This episode, we take a look back at the short-lived production and distribution company American Cinema Releasing, pioneers of two ways of finding financing for independent films and releasing them into theatres, and the company responsible for making Chuck Norris a star.
----more----
Movies discussed on this episode include:
Beatlemania (1981, Joseph Manduke)
Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen (1981, Clive Donner)
Cheaper to Keep Her (1981, Ken Annakin)
Dirt (1979, Eric Karson)
The Entity (1983, Sidney J. Furie)
Fade to Black (1980, Vernon Zimmerman)
A Force of One (1979, Paul Aaron)
Force: Five (1981, Robert Clouse)
Good Guys Wear Black (1978, Ted Post)
High Risk (1981, Stewart Raffill)
I, the Jury (1982, Richard T. Heffron)
The Late, Great Planet Earth (1978, Robert Amram and Rolf Forsberg)
The Octagon (1980, Eric Karson)
Silent Scream (1979, Denny Harris)
Tough Enough (1983, Richard Fleischer)
If you like what you hear and you haven’t done so already, please make sure to rate and review the show on your favorite podcatching source. While a good review and rating won’t increase our chances of being found or being a featured podcast on a podcatcher like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, it will potentially help increase the odds of someone who does find the show for the first time thinking that clicking play will be a good time investment for them. And it’s something you can even do while you’re listening to this episode.
On this episode, we return to one of our favorite templates, a look back at one of the plethora of movie distributors from the 1980s that is almost completely forgotten today.
American Cinema Releasing.
A division of American Communications Industries, American Cinema Releasing would be responsible for resurrecting one of the staples of independent film distribution. But we’ll get there in a moment.
The company would begin in 1975 as American Financial Resources, a film financing company run by 31 year old Michael Leone out of a bank building in Torrance, Calif. He chose the location for its vicinity to the airport which made it easy for investors to fly in and out of the area, and a number of their projects over the years would be directly financed as tax-shelter films. What this means is that, in the 1970s and 1980s, someone looking to stash away some money to protect it from the IRS could directly invest that money into a specific movie or a series of movies.
If you go back and look at the credits for an 80s movie like The Journey of Natty Gann or Down and Out in Beverly Hills or Adventures in Babysitting, you’ll notice a credit for an entity called Silver Screen Partners. The Silver Screen Partners Limited Partnership was organized by a New York film investment broker named Roland W. Betts to help his clients protect their money by funding movies for HBO in 1982. Through stock brokerage firm EF Hutton, 13 people would invest $83m to help produce several movies including Heaven Help Us and The Hitcher. The partnership would pay for a movie's production costs and would share in the gross dollars in all markets from theater to television. What made a limited partnership like this popular was that the partners would receive their returns before the production company could defray any of their expenses. So even if the film in question would be a bomb at the box office and have no post-theatrical life, the investors would at least get some of their money back.
Although most of the movies from the first Silver Screen Partnership were not huge hits, the partnership would be so popular with Betts’ clients that he would create three more Silver Screen Partnerships for Disney. Between 1985 and 1992, those partnerships would raise more than half a billion dollars for the productions of seventy-three films, including Three Men and a Baby, Good Morning Vietnam, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Dead Poets Society, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, The Little Mermaid, Pretty Woman, Dick Tracy, and Beauty and the Beast. Combined, those films would gross more than four billion dollars worldwide.
Michael Leone wouldn’t have access to that kind of money, and he wouldn’t finance any movies like those. The first movie he would finance through his limited partnership, the American Cinema Group Motion Picture Investment Fund, was a documentary called The Late, Great Plane Earth. Narrated by Orson Welles, the film prophesied that events mentioned in the Bible illustrated how civilization was headed for a doomsday. Based on a 1970 bestseller by professional Bible prophecy teacher Hal Lindsey, the movie would be a minor phenomenon when it was released into theatres in January 1978, selling $19.5m worth of tickets against an $11m budget, but most critics would rightfully point out how absurdly general these prophecies were. The promoters of the film weren’t so general, though. “Don’t Make Plans for 1985 Before Seeing This Movie,” ads warned potential viewers.
