By the decade\u2019s end, Cannon was in dire financial straits, so Friedland and Dewey sold the company to two Israeli emigrants looking to make their name and fortune in America: director\/producer Menahem Golan and his cousin Yoram Globus. The duo had seen success in their native country with their teen sex comedy series Lemon Popsicle<\/em> (the first of which they would soon remake in America as The Last American Virgin<\/em>). Blustery hustlers of the old school, the two men tapped into their \u201880s audience\u2019s hunger for sex and violence, turning out one B-picture after another. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Actually, to call the majority of these films B-pictures is far too flattering\u2014these were Z-grade pictures made for a buck, in order to make a buck and a half. But every once in a while, Cannon would achieve some legitimate success, either by tapping into an unknown\u2019s star potential (Norris, Van Damme) or getting in early on a trend or fad (Breaking<\/em>). But while these early years under the Golan and Globus regime produced some fun trash classics (amidst a lot of straight trash) and netted a decent profit, Cannon was running negative in the critical acclaim department. And unlike fellow schlockmeisters Lloyd Kaufman or Roger Corman, Golan and Globus craved prestige. So, they decided to buy some.<\/p>\n\n\n\n They went the opposite route of the aforementioned Corman, whose films often earned critical praise because he gave opportunities to young, hungry filmmakers. Instead, Golan and Globus reached out to established names who had hit a professional wall. In the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, <\/em>archival footage has Menahem Globus explaining his philosophy: \u201cI\u2019m not buying people \u2013 I\u2019m giving them opportunities.\u201d (This is followed by a hilarious scene wherein he demands an associate ink a deal with Peter Bogdanovich, before launching into a tirade about how Bogdanovich is a total loser.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The first such auteur Cannon successfully reached out to was John Cassavetes. The godfather of American independent cinema, and one of the most heroically uncompromising and passionate artists to ever step behind a camera, Cassavetes had fallen on hard times by the mid-eighties. All of his films post-A Woman Under the Influence<\/em> failed to perform commercially or even critically, and he was facing serious health problems from cirrhosis of the liver. So, despite his antipathy towards producers\u2014not to mention the types of films that Cannon made (Cassavetes often liked to proclaim, \u201cI hate entertainment!\u201d)\u2014their offer to finance Love Streams<\/em>, his adaptation of Ted Allen\u2019s stage drama of the same name, proved not only a lifeline, but ultimately, a valediction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The film, which stars Cassavetes and real-life wife and muse Gena Rowlands as siblings, is one of his most challenging, but also most haunting and emotionally cathartic works. Although he would go on to direct one more film\u20141986\u2019s screwball comedy Big Trouble<\/em>, which he only took on as a favor to best friend and star Peter Falk after the original director was fired three weeks into shooting, and which he would subsequently disavow\u2014Love Streams<\/em> is Cassavetes\u2019s true curtain call, thanks in no small part to the complete artistic freedom afforded to him by Golan and Globus (at one point, Golan asked him to consider cutting 15 minutes from the film\u2019s runtime, to which Cassavetes responded by adding an extra fifteen.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the Cannon-produced making-of documentary, I’m Almost Not Crazy: John Cassavetes, the Man and His Work<\/em>, Menahem Golan says of the experience: \u201cIf I\u2019m going to do a John Cassavetes film\u2026I had to give John Cassavetes the full freedom to create his film.\u201d This was not merely a case of artistic largesse\u2014Golan was also sending a message. As explained by Cassavetes\u2019s longtime producer Al Rubin, Golan and Globus could now \u201cgo to any other director and say, hey, look, we just made a film with John Cassavetes, and you know how difficult he could be, and that just goes to show you how far we\u2019ll go with directors.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n The gambit worked, and soon, other serious directors\u2014both established and up-and-coming\u2014accepted their call. In 1985, Cannon made two films that garnered the type of critical attention they were hoping to receive with Love Streams<\/em> (which, outside of winning the Golden Bear at 34th<\/sup> International Berlin Film Festival, was unfortunately all but ignored on release).