Margaux Hemingway

that he is in love with her.

How'd you like to spend the rest of your life

with a sloppy, diabetic Jew

who some day is going to be a top restaurateur?

I love you, sweetheart.

After the first rehearsal,

Golan goes, "Elliot, Elliot, Elliot, no, no, no, no, no."

And the whole crew we're standing there,

we're going, "Oh, boy."

And he goes, "Watch, watch, watch, watch."

"Margaux, you come here, come here."

"Come. Come to Menahem."

"Okay. I love you. I love you."

You know, and you just sit there and you go,

"Oh, my God. This is insane."

We had an enormous fight, an enormous fight

and he closed down the picture for a day or so.

Menahem, you know, I told him he was a cocksucker

and he took me literally

and I had to, in order to get it going again,

I said, "Oh, Menahem",

"I apologize for using that kind of language."

"You're not a cocksucker, okay?"

YABLANS: All you really want when you're running a studio is a hit movie,

but if you have films like Cannon was supplying

it's an embarrassment to the studio name.

Okay, we fucked up. What's next?

John Derek said one night,

"You know, what are we doing all this for?"

"Why are we trying to make good films?"

"You did 10."

"All Hollywood ever approaches you with"

"is to screw to Bolero."

NARRATOR: Introducing Bo Derek.

Did you ever do it to Ravels Bolero?

(COUGHS)

MAN: Bo, in a lot of people's mind, equaled sex.

MAN: She was the 10 of that period.

Everywhere we went, she was recognized.

Our agent, Marty Baum, said,

"Look, if you guys wanna just go make a film"

"and be totally left alone,"

"there are two new guys in town."

NARRATOR: Bo Derek, in a John Derek film.

Bolero was a take-off of Blood and Sand

and the old romantic 40s bullfight pictures.

(COUGHS)

WOMAN: Andrea Occhipinti has been gored by a bull in the balls.

And now he can't do it anymore,

and so then the next sort of half of the film

becomes about Bo taking on bullfighting herself

and taking care and nurturing her man.

Cut to, she says...

That thing is going to work.

One of my favorite lines, by the way.

I guarantee you this.

Then there's this neon sign of ecstasy

as they're going for a second round.

If you put Bo in anything at that time

that John was directing,

it was bound to be erotica.

Her clothes would always come off.

Riding a horse, terribly erect,

and I suppose others might be as well while watching her.

BO: All of sudden, we started getting letters from Menahem

that the film wasn't strong enough.

"Make this as explicit and strong as you possibly can."

It was controversial enough.

Look at you.

I am woman. Ready. Juicy too.

BO: It had enough love scenes, it had plenty of nudity.

I remember taking the work print down

and screening it for Frank Yablans

and saying, "Look, we've got all these fights going on."

"They want it stronger."

"I think you'll see it's strong enough."

YABLANS: I really don't remember.

All I know is that it was another failed movie.

Making motion picture is practically being in a war,

and there is, in a war, wounded.

Menahem would call a press conference and say,

"Bo and John, they live on a ranch,"

"they don't even live in Hollywood."

"They love that ranch."

"Were going to take that ranch away from them,"

and just crazy, outrageous stuff.

And that the film was too sexy, what are we gonna do?

Poor Cannon Films, were a good company,

and the Dereks were trying to ruin our reputation.

And they were just manipulating the press at our expense.

MGM at that point, I do believe,

decided to discontinue the relationship with Cannon

as far as distributing all of their films.

I told em, "Were not going to go forward with this deal."

"You've reneged on your deal."

"You've given us nothing but junk."

Maybe we were a little bit of a pawn in this game,

and they were using us as a piece

because they no longer wanted to distribute Cannon films.

Cannon had sort of a terrible reputation in this town

as, you know, sort of down and dirty, which we were.

You would open up Variety,

and there, a big double-page spread for Bolero.

And these photos were in my suitcase.

While they were in Cannon's office

as we were waiting to get another plane,

they went through my bags, stole my photos,

and now they shamelessly, brazenly use them in ads.

They didn't work according to the Hollywood rules.

They were outlaws, reckless, had no scruples.

There were a lot of provocative things said about them.

Carpetbaggers. Rug salesmen.

Hustlers. Carnival salesmen.

Cheapskates. Junk peddlers.

Wheeler-dealers.

They were starting to get known as the Go-Go Boys.

The Bagel Brothers. I came up with Mayhem and Urine.

I called them the Bad News Jews.

There was certainly that kind of anti-immigrant sensibility

in these nicknames for them.

They were down-to-earth people

who just did the movies the same way that they did it back home.

They weren't part of the Hollywood bullshit.

Hollywood, 90% is talk and 10% is making motion pictures.

We are motion pictures makers

and the world know about it.

Sometimes we make better films,

sometimes we don't make such good films,

but we do make films.

NARRATOR: It is 900 years after the great nuke

and the roles of women have changed dramatically,

much to the displeasure of men and mutants.

America 3000.

DAVID: Tongue-in-cheek adventure comedy

in which women ruled and men were slaves,

which every time I would explain that to actresses

they always went, "Ooh, I like that."

My interaction with them was extremely brief.

It was the day that I quit the film.

A call sheet comes under the door

and I just threw it back and I screamed,

"Fuck you! Pay the crew!"

(GROANING)

"You people have a cash register where your heart should be."

This is the only copy that I have

and this is what I think of Cannon Films.

There were so many bad movies being made at Cannon

that if something of quality came out,

it was like a happy accident.

I got a phone call out of the blue

and it was from Chuck Norris.

MAN: Chuck Norris was already established

in the world of martial art movies,

what they used to call karate movies.

He wanted to branch out more into bigger action pictures.

MAN: And I talked Menahem into it,

I said, "I think this is the right guy."

"Ah, but he can't act." I said, "Well make him act."

NARRATOR: Vietnam, 1972.

Captured in a savage jungle war.

We wanted to bring in all of his abilities.

JAMES: The first time in a movie

that really is a war movie with explosions and shootings.

There is actually martial arts in an extensive way.

They thought before the film had even come out

that it was going to be successful.

They wanted to do a sequel right away,

so they decided to make that in the Philippines

with Joe Zito directing.

DANIEL: Joe had gone to the Philippines

and he said, "I've looked at."

"Lance Hool's Missing in Action."

"It's a disaster. Chuck is terrible."

"It's shot badly."

"What I'm telling Menahem and Yoram"

"is that if we release our Missing in Action first,"

"we will create a marketplace for Lance's film."

"If Lance's film comes out,"

"he's gonna kill the business for our film."

BRUGGE: The second one was the better movie of the two

and rather than kill the franchise right off the bat

by showing them in order,

they basically released number two first.

NARRATOR: James Braddock declares war.

I think it was a good vehicle for Chuck Norris.

It didn't ask him to do too much,

it played to his strength,

and it kind of evolved his on-screen persona.

Globus was screaming at Menahem in Hebrew

and I asked somebody, "What's he saying?"

And he's saying... He says...

"They're talking about some karate guy,"

and Yoram is yelling at him

because he signed him to a five-picture deal

for $5 million,

and he wants to kill Menahem, and that was Chuck Norris.

In the golden era of Hollywood,

every studio had a stable of stars,

so Cannon started to adopt this thinking.