The success of The Late Great Planet Earth convinced Leone that the big money was in distribution. And luckily for him, he would have a few other movies in production that would help that prophecy come true, at least in the short term.
One of the people Michael Leone had gotten to know over the years was Carlos Ray Norris, who operated a chain of popular karate schools around Los Angeles, including one on Hawthorne Boulevard just around the corner from Leone’s office next to the Torrance Airport. Norris had a celebrity clientele at his schools that included Steve McQueen, Bob Barker, Priscilla Presley and several members of the Osmond family. Maybe that’s why Leone would listen to Carlos, better known by his nickname Chuck, when the karate guy pitched him the idea for his own movie, who had already been rejected by every other studio and producer in town. “Why will this movie make money?” Leone would ask Norris. “Because there are four million karate people in America,” Norris would tell him, “and even if only half of them go to this movie, that’s a $6m gross. Make a movie for $1m, and we all make money.”
Within six months, Chuck Norris was on the set of the film he still considers to this day to be his breakthrough.
And it’s not like Chuck hadn’t acted before. In 1972, he was Bruce Lee’s nemesis in Return of the Dragon, and he had been the star of the 1977 film Breaker Breaker, which would be a minor hit itself.
Leone would pay Norris significantly more than the $5 he got for Breaker Breaker, and Norris leaped at the chance to prove he could be a successful action star.
Although he would not receive a Story By credit, Norris has claimed that he was the one who came up with the plotline for Good Guys Wear Black along with one of his karate school students, and it's the type of jingoistic pabulum that would become Norris's stock in trade. In 1973, an American Senator makes a deal with a North Vietnamese negotiator in the hopes of ending the long-standing Vietnam conflict. The North Koreans will release a certain group of key CIA prisoners of war, and in return, the Americans will set up a group of elite CIA assassins known as The Black Tigers. How that is supposed to end a decade-plus conflict is anyone’s guess, but both sides sign the treaty, and the US sends The Black Tigers into the jungles of Vietnam, having been told they were on a mission to rescue a group of American POWs. Most of the squad is killed, but the leader of the team, Major John T. Booker, survives the attack, along with four others who were smart enough to stick with Booker.
Five years later, Booker is now a political science teacher at UCLA, who lectures his students about how the US never should have been involved in Vietnam. During one class, a plucky female reporter starts to ask Booker a series of questions about the mission that almost killed him, as all the other members of the group who survived have been killed off one by one. Along with the help of the reporter, Booker finds himself dealing with aspects of his past he wasn’t ready to deal with yet.
Norris had a specific person in mind when he was figuring out the direction of his acting career. Clint Eastwood. In fact, it was Eastwood’s role as Dirty Harry Callahan that Norris wanted to emulate in Good Guys Wear Black, and he and Michael Leone would go so far as to hire Ted Post, who had directed the second Dirty Harry movie, Magnum Force, as well as the Eastwood western Hang 'Em High, to direct here. They would also assemble a fairly decent supporting cast for Norris to work with, including Dana Andrews, Jim Backus, Anne Archer, James Franciscus, and Soon-Tek Oh, along with Norris's younger brother Aaron, who would also become the film’s martial arts choreographer.
Production on the $1.1m film would begin on the film in Los Angeles and at the Squaw Valley ski resort outside Lake Tahoe on April 25th, 1977, and would last for eight weeks.
Originally, Michael Leone did not plan on releasing Good Guys Wear Black himself. He was certain he would be able to sell the completed film to a more established distributor, the way he had sold the Ted Post-directed Go Tell the Spartans starring Burt Lancaster to Avco Embassy Pictures.
But once the film was locked in early 1978, the producer would be rejected by everyone the same way everyone rejected Chuck Norris and the script for Good Guys Wear Black when Norris was circulating it around town two years earlier.