<\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time Neil Jordan made The Company of Wolves<\/em> for Cannon, he had already achieved notice for his writing and television work in his native Ireland, as well as his small first feature, Angel<\/em>. But it was The Company of Wolves<\/em> that set him on a course as one of the most acclaimed writers and directors of the following decade, during which time he\u2019d nab one Oscar and many other awards. Based merely on its synopsis, The Company of Wolves<\/em> seems like something that would fall within Cannon\u2019s wheelhouse\u2014a sexually charged horror-drama featuring werewolves\u2014but it is in fact a much deeper and dreamier film than anything else they\u2019d done up to that point (Love Streams<\/em> excluded), as evidenced by its highbrow pedigree: an adaptation of feminist fabulist Angela Carter\u2019s modern literary classic The Bloody Chamber<\/em>, with Carter herself on co-scripting duties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much the same can be said of Runaway Train,<\/em> released later that same year. Again, on paper, the film\u2014about two prison escapees who hop aboard an unmanned and out-of-control locomotive\u2014reads like a two-fisted, muscular crime-action flick of the standard Cannon variety. But while it is that to a degree, it is also a powerful existentialist drama, one that takes on the thematic and philosophical weight of a Dostoevsky or Conrad novel. This isn\u2019t so surprising when you take into account that the script was developed and co-written by Akira Kurosawa, and the director was Andrei Konchalovsky, best known at that point as the writer of Andrei Tarkovsky\u2019s Ivan\u2019s Childhood<\/em> and Andrie Rublev<\/em>. The film earned three Oscar nominations (Best Actor and Supporting Actor for co-leads Jon Voight and Eric Roberts, respectively, and Editing) and rave reviews from critics, and is considered by many of the people at Cannon during this period to be the best film the company ever made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between 1986 and 1987, Cannon made the majority of its \u2018serious\u2019 pictures, although these were by no means all critical or even artistic successes. John Frankenheimer made one of his best films with an adaptation of Elmore Leonard\u2019s sextrade thriller 52 Pick-Up<\/em>, but its sleazy sheen and setting kept it from being recognizing as such. Roman Polanski\u2019s Pirates<\/em>\u2014which Cannon distributed\u2014was a major disaster, while Nic Roeg\u2019s erotic drama Castaway<\/em> met with tepid reviews before being mostly ignored by audiences (Roeg\u2019s grotesquely perverse Oedipal psychodrama of two years later, Track 29<\/em>, also distributed by Cannon, met with a similar fate, although the reviews were even less kind). <\/p>\n\n\n\n However, the same year also saw Cannon produce and release Franco Zeffirelli\u2019s adaptation of Giuseppe Verdi\u2019s opera Otello<\/em>\u2013itself based on William Shakespeare\u2019s tragedy Othello<\/em>\u2014the most aesthetically ambitious project they ever embarked on. While Otello<\/em> was highly praised for its lush cinematography and set design, it didn\u2019t receive quite the success Cannon hoped for, although it\u2019s clear from interviews that it was a deeply meaningful film for them nonetheless. Golan loved Zeffirelli and took great pride in bringing him on board, while Zeffirelli, despite his initial skepticism towards Cannon, ended up proclaiming Golan and Globus the best producers he ever worked for, while also saying he considered Otello<\/em> his best film. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Cannon returned to the bosom of the bard the next year, by way of Jean-Luc Godard\u2019s King Lear<\/em>. Golan thought he\u2019d scored a coup when he signed the notoriously prickly auteur (literally inking the deal on a napkin in a restaurant), and while he couldn\u2019t have expected the iconoclastic French legend to turn in a straight adaptation of Shakespeare\u2019s tragedy, neither was he prepared for the impenetrable film he did make. Godard\u2019s King Lear<\/em> is a Brechtian experiment that deals with Lear<\/em> as a text, alongside numerous other heady literary, philosophical, historical and political ideas, all while embracing obfuscation and discarding everything you expect from a regular movie, such as makeup, costumes and conventional narrative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Golan was furious at Godard for turning in so massively uncommercial a film, although he still allowed him to include a private (and antagonistic) phone call in which he chided the director for taking too long on production. Golan wasn\u2019t the only one baffled by what he saw, with the film was furiously dismissed by critics when it debuted at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival and during its brief theatrical run. Today, it remains one Godard\u2019s more notorious and difficult works, although its vociferous supporters (including Richard Brody, who named it the greatest film ever made in the 2012 Sight & Sound<\/em> pole) hail it as a prime example of the film maudit<\/a>\u2014”the accomplished work of art that met with critical incomprehension and rejection at the time of its release.