"We need stars that will work for us constantly."

NARRATOR: Chuck Norris.

Charles Bronson.

WINTER: For someone like Bronson,

who was phasing out of a Hollywood career

in a Hollywood that did not recognize him anymore,

that was one of the only places to go.

MAN: Bronson, I think, has more actual charisma,

but neither one of them were actors.

You're beginning to irritate me.

DAVID: When I was reading scripts for this company,

we were told very plainly

everything we got would go in two piles,

one for the two Chucks, Bronson and Norris.

It could have been Wuthering Heights,

which one is for Chuck

and which one is for the other Chuck?

It was offered to Chuck Norris to do this movie,

American Ninja.

NARRATOR: For 2,000 years,

the sacred art of the ninja has been guarded in the East.

Now it has come to the West.

When Chuck Norris learned that he has to be covered, he declined.

He said, "I am not covering myself."

"If I am on the screen, I am Chuck Norris."

Who will be the American ninja?

We saw, I believe, more than 400 candidates,

and when Michael Dudikoff walked in,

it was like, "Wow, I saw the American ninja."

Menahem said, "The Dudikoff kid."

"Get the Dudikoff kid."

Who is he?

I don't know. He's a new recruit.

I don't even know his name.

He possess great skills.

(SCREAMS)

When I got American Ninja, I stepped it up.

Anything that I had to do, being Joe, the American Ninja,

I really wanted to do well.

(TIRES SQUEAL)

Even before the movie was finished,

it was obvious

that Dudikoff has the charisma to be on the screen.

I remember Menahem saying that he is going to be the next James Dean.

MICHAEL: I was gonna be Superman. There are so many...

I was going to do so many different roles.

I was Spider-Man at one time.

SAM: Cannon did not pay attention

to brand the name Dudikoff

and to make sure that instead of making

smaller and smaller movies,

he should make bigger and bigger movies.

"We will. We will!"

"Don't worry, Michael. No, don't worry."

"It's only the beginning."

NARRATOR: This is Cannes, home of the prestigious film festival

which is held every year.

You know about the glamour, the Riviera, the stars,

but there's another side, a business side you don't see.

They were going there to sell and to make deals.

This was the jewel of the crown

and they decided to take it by storm.

The money that they spent in Cannes would have financed a film.

We'd take over the Carlton Hotel,

put up as much advertising as we could.

Posters everywhere, everywhere.

"Cannon Group presents..."

Full-page ads in Variety,

full-page ads in all the trades.

It almost became a joke, I think, in the business,

because nobody could just work out

how they were paying for all this,

how they were doing all this,

what was going on?

This limo comes up and out gets Menahem, like the Queen.

The Cannes Film Festival

became the Cannon Film Festival.

A line of distributors getting a number,

like in a barber shop, to meet Yoram and me.

People come with a check, people come with cash money.

"This film will be ready, don't worry.

"I'll get it to you on time." "Give me this picture too."

"This is the piece of crap you really want"

"because people are going to love this shit."

"Okay, you'll pay a million?"

"Okay, million and one. Million and two."

It was like being at the fish market.

MAN: They used to sell their film by the kilo.

Selling, buying, selling, buying.

You hear Golan constantly going, "Gunga Din, epic."

"Epic, I tell you. Epic of the cinema."

He loved it. He was on a high.

You'd meet some Greek distributor,

who didn't speak English, couldn't read English,

certainly couldn't read a script,

but you had to sell him a picture,

so you just showed him a poster.

Outlandish poster art for movies,

most of which they never made.

The film could have been about anything,

and they would have had a machine gun in the poster.

He would invent a story on the spot and sell it to them.

"Charles Bronson is The Golem."

I was in charge of writing press releases

for non-existent movies

with no cast and no stars

and frequently no scripts.

I don't know that there's anyone out there today

that has the reputation that Menahem and Yoram had

for being such effective salesmen.

They were the best wheelers and dealers of the 80s.

There was a great celebration

of throwing spaghetti against the wall,

and whichever crazy ideas he could get presales for,

those became the movies we made.

The result is those films were never very good.

If you had Chuck Norris on that poster,

you knew exactly the picture you were buying.

So all presale films were predictable.

MAN ON PHONE: I have for you Chuck Norris's picture for April.

Killing, shooting, maiming! Fabulous story.

You're going to love it. Absolutely love it.

Bring me the script.

NARRATOR: They are an army of international terrorists.

Their target, America.

DANIEL: In a way, Invasion USA was a very prescient film.

We didn't really think about terrorism,

and terrorism was more of an abstract idea.

NARRATOR: No one thought it could ever happen...

Here. (PEOPLE SCREAMING)

The idea of boatloads full of terrorists

landing on a beach somewhere in Florida,

being picked up by trucks

and being driven all over the United States

to create random acts of terror

was a bit of a stretch for me.

What we were trying to do

was come up with some big action picture

that would be a lot of fun and larger than life.

Didn't work, huh?

Now it will.

(EXPLODING) (SCREAMING)

They made Chuck a star.

(GUNS FIRING)

Now they were putting him in a big-budget movie.

(ENGINE REVVING)

CHUCK NORRIS: The shopping mall, of course, has been the hardest

and most hair-raising, most dangerous thing I've done.

Probably the most dangerous stunt I've ever done on film.

JAMES: They were going to completely rebuild it, gut it,

so we were allowed to destroy everything.

They were going to literally bulldoze

an entire suburban neighborhood

to extend the runway of Atlanta Airport.

And they were able to blow the houses up.

(ROCKET FIRING) (EXPLODING)

We had some really great stuntmen working on that picture.

The helicopter on top of helicopters,

the tanks, people firing.

No, there's some great stuff in that film.

When we had a screening of the rough cut,

it was heart-wrenching.

The story, basically, was edited out.

It's time.

(YELLING)

(ROCKET FIRING) (EXPLODING)

There's a lot of great scenes, but it's disjointed.

GOLDBLATT: Menahem and Yoram were not particularly precious

about the process of editing a picture

and the process of getting it into a final cut.

"Okay, rewind. Now, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut!"

He would start the morning in his office,

listen to a pitch meeting, go back, edit a trailer.

All the time, keep suspense and action.

(VOCALIZING) The scene is their voices.

"No! Help! Help! Help!"

Go back, meet an actor, director, give notes on a script, go back,

change three cuts.

"That's terrific. That's great, that's great."

"This is shit! This is shit!" "Trim that! Trim that!

"This is good! This is good!" "Cut negative!"

"It's the same shit you looked at yesterday."

"No, no, no, it's good shit today."

The problem is they loved cinema in the abstract.

I don't think, in my experience,

that they really knew what it was like to love something so much

that you were patient and took the time and went through the pain

of seeing it through draft after draft after draft,

admitting to yourself that it might not be right yet.

You could take 150, 500 scripts, put them in an office,

have a monkey go inside and pick 70 of them,

and he'd be on par with Golan and Globus.

NARRATOR: In the tail of Halley's Comet,

there's something wrong,

something evil,

something hungry.

(NARRATOR READING)

(SCREAMING) Whoa!

Did someone get the license number of that movie?

This is the wildest thing I've seen in ages.

It starts as an outer-space movie,

then becomes a vampire movie,

then turns into an end-of-the-world movie.

(SNARLING) I think I know the word to describe this film.

Berserk! (SCREAMING)

Tobe Hooper's Ben-Hur.

At the time, it was their biggest budget film.

It has something major happening in terms of grand spectacle

about every 60 seconds,

with incredible mechanical effects, physical and optical effects,

nudity, because the humanoid creatures are found nude

in these crystal sarcophagi.

Finding Mathilda May was an achievement, actually,

one of the most striking young women I've ever seen.

When I saw the rushes, I... I just died,

and knew that we would never, ever get away with the British censor.

Her private parts area was like a bikini!

You'll never believe what I'm looking at.

JOHN GROVER: And this was supposed to be a mystery about

this beautiful woman that was gonna destroy London.

MAN: That girl was no girl.

She's totally alien to this planet and our life form,

and totally dangerous.

Golan and Globus took a risk.

It was a big risk with this,

especially halfway through the picture,

when we were four months behind.

They weren't worried about the amount of time

it was taking to shoot the film.

It had to do with watching the dailies

and loving the scope of what they were producing.

They now were in another level of filmmaking.

GROVER: They wanted to make the biggest picture of the year.

They were small fry in a very big pond.

All these films that they made were bizarre, plot-wise.

I mean, they were made up on the spot half the time.

"Marriage Venetian Style."

"A Holiday in Rome."

"Holiday in Rome." "A Holiday in Venice."

(CHUCKLES)

"Marriage in Venice." "Marriage in Venice."

(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

Yeah? Yeah. "Marriage in Venice." In Venice.

Or... "Stop That Marriage."

Menahem had lots of ideas. Too many ideas, some people say.

He would say, "I want music like Poltergeist."

And I was like, "Poltergeist is a 100-piece orchestra."

And he goes, "You idiot!"

"We get 50 musicians and we have them play the music twice!"

There was a series of books that go on about a monkey,

kind of like Curious George, but it was an Israeli series of books.

Clyde the orangutan from Every Which Way But Loose

came to the office with his agent.

Clyde was very hot at that point,

and he's here with some Beverly Hills lawyers in suits.

(LAUGHING) Menahem's sitting next to an orangutan

and deciding whether to sign the orangutan, to put him under contract,

and he turns to the woman who's head of publicity

and says, "Would you fuck this monkey?"

(WHINES)

They go, "So, go on. What's the story?"

And he said, "Look, it's about this kid who goes to Africa."

"He is without his parents, but he has this guy who takes care of him."

"And when they come off the boat,"

"all of a sudden, they see you!"

And he looked at the monkey.

And from now on,

he kept talking to the monkey.

"Okay, we're in the jungle. There is a monkey."

"You, Clyde, you're the monkey."

"And, you know, there's a kid,"

"and the kid is being attacked by the tribes,"

"but the monkey saves him, but now he must go on his uncle's ship."

"The monkey cannot go with him,"

"so now the ship is leaving and the kid, his heart is broken."

"It's broken!"

"And you love the boy."

"You love the boy."

"And you feel that the boy love you."

Golan gets on his desk, and he's literally standing on his desk at this point...

"And you cut back and you see the monkey,"

"and he's going, 'Help me! Help me!'"

And... It was crazy.

Talking to a monkey.

I remember one of the agents going, like,

"Will the monkey be talking in the movie?"

"We don't know that yet, but it doesn't matter. It's the emotion."

We did some tests and, uh,

and the monkey either bit the boy or something.

Two days later, Menahem showed up

with a little guy,

who was a... Midget.

You know? And he said,

"This is your new monkey."

(CHATTERS)

And he said, "Does he look like a monkey or not?"

Everybody said, "Yeah, he looks like a monkey."

But the truth is he didn't.

Not at all.

And I went with them to Africa...

Oh! Ohh!

And I felt really, really embarrassed.

When we were in the jungle, on the tree, there were real monkeys

and I had the feeling that they are laughing at me.

KRAFT: Usually, a bad idea

only happens once or twice.

Oh!

Bonzo love Ben.

Oh!

These were bad ideas on a regular basis.

(MAN READING)

I don't care what anyone says. It's... It's a masterpiece.

NARRATOR: In a world gone mad,

there is only one law, his.

What's the problem?

We're stealin' a fucking car. What's it to you?

It's my car!

(GUN FIRING)

Total dog-pile piece of shit.

The first movie that Michael Winner did was somewhat compelling.

But this is a cartoon.

It's practically World War III in the streets of New York.

(ROCKET FIRING) (EXPLODING)

ALEX: Winner took pleasure out of presenting this world...

Where these grimy, mostly minority ghetto characters...

Come on, bitch! Come on!

Would be summarily executed

by more refined, more middle to upper-class characters.

And I think that he felt that that stage could only get bigger.

(GUN FIRING)

(GROANING)

(TIRES SCREECHING)

(EXPLODING)

Yeah! Power, man!

Each film, the police force gets smaller and smaller and smaller,

and Bronson's persona gets bigger, bigger and bigger.

NARRATOR: Now the trap is set. The fuse is lit.

Bronson is unleashed.

(NARRATOR READING)

Three, four and five are a different...

They're related by blood, but they're the family we don't talk to.

I know that Charlie wanted to make better movies.

We had that conversation many times.

He didn't want to make Death Wish 2, 3, 4 and 5.

I don't know how they talked him into it.

He didn't really have to do very much.

He had a Jaguar that would drive him

from his dressing room to the set,

which was usually about three feet from his dressing room.

It was more like watching a man golf than act.

MAN: Charles Bronson and Bronson's stunt double

discuss the seemingly simple task

of throwing groceries at a moving car.

This is turned over to a stunt double

in order to ensure the safety of the star.

Well, we became the garbage of the industry.

A place of last resort to get movies made.

They were considered schlockmeisters.

Schlock. Schlock.

Schlock. It's schlock.

But they sure do make a lot of it.

They knew what their reputation was.

They knew that everyone saw them as kind of,

"Yeah, you guys do a lot of stuff, but where's the, where's the quality?"

And I think that, uh, they wanted to do some projects

that not only would bankroll their company,

but would bring them a little more respect.

MENAHEM: I want to sign with Bogdanovich to a three-picture deal.

MAN: (ON PHONE) If you want to buy Peter Bogdanovich,

let's say that you had a project called XYZ...

Yeah, I'm not buying people. I'm giving them opportunities.

"He should work with me because I'm giving him this opportunity,"

"and if he doesn't, he's an idiot."

He needs a family because he's now without a family.

And he's a loser and he needs to be with the winning, with the winners.

The artists that were attracted to Cannon

probably didn't want to be, in the beginning.

But once they got to know Golan,

they realized they found a patron.

Menahem Golan is a director.

You're dealing with someone who does the same thing you do,

who understands what your problems are.

You're dealing with guys who know every element of the film business.

That, to me, is terribly refreshing.

NARRATOR: Cannon Films proudly presents a motion picture event,

directed by internationally acclaimed master filmmaker Franco Zeffirelli.

Menahem loved Zeffirelli.

MICHAEL: You tell him, "Listen, you can get the lottery

"or sit with Zeffirelli and make a movie with him."