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fellow French New Wave director Barbet Schroeder also hopped on the Cannon train at the same time as Godard with Barfly<\/em> , a grungy, semi-autobiographical alcoholism drama written by poet and novelist Charles Bukowski and starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. Although the film had a slightly troubled production\u2014at one point, Golan stopped production, relenting only after Schroder barged into his office with a chainsaw and threatened to cut off his own fingers, one-by-one, until it resumed\u2014Schroder still turned in a masterfully moody character piece, one of the great examples of loser cinema<\/a> and a work that not only does justice to Bukowksi\u2019s writing, but arguably does it one better. A critical success, it proved a commercial disappointment upon release, although as Bukowski\u2019s popularity grew following his death in 1994, so too did the film\u2019s cult status (unfortunately, it is currently difficult to see).<\/p>\n\n\n\n If Barfly<\/em> shares a boozy, literary sensibility with Love Streams<\/em>, they both also contain a certain seediness similar to many other Cannon productions, including Jerry Schatzberg\u2019s gritty prostitution thriller Street Smart<\/em> (which features an early breakout performance from Morgan Freeman) and Norman Mailer\u2019s\u2014who\u2019d previously worked with Cannon on Godard\u2019s King Lear<\/em>\u2014proto-Lynchian neo-noir Tough Guy\u2019s Don\u2019t Dance<\/em>. The latter two films find a sweet spot between the grindhouse and the arthouse, but all of them\u2014and, to a lesser extent Frankenheimer\u2019s 52 Pick-Up<\/em> (although that\u2019s a little more of a traditional action-thriller)\u2014convey the seedy, neon decadence of the Cannon aesthetic (most notably displayed in their horror-action-crime hybrids 10 to Midnight<\/em> and Cobra<\/em>), making them truer Cannon Films spiritually than Zeffirelli or Godard\u2019s efforts, or, for that matter, 1988\u2019s documentary tone poem Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation, <\/em>the second installment in Godfrey Rodrigo\u2019s Qatsi trilogy, which was brought to Golan and Globus by producers George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. <\/p>\n\n\n\n By the time Cannon released Powaqqatsi<\/em>, they had finally started earning recognition for their arthouse efforts, with Roger Ebert declaring “no other production organization in the world today\u2014certainly not any of the seven Hollywood ‘majors’\u2014has taken more chances with serious, marginal films than Cannon.” However, they had simultaneously gone the opposite route business-wise, investing more and more capital in large budget productions and ludicrously high contracts with big name stars. The failure of these movies, combined with other poor financial decisions, eventually led to the studio\u2019s demise. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Today, Cannon is looked back on with great nostalgia from genre hounds and cinematic trash connoisseurs, but it has never really received its proper due for the attention it gave to those serious, marginal films Ebert spoke of, even as some of the movies themselves have earned entry critical reappraisal (Love Streams<\/em>, for example, was put out on Blu-ray and DVD by the Criterion Collection in 2014). For as much cultural cache as boutique production companies like A24, Neon and Annapurna enjoy today, it\u2019s impossible to imagine any of them making anything as legitimately experimental and uncommercial as Godard\u2019s Lear<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n All these years later, it\u2019s time to give the schlockmeisters their due, and induct the arthouse Cannon into the arthouse canon proper. When you think of Cannon Films, you typically think of exploitation movies and Chuck Norris vehicles. But the \u201880s legends also assembled an impressive array of art films, and provided opportunities for auteurs in need.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":506,"featured_media":16935,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-16932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/506"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16932"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22218,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16932\/revisions\/22218"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/love-streams-1024x576.jpg\")
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