He will take Zeffirelli making a movie with him.

The film opera event of our century, Otello.

(SINGING IN OTHER LANGUAGE)

Zeffirelli, Cannon.

JOHN: Franco probably started out

by thinking how crude these guys were

and then ended up really appreciating them.

MAN: There was one telegram that said,

"We are looking at the daily and they looked like they were created by God."

(FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI SPEAKING)

Someone like John Cassavetes,

who could not get financing from anybody,

Menahem would give him funding.

I'm going to do a John Cassavetes film,

and once I accepted this fact...

I had to give John Cassavetes

the full freedom to create his film.

We were never committed to make a film

that would please the audience.

Now, if you came to see our films,

you had to suffer through them.

Do you believe that love is a continuous stream?

MENAHEM: John Cassavetes brought me a two hours and 15 minutes movie.

I told John, "Go and cut out 15 minutes in the middle"

"and you'll see we'll get a much better movie."

He said, "Menahem, it will be done in the next two days."

Two days later, he came and the movie was two and a half hours.

And I said, "John, you added 15 minutes."

He said, "But it's, but it's shorter, nevertheless."

AL: I think Menahem got the film that he wanted.

I think it served a purpose for Cannon Films.

He could then go to any other director

and say, "Hey, look, we just made a film with John Cassavetes."

You know? "And you know how difficult he can be."

"But that just goes to show you how, you know, how far we'll go"

"with a, with another director."

Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus are...

Are kind of wild characters.

They make impulsive decisions like signing up Godard on a napkin.

We didn't have paper and this was on the table of the bar.

And this is Mr. Jean-Luc Godard.

I love this project. I believe in it.

I think it'll be a great movie.

Godard said that he would do, uh, King Lear only with Norman Mailer.

Mailer. Oh, yes.

That is a good way to begin.

Godard wanted Norman to play a writer named Norman Mailer

and he wanted Kate to play a daughter of that writer, named Kate Mailer,

and there was a suggestion of incest.

Part of me thinks that Godard did that

in the hopes that Norman would quit,

and that led to the famous phone call

that Godard recorded without our permission.

JEAN-LUC GODARD: I must insist

that this movie, as promised, which was already put forward so many times,

will reach the Cannes Festival.

This is my main concern.

MAN: No script, no make-up, no hair, no costumes, nothing.

MOLLY RINGWALD: I was walking with a horse and I think I'm Joan of Arc,

and then I think I'm dead on the rocks or something.

And I think I asked him, "Am I supposed to be dead or alive?"

"Am I sleeping?"

You know, "What am I doing?"

And he was like... (EXHALES)

Like it was the stupidest question ever, you know?

Like, "Oh! Dead!" Like, you know, "Pff!" You know?

It was not even worthy of a response

and I thought, "All right, I'm gonna go with dead." (LAUGHING)

I'm sure it absolutely was not what Cannon Pictures was expecting.

TOM: When the first images come on,

Menahem started whispering to me,

"Tom Luddy, I will kill you! Tom Luddy, I will strangle you!"

"You don't fuck with Sabras."

I think he was a bit disappointed

because Godard didn't take Menahem seriously.

Golan always wanted to make interesting pictures.

I mean, we would make what we would call

"the engine that pulled the train".

We would make one picture that we'd know we could presell

and then sneak in a bunch of little ones with it.

We say to the local distributor,

"Sorry, man, you have to take John Cassavetes first"

"or you don't get Charles Bronson."

That's how films like Barfly get funded.

NARRATOR: Mickey Rourke. FAY DUNAWAY: Just one thing.

I don't ever want to fall in love.

NARRATOR: Faye Dunaway.

Don't worry. Nobody's ever loved me yet.

(NARRATOR READING)

Those were the Cannon days where you had a meeting with Menahem,

you had a 90% chances of walking away with a deal.

TOM: When we were in pre-production,

and we already had Mickey and we already had Faye,

when they said, "We're stopping the shooting"

"unless you cut the budget, cut your fees."

So I had to find something to replace the lawyer

and I found the firm Black & Decker. (LAUGHS)

Barbet went into Menahem's office with a chainsaw.

(IMITATES CHAINSAW REVVING)

"For every day I don't get my movie made,"

"I'm gonna cut one finger and send it to you."

MENAHEM: As a matter of fact, I love it that he is ready to cut his finger,

because I am ready to cut anything, my balls, to make a film.

PIETER: He outsmarted Menahem

and that's how that movie got made.

The movie didn't explode the way I wanted

because it was perceived as a movie about alcoholics.

DUNAWAY: We're all in some kind of hell

and the madhouses are the only places

where people know they're in hell.

They had this terrible kind of dichotomy about

making what they thought were important films

and then being able to sell them.

ALAIN: Even if the movie was not a B movie,

the moment the Cannon logo was showing up on the screen,

"Oh! That's a Cannon movie."

What people expected from Cannon, the films that we made,

were low-budget, lowbrow, action pictures.

You'd come along with something that was more interesting,

no one could take it seriously.

NARRATOR: They escaped together.

They achieved the impossible.

But their train to freedom was out of control.

JOHN: You're not gonna hear anyone not say

that Runaway Train is one of the most incredible films they've ever seen.

Runaway Train is, quite simply,

one of the best adventure movies I've ever seen,

a combination of action and suspense and desperate characters

that never stopped surprising me.

I don't know how closely you can almost associate it with Cannon.

It was a film unto itself,

I think, with a very visionary director in his own right,

Andrei Konchalovsky.

The fact it got made, I suppose, is some sort of tribute to them,

that they actually did give it a green light.

JOHN: I believe firmly today

that if a studio had made Runaway Train,

it would be a classic forever.

PEARCE: Made by Orion, it would have got great respect, I think.

You're as afraid to die as anybody else!

And I never let you free.

I'm free, Rankin.

I am free.

Made by Cannon, no.

They came in so quick and they did so many films so fast,

and everyone was always looking around, like,

"How are they doing this?"

Michael Milken, he was called the Junk Bond King.

CHRISTOPHER: He created something called

the high yield or junk-bond business.

That went from financing bankrupt companies

to financing small, growing companies.

Michael Milken raised $300 million for Cannon Pictures.

It really took Hollywood by surprise

that Cannon now had the ability to make picture after picture after picture.

Major studios were making six, seven, maybe eight films a year.

Nobody was making 20 films a year.

Forty films a year. Forty two movies.

Forty seven films a year. Fifty two in-house films.

Almost average one a week.

Eighty four.

That's an entire career there.

It was almost like a bowel movement.

(LAUGHING) You make a movie, it comes out,

you flush it and you move on to another one.

This company grew up and mushroomed so fast

just because of the energy and the personality of Menahem Golan.

The name of the game is to do!

Not just to "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," talk about it.

I'd have meetings with Yoram one day

and Golan comes in and he starts talking about something in Budapest.

And we say, "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, I forgot to tell you, we're making this film in Budapest."

"We're in the second week of shooting."

We didn't even know it was being made.

If something excites you, be brave and go

and try to do it good, but do it.

In England, Cannon became a real threat to the British film industry.

NARRATOR: Cannon gained a place in Britain's film line-up

when it took over Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment.

Suddenly they owned Elstree Studios,

the Pathe film library,

and the ABC Cinema circuit.

With their own Classic and Star chain,

this gave Golan and Globus command of almost 40% of the British cinema market.

We owned the big chain in London, in England.

We owned the big chain in Italy,

all the theaters in Holland.

They bought everything, short of Harrods.

Cannon had all this money and was anxious to spend it,

and they wanted to spend it on stars.

They were, and I hope you don't mind me using the word, star-fuckers.

How many films a star does a year? One?

What does he do the rest of the year?

Forty weeks, what does he do?

He goes to psychoanalysts, he get divorced.

What does he do? Okay?

So, he wants to work!

He said, "I want... for the leading lady",

"I want, uh, that, uh..."

"The movie, the Stone movie, you know the one."

"That's the one I want. Get her."

RICHARD: And they get back the first week of dailies

and he goes, "Who is this fucking bitch?"

"I said, I want that Stone woman."

Well, everybody thought he was talking about Sharon Stone.

He was talking about Romancing the Stone, which was Kathleen Turner.

That's who he thought he'd cast in the movie.

I've got it!

NARRATOR: Richard Chamberlain is Allan Quartermain in...

(NARRATOR READING)

CASSANDRA PETERSON: At the time, Richard was just an incredibly hot star,

so that impressed me.

"Well, they're not doing the same schlocky stuff they used to do before."

You know, little did I know. (LAUGHS)

It was a bit of a spoof of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

(SCREAMING)

(SCREAMING)

(EXPLODING)

You had the sense that if you could think of something funny to do

that wasn't out of character, do it.

Surprise!

Great reflexes, boys.

PETERSON: It slowly became apparent to me,

not that slowly, pretty quickly,

that this was definitely not going to be of the Indiana Jones caliber.

Quartermain!

DANIEL: Chamberlain was not Harrison Ford. (GUN FIRING)

And Sharon Stone, nobody knew who she was.

AVI: It was a tough time to work with Sharon,

to a level that none of the crew,

none of the assistants, none of the make-up,

none of the people that she worked day-by-day, wanted to work with her.

(GASPS) I wanna scream!

She was hated on the set.

(SCREAMING)

All the South Africans hated her.

She took a milk bath, they peed in the water.

And when she got in the water, she's like, "Ew! Ew!"

"This water smells so funny."

(SNICKERING)

Richard Chamberlain himself could not stand her.

What's wrong?

(SIGHS) Sharon's a difficult person to understand.

She was incredibly beautiful. She's very, very smart,

and talks about how smart she is a lot.

NELSON: She should have never done the second movie

if she had such a bad time on the first one.

NARRATOR: The odds are against them

and that's the way they like it!

(NARRATOR READING)

I don't know why they would want to do King Solomon's Mines twice,

'cause the first one wasn't very good to begin with.

Hold on!

RICHARD: Well, my first question was,

"How much money do you think you'll be spending on it?"

And they said, "Oh, probably $10 million."

I think they ended up spending about $3.75 on it.

(SNARLING) (GUN FIRING)

I signed on as the villainess, Sorais.

They actually had me in a harness

and were swinging me over this pit.

I remember being scared out of my freaking brain,

thinking, "Why am I doing this and not a stunt person?"

"Oh, wait a minute. There is no stunt person."

(BLOWS)

(SCREAMING)

Never had contact ever with either Menahem or Yoram until the end of the movie,

until, um, it was... Judgment day.

We'd screen a version of the film

and everybody would turn to the back of the room, where Menahem and Yoram were,

and they'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

Every once in a while, I heard, "Fakakta director",

you know, as I figured, you know, I'm the fucking director, you know?

So, I'm... "That's me. I'm sitting right behind you, you know".

Then the English would come out.

"Why are those people all blonde, walking with white pajamas?"

"What's going on?"

And, "Oh, my God! Yoram, look!"

"The queens! Look at those queens!"

"They're supposed to be ugly!"

I come to find out that they had gotten my movie confused

with one that Tobe Hooper was making at the same time.

He never would admit that he was confused.

He never said, "Oh, I'm wrong," you know.

"I'll look at your picture in a different light." No.

He said, "The picture is un-releasable!"

I said, "Menahem, please."

I said, "As I came down the halls to your office",

"on either side are posters of films that you have done"

"that are totally un-releasable that you have released!"

"So don't tell me it's un-releasable."

MAN: Golan's real dream always was to be a studio.

They moved out of low-class offices

and suddenly bought an entire building.

And had to have security guards with Uzis at the front desk.

I think there had been death threats.

"Menahem, there's a bomb threat!"

"Somebody's gonna blow up the building!"

(MIMICKING MENAHEM) "Tell them to go fuck themselves!"

The joke company wasn't such a joke anymore.

REPORTER: Menahem Golan took time off from his duties

as chairman of the board of Hollywood's Cannon Films

to personally produce and direct Delta Force.

This is a hijack!

NARRATOR: It's a new age of terror that requires a new breed of warrior.

MENAHEM: We worked on a screenplay to tell a story of new American heroes,

tell a story of the real modern American drama.

This was absolutely a fairytale reaction to a real-life TWA hijacking.

JAMES: The hostages hadn't been released,

so he got the idea of sending me to Beirut.

He was gonna sneak me across the border

and I was supposed to go to the Beirut airport

and find out what was going on and report back to him

so he could come up with an ending for the picture.

Everybody want to see the American president taking a firm state

and using whatever he has in America, like the Delta Force, for solutions.

It's a go. Take 'em down.

We don't move until the women and children are away and safe.

SHARON KAHN: This was the happy ending

that a lot of people felt should have happened.

(ROCKET FIRING) (EXPLODING)

It was September in Israel.

It was the hottest point of the year.

Way over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in that airplane.

But Menahem, sweating harder than anybody else in that movie,

pushing, shoving, making that movie happen and getting his shots,

and as a director, he was one of the best directors I ever worked for.

He wasn't afraid to grab the thing and say, "Do it like this!"

Shelley Winters and Menahem had some rip-roaring fights.

Sit down!

"Menahem, I cannot do it! I'm dying!"

He said, you know, "Do it and then die."

That's Menahem.

ALAIN: Every movie he directed always had a cartoonish side.

(ROCKET FIRING) (EXPLODING)

Every time I was trying to reduce it,

he was yelling that I was killing his movie.

It's an action movie.

With apologies to the guys who have to play the bad guys,

somebody's got to carry the flag.

(ROCKET FIRING) (EXPLODING)

You cannot hide your head in the sand

and say there is not violence out there.

The key point is, how do you deal with violence?

That's what's important,

and that's what we try to demonstrate on the screen.

This, I think, is an exploitation movie

in the very worst sense of the term,

blatantly and brainlessly concocted

to inspire vengeful hatred toward Arabs and Palestinians.

(ROCKET FIRING) (EXPLODING)

If you kill Arabs, uh... You have to be politically correct.

(GUNS FIRING)

Menahem didn't care about being politically correct.

(GUN FIRING)

Sleep tight, sucker.

REPORTER: To celebrate the move to their new headquarters

and the opening of Delta Force,

Golem and Globus invited Hollywood to a black-tie party.

A black-tie opening for a Chuck Norris film!

It's gonna be a blockbuster of the century!

Delighted to see you. Delighted to see you. Okay.

Dude, it's a Chuck Norris film!

RUSTY: I remember thinking there's something really wrong

about putting a party in a parking structure

where nobody can ever stand up.

Everybody was kind of, like, leaning.

And I thought, "This is a bad omen for this company."

It seemed from that point on that things started getting

a little, a little dicey at the company.

Cannon expanded too much too fast.

We had films going in Asia, Africa, Europe, the United States.

How can you control it? It's a mess.

They didn't have the money to make 50 films.

They're raising it on the next 50 and the next 50.

They were busy selling and making deals

in order to keep the company afloat.

Every Friday, Yoram needed $5 million just to continue.

MENAHEM: I can't be worried because I'm too busy making the movies

and I'm so excited and I'm so into it.

I believe that we know what we are doing

and I believe that our future is safe.

Roll camera.

MAN 1: Mark. MAN 2: Marker!

Set. And action!

NARRATOR: David Gardner just woke up to a nightmare in his own backyard.

But no one will listen.

And soon, no one will be left.

Tobe Hooper's...

(NARRATOR READING)

TOBE: I wanted to capture, or, I should say, recapture

those images that literally burned holes in my mind,

in my imagination and dreams when I was a child.

I liked the idea of being uptight and paranoid

to the point where finally you're afraid of your parents

and where there is really no safe place to go.

WILLIAM: The tone of the film was off.

It wasn't as serious as I think it should have been.

It seemed a little bit silly.

The film missed really connecting with

the deep fears people would have in identifying with a child

who can no longer trust his parents.

Menahem and Yoram hated the film.

They really felt personally wounded by what Tobe had done,

that he had basically sold them on his vision and he didn't deliver on it.

And I think that really hurt them.

What got everybody excited about Tobe with Texas Chainsaw,

which was really kind of a raw experience.

TOBE: Chainsaw wasn't just a horror film.

It had a lot of reflection of society.

It totally changed the genre of horror.

Cannon wanted Tobe to do a sequel to Chainsaw.

They wanted it desperately.

NARRATOR: Now, after more than a decade of silence,

the buzz is back.

(CHAINSAW WHIRRING) (SCREAMING)

I amplified the dark humor.

I'd felt that that was missed in the first film.

Bubba's got a girlfriend!

(SINGSONG) Bubba's got a girlfriend!

Bubba's got a girlfriend! Bubba's got a girlfriend!

Bubba's got a girlfriend! (GROWLING AND LAUGHING)

Some people had been calling it as "red humor".

Because it also made up for the lack of gore in Chainsaw 1.

(CHAINSAW WHIRRING) (SCREAMING)

So, they show it. First time Cannon's seen it.

Boys, boys, boys.

It was not what they expected.

For some reason, Cannon didn't realize it was a comedy.

The small business man that

always, always, always gets it in the ass!

ALAIN: Menahem and Yoram are not very flexible

and if you sell them a horror picture, they want horror.

It was a shocker for them to not know what the film was.

We took the Chainsaw family

and copied the same poster from The Breakfast Club,

and it went up on Sunset Boulevard.

And Cannon didn't know it was a comedy?

The audience wasn't prepared for the craziness

or the loony-ness of Chainsaw 2.

They just wanted a scream.

And Tobe didn't want to make another screaming movie.

(CHAINSAW WHIRRING)

The end of Chainsaw was almost really

the public beginning of the end for Cannon.

In October, their accounting practices came under the scrutiny

of the American Securities and Exchange Commission.

At this point, the company is not able to continue to operate profitably.

The movies are not doing well at the box office.

They have a large amount of what is called

a selling and administrative expense,

and now a very heavy interest payment annually

from all of the bonds and the debt

that they have taken on to fund themselves.

Menahem asked Yoram...

"Why are you so depressed? What's wrong?"

And Yoram said, "You know, we owe the bank $5 million."

And Menahem said, "You know why I'm depressed?"

"Why we owe them only $5 million?"

"I want to owe them $100 million."

NARRATOR: Now we're on the horizon of our second decade of success,

with promising new talent and established box office names.

We're charged for excitement

and looking forward to another decade of blockbusters.

So look to Cannon for the future.

Cannon Entertainment. We're moving forward.

When people think we're in financial trouble,

let's sign a huge actor and announce three big movies,

and what are they gonna say now?

Tell me, the Stallone deal, is it completely signed?

NELSON: He said, "I'm going to direct Sylvester Stallone in this next movie."

I said, "You're fucking nuts."

"My client would not work for you for $10 million."

Menahem said, "How about $12 million?"

Menahem paid him an unprecedented amount of money.

$13 million. $15 million.

$20 million. $25 million.

Before that, probably the max he'd ever been paid was $4 or $5 million.

Every other star said, "Yeah. I want that deal."

Changed the marketplace within the Hollywood community.

JOHN: Menahem believed that Over The Top

was gonna be as big as any Rocky or Rambo.

ENGELBACH: My original script was different

than the movie that they eventually made.

It wasn't nearly as dumb.

NARRATOR: The world has always bet against Lincoln Hawks,

but a winner never listens to the odds.

They made it more about truck-driving and arm-wrestling

than the film should have been.

Arm-wrestling was a very strange selection.

(GRUNTS) And it's over!

(GRUNTING)

How do you make something like that interesting?

ROSENTHAL: We're gonna have great action sequences

where there's gonna be two arms.

You might as well have somebody talking like this,

"Hi, Sylvester. How are you?"

It was definitely unique. And who knows?

You could have been plagued with 100 arm-wrestling movies after that. (LAUGHS)

(YELLING)

At the end of the movie, I had tears in my eyes.

Menahem patted me on this shoulder.

He says, "Aha! I got you!"

(CROWD CHEERING)

I was crying 'cause I saw my career going down the toilet

and I didn't know what I was gonna do next.

ROSENTHAL: Menahem was out of touch with the reality of what was going to be a hit

and what the audience was going to want.

Over The Top broadcast this idea of...

He thinks this is what American kids are gonna love,

and it was so...

It was a... You know, he had no ear for it.

Selling American films to Americans was not, uh...

Their sweet spot.

They had certain instincts of where they wanted to go,

but they didn't quite know how to get there.

They started diving in and renewing franchises such as Superman.

Cannon was being touted as, "Look what they did."

"These two guys have made it to big time."

JOHN: There's no reason why Superman IV wouldn't do well.

Probably could have saved Cannon.

Cured many of the financial woes

and created acceptance in Hollywood

that probably would have made them leaders.

You were rooting for them.

HARRISON ELLENSHAW: Christopher Reeve did not want to come back,

but he was seduced by the fact,

"Chris, what would you like the fourth one to be about?"

ROSENTHAL: He had this idea, which was essentially,

what would happen if Superman decided

he was actually gonna use his powers to stop war?

Effective immediately,

I'm going to rid our planet of all nuclear weapons.

How could it fail? It failed.

ROSENTHAL: Menahem promised us that we were gonna rise to the Warners' level,

not do it like a Cannon movie.

(LAUGHING) And, of course, in the end, we did it like a Cannon movie.

There was Nuclear Man, a He-Man equal to Superman.

Sidney Furie says to me,

"We've found him. We've found Nuclear Man."

"And he's an ex-Chippendale dancer."

(ROARING)

And I'm just trying to behave as the visual effects dweeb

and going, "Oh, God. We are in so much trouble."

I, Lex Luthor, the greatest criminal mind of the modern era,

have discovered a way to destroy Superman.

Last month, Cannon announced a loss of $90 million for the two years 1985-86.

REPORTER: By mid-December, Cannon must raise $80 million to pay off a debt in Britain.

By production of Superman, they were already in freefall.

All they could do was start to cut the budget.

DEL VALLE: This was a movie that was supposed to be $30 million,

and when they start shooting it, it's dropped to 17,

and it's a special effects movie.

ELLENSHAW: I said, "Hey, you want him to look like the first one?

"This is what it's gonna cost."

(SNORTS) Well, no way!

It was so cheap and so chintzy-looking and it just didn't look good.

All the ragged edges of the production were visible.

ROSENTHAL: They'd pad out the shots. They duplicated.

It's everything that happens when you don't have enough money for the effects.

ELLENSHAW: "You're dreadful at what you do, Harrison!"

"You are a big frickin' failure!"

Guilty.

Everybody sort of pointed the finger.

The finger was really the demise of Cannon.

MATTHAU: They started to do films with big budgets and take big risks

and try and compete with the Warner Brothers of the world,

and that didn't go so well.

(GROANING)

They couldn't take on the studio system and they knew it.

They were trying to get out from underneath,

and they thought if they got these big mega-pictures

that they could somehow parlay it into

not being discovered for the slobs they were.

If you kept moving fast enough,

there was always the next movie to be made,

and the next one was going to be great.

I have the power!

Masters was their big shot.

WILLIAM: They were so excited.

They could almost taste the money.

They could almost taste the success.

GARY: I was trying everything I could to try and make this

not look, feel, sound like a Cannon movie.

NARRATOR: At the far end of the universe,

there is a planet ruled by a being of utter evil...

(SCREAMING)

And there is only one man who dares challenge him.

DOLPH LUNDGREN: It was kind of slightly embarrassing

to sign on playing a toy, right?

For me, it was a bit weird, all this stuff.

The little dwarf with the little key and all of that.

I felt a little stupid doing it.

(WEAPON FIRING)

Sylvester Stallone showed up and he pointed up to Dolph.

He goes, "You gave that guy lines?"

This is our fight.

I don't want innocent people to die.

The special effect of Skeletor,

of creating a skeleton head,

was astronomical and would take an enormous amount of time,

and they knew that.

The solution that Cannon came up with

was to paint a skeleton on Frank Langella's face

that looked like a Halloween costume

that a mother made for her child.

I don't think so.

I remember just being really happy that we had

a beginning, a middle and end! (LAUGHS)

Kneel!

'Cause at one point, it looked like we weren't gonna have the end.

GARY: They literally shut me down.

And I said, "There's no ending to this movie."

(LAUGHING) I made Frank Langella, this great actor,

in this skeleton mask get in this bubbling vat of liquid

so he could pop up and say...

I'll be back!

They thought that that picture would play

to an adult audience, you know, to grown-ups.

But it didn't.

Masters Of The Universe was to blame for Masters Of The Universe.

If it was a great story, if it was funny and moving and exciting,

people would have flocked to it.

These pictures, Superman, Masters and Over The Top,

went off their business model.

ROSENTHAL: Make low-budget films, wait for one or two to hit big,

have a huge profit margin, sell them a lot,

build a library, sell them overseas.

And Superman is exactly the thing you don't want to do.

INTERVIEWER: Would you ever make a $30 million movie?

Never. I don't know what to do with 30 millions.

I can make 30 movies, maybe, you know?

But I don't know what to do with 30 millions.

I mean, I... I'll feel... I'll feel like I'm a criminal

spending this kind of money on doing one motion picture.

They were trying to get a little bit

out of the assembly-line factory process and make better pictures.

But I think timing and finances just caught up with them.

REPORTER: The more films Cannon produced, the more its debt grew.

Cannon have been dispossessing themselves of their assets.

The Thorn-EMI cinemas, Elstree Studios,

and a wonderful library of 2,000 films, and they sold those first.

And now they've sold the studios

for what they realized for property.

REPORTER: Plans to build up movie chains, distribution rights around the world

collapsed under mounting interest payments.

Cannon are not in the film production business as far as Britain is concerned.

They're in the property disposal business.

They didn't look upon it as a reason to stop and pause.

"Let's keep going."

They had problems releasing pictures.

They had problems finishing pictures.

I'd be on pictures that were relatively simple pictures

that would take six, eight months to not get finished.

NARRATOR: An incredible adventure awaits a young girl

and two brothers with a taste for excitement.

They will take a journey to a place they never dreamed existed.

Cannon shutting down almost overnight had a disastrous effect.

They just basically said, "You're finished."

Oh, my God.

RUSTY: The thing about a special effects film

is that it's like a jigsaw puzzle.

Imagine every third piece of the puzzle doesn't exist.

So you end up having a lot of blacks,

we call them "slugs".

So, there was all this footage that didn't have the special effects.

And it's just not releasable without it.

They just needed to have it finished and delivered for a price.

They had already spent the money on the advances,

so they had to deliver a finished film.

(LAUGHING) "Can you finish this film without special effects?"

What a question.

ALBERT: We went in and shot a pretty big chunk of storyline.

I can't give you words to tell you how heartbreaking it was.

It was an awkward situation

that I was very quickly the following year run into with Cyborg.

(NARRATOR READING)

NARRATOR: A brutal gang is reshaping the world into their own vision of hell,

and only one man can stop them.

I had this idea of a futuristic action movie that would feature Chuck.

Menahem and Yoram, they talked

and they said, "Well, you know, we have this other guy

"that we think is gonna be a big star."

"We'd like to see him in that part."

And I said, "Oh, yeah? Who's that?"

NARRATOR: Jean-Claude Van Damme has become the first hero

of the 21st century.

BOAZ: He used to come to our company

and he used to sit in the lobby.

He waited, and when Menahem came out of his office,

he ran up and did a sweeping kick.

Spinning split kick a quarter-inch from the end of Menahem's nose.

The very next day, he got a job.

ALBERT: I think Jean-Claude was more enamored with being a star on the ascent

than he was being an actor.

(GRUNTING)

I think he felt more confident in how he looked,

'cause as an actor, I don't think he felt secure yet.

(YELLING)

My vision was very dark, more of a war film than it was an action-adventure movie.

(BOTH YELLING)

LETTICH: It was very uncommercial.

They took a survey, and out of 100 people that were in the screening,

one person said that he liked the movie.

Which is no big surprise, 'cause I don't think

I ever had a test screening really go very well.

Yoram was saying, "Look, we've already got this booked in theaters."

"Just let us release the movie."

"It's not gonna kill your career."

And Jean-Claude was saying, "Look, give me two months. Let me recut the movie."

(GRUNTING)

We just turned it into more of a conventional action picture.

(GROANS)

And that movie worked.

So we had every right to believe, "I'll get through this.

"I'll sell this. I'll make some money."

"I'll sell some foreign rights, I'll get to the next one,"

"and the next one, we're gonna do right."

That's probably the biggest reason for the Cannon demise.

Not stopping licking the wounds, getting healed,

and then starting out with a new slate.

It just was too much.

It wasn't, "Is Cannon gonna collapse?"

It was, "When is Cannon gonna collapse?"

Globus was more practical and said, you know, "It's one thing to want it,

"it's another thing to pay for it, even the way we pay,"

uh, and I think it just became untenable.

Menahem was making too many movies.

Yoram was buying too many cinema chains.

And, uh... I don't know where the balance lied between them,

but I think each guy was very critical of the other.

The banks didn't want to give them any more money.

They couldn't repay the money they took because the movies all failed.

That's when Giancarlo Parretti came in.

Basically, overnight, Credit Lyonnais said,

"You've go t new partners."

CHARLES MATTHAU: You could feel Parretti come in.

You could feel the company change.

(WHISPERS) "That's Mr. Parretti."

"Be very careful around him."

Menahem and Yoram just wanted to believe

that this was their white knight savior,

and ignored all the signs that he was really a raider.

Parretti was an Italian con man.

They said that he was maybe associated with the Mafia or something.

AVI LERNER: Yoram stayed with Parretti

and Menahem said he is not happy to sell his...

His, as you say, soul to the devil.

These two cousins, who worked together for so many years,

Um... Splitted.

They had their success and... it ended.

It was a sad split for us,

because for us, there was Menahem and there was Yoram,

but what we all loved about the two of them was the two of them together.

I stayed with Yoram,

and I said to Menahem, you know,

"You're just unmanageable."

"You know, you shouldn't be running your company."

And he say, "Just give me the films that I did."

"I don't want the money."

I created a new company called the 21st Century.

I'm coming with new movies, modern movies,

picture that everybody in this coming decade will want to see.

He said to me he had just split with Yoram

and he went... (SPITS)

And he spit on the floor.

And they started making these competing movies,

like two competing lambada movies.

REPORTER: The lambada dance originated in the 1930s,

where it was soon banned by the government

for its sexual overtones.

What is that? The lambada!

That was their next great idea as a team,

and then when they split up,

it was, who could make that movie faster?

SHELDON RENAN: Yoram had a script

and was already into pre-production.

NARRATOR: A teacher, his student

and the dance that changed their lives.

So they were way ahead of Menahem,

who had to, like, cobble something together.

We were brought in to write Menahem's version

as fast as we could,

because the plan was to get it to theaters before Yoram's.

(SPITS)

NARRATOR: Only one dance can turn feeling into fury.

This crazy, crazy thing,

that an Indian princess from Brazil

was going to stop the destruction of the rainforest.

Stop!

Johns a particularly fast writer, so I said,

"We can write it in 10 days."

They shot in four weeks, we shot in three weeks.

We were working like crazy

and they were trying to shoot as much in order as possible

so they could finish the reels and get the sound effects cut in

and get them mixed at the same time.

If we shot on a Monday,

by Wednesday, we were locking the scenes.

There was no time to, like, redo anything

and there was no time to fine-tune anything.

Somehow, Yoram had managed to get the word lambada.

We ended up calling it The Forbidden Dance Is Lambada!

And put Lambada in huge letters

and put Lambada all over the poster,

but we had the Lambada song and they didn't.

* Not so far away.

We stopped shooting on a Thursday,

and Monday, we had the answer print.

We finished shooting Saturday morning at 2:45 a.m.,

and if you ever look at the end of it,

nobody has any energy left, there's a rainstorm going on,

and all they're doing is just moving,

just trying to get the movie done.

We screened the picture for Columbia,

and I said, "So, were gonna pick a nice freeze-frame of the two young couple"

"and were gonna put on a title that says..."

If you've got something that isn't so good,

you tack on green ecology to it,

and that improves the brand. It's called greenwashing.

After all this,

the two pictures were released at the same time.

Limousines from the two groups came to the same theater.

I don't know that it could happen anywhere.

It has a surreal quality even for Los Angeles.

Because the two men had broken up

and because they made two movies

with the same title, basically, same theme,

released on the same day,

they split the box office in half.

They were really trying to make this lambada craze

rather than waiting for the craze

and then having a movie that was a response to it,

like the Breakin ' movies.

Together, they were very successful,

and alone, it didn't happen the same way.

It seemed like a lot of people were happy

to see them go down in flames.

I don't think there were many grievers, at the end of the day.

Next!

I see Miramax now and I think that that's probably

when they came to the US,

that's probably what they had in mind.

They were the forerunners of the Weinstein's.

The difference is the Weinstein's cared about quality.

I think that they were the victims of snobbery.

I think that they were ostracized

because they didn't have the proper manners.

There was always that wheeling and dealing,

and that wheeling and dealing was very much...

I mean, they were Israelis,

and they were defined by that culture.

Menahem, I don't think, was ever thought of

as a great filmmaker,

even though his ego was as a filmmaker.

His spontaneity and flying, you know, sort of blind...

It's what destroyed the company,

because he did not think ahead.

He really just thought with his heart.

And you can't hate someone who thinks with their heart.

YIFTACH KATZUR: When I look at Menahem these days, I feel sorry.

There's a certain sadness about it,

because it was a man who retreated in defeat.

I'm sure Menahem would like to still be making movies today,

because he's a filmmaker.

It's in his blood. I mean, you can't deny him that.

Menahem says, "This is top-secret."

"Two words."

"Naked Lambada."

Yoram is probably more comfortable

not being in that position,

but Menahem would still be on the set.

Somebody comes up to Menahem and says,

"Menahem, did you hear that Yoram has cancer?"

And he goes...

"He should never have left me!"

YIFTACH KATZUR: Look at these guys.

They touch the sky, the stars, and they are not anymore.

The legacy is there, but.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

And I don't think we can say they were failures.

Because for a decade plus, they lived an incredible life.

If you've got all the guts in the world

and you've got energy and work hard,

you can make it work, and that's what they did.

If you look at how many B-movie companies

have been around in the history of Hollywood,

almost none of them got to where Menahem got.

If they had any influence on the industry, it shook 'em up.

And that's not a bad thing.

We always said,

"The best school in the world what not to do is Cannon."

Avi started

turning out all these low-budget Cannon-like movies

with a company called Nu Image.

JOHN THOMPSON: Nu Image was founded

by Danny Dimbort and Avi Lerner,

both with great linkage to the Cannon Group.

In many ways, we use the Cannon model.

We learned not to overextend our budgets,

not to overextend with the acquisition of assets,

and how to make action pictures.

The Expendables series. Olympus Has Fallen.

We have ninja films

would fit perfectly into the Cannon brochure.

I think Menahem probably is very proud of this.

Hollywood today is making Cannon movies,

bigger Cannon movies with millions and millions,

but it's making action movies.

We owe it to those guys. They put a stamp on it.

The only way you can now pretty much make a movie

is by having some calculation of presales in them.

And Cannon did that.

Good, bad or indifferent, they pioneered that idea.

KRAFT: Cannons legacy will be the insane stories

of how that many movies got made

during a very specific period of time

by two guys who had no business doing any of it.

They were definitely leaders

in the foreign market, in foreign sales

and in dreams, for sure.