What Leone would decide to do was to revive a distribution method that a number of other independent distributors would implement in similar situations, with varying results. We’ve talked about the concept of four walling on the show before, but a quick primer for those who haven’t heard the term before, to four-wall a theatre would be to literally buy the four walls of the theatre from the operator for a certain amount of time. The owner of the theatre gets a guaranteed amount of money, regardless of if the film does great business or bombs, and the distributor would get 100% of the ticket sales, instead of a rental fee that for an independent distributor with a lack of titles in the pipeline might be as low as 55% of the ticket sales.
Usually, the cost of the four-wall rental would be what theatres call The Nut, which was how much it cost to operate the theatre for a week. So if you were an independent York City in dent distributor looking to four wall their movie in New York City in early June 1978, one could four-wall the 1-seat Astor Plaza Theatre in Times Square for around $17, or the 568 seat Murray Hill Theatre in the Gramercy neighborhood on the East Side for $7. But Leone wasn’t ready to open in New York City, or Los Angeles, just yet. But he was ready to take a chance in Denver. Leone would four-wall six theatres in and around the Mile High City, and the film would gross $65k in its first three days.
The following week, Leone would four-wall 61 theatres in and around the greater Chicago metropolitan area, and despite blistering reviews from Windy City critics, the film would gross $450k in its first three days. But those six theatres in Denver would be done after one week. Not because the film wasn’t doing well, but because there were movies like Grease, Jaws 2, and Damien: The Omen 2 that promised bigger grosses for theatres.
By its second week in Chicago, Good Guys Wear Black would shed 27 theatres, but the 34 theatres Leone did keep would gross a cool $175k. And then, he’d pull the film out of Chicago.
This would be Leon's MO for the remainder of the summer. Take a handful of prints, move them from market to market, four wall theatres for only as long as the film was still making him a profit from ticket sales, and then pull it before the grosses fell below the cost of four walling the theatres.
What was the secret of their success?
Chuck Norris.
Between June 1978, when the film opened in Denver, and June 1979, when the film finally opened in New York City, Chuck Norris would spend most of those thirteen months on road, promoting the movie, city by city, doing local interviews with any newspaper columnist or television reporter who would speak to him. For those in smaller towns like Charleston SC or Boise ID, who were not accustomed to movie stars coming to their town to promote their movies, the chance to interview a movie star in their hometown was irresistible. Norris himself claims he did more than 2 interviews in that thirteen-month period, and says he had to be hospitalized with a case of laryngitis.
In the end, Good Guys Wear Black would gross $18.3m, and put Chuck Norris squarely on the path to stardom.
About the only time Norris wasn’t on the road promoting Good Guys Wear Black was when he was working on his next movie.
A Force of One would find Norris as karate champion Matt Logan, who is recruited by the local police department after a team of undercover narcotics officers is targeted by a mysterious serial killer.
Like Good Guys Wear Black, A Force of One would team Norris with an alluring co-star, this time the ravishing Jennifer O’Neill from Summer of ’42, who plays the last surviving member of the narcotics team, and helps Matt Logan discover a traitor within the force is behind the killings. The film would also feature Clu Gulager, Super Fly himself, Ron O’Neal, James Whitmore Jr., and Pepe Serna.
The $2m movie would shoot in and around the San Diego area, near where Michael Leone had a home in Cardiff by the Sea, between December 11th, 1978 and January 31st, 1979. And as soon as shooting was completed, Norris was back on the road promoting Good Guys Wear Black.
Wanting to strike while the Chuck Norris iron was still hot, director Paul Aaron, Michael Leone, and the post-production team would rush the film to completion, opening it on 16 screens in the Norfolk NC area on May 18th, less than three and a half months after the end of shooting, even as Good Guys Wear Black was still opening in cities like Buffalo, Minneapolis and St. Louis. The film would do great business, with more than $158k in ticket sales in the first ten days. The following week, they would add 15 theatres in Denver and 2 in Colorado Springs, where the film would gross an additional $166k during the four-day Memorial Day holiday weekend, even while films like Alien were tearing up the box office charts.
Once again, American Releasing would four-wall all the theatres and would follow the same general release pattern as Good Guys Wear Black, jumping in and out of smaller markets for a couple of weeks throughout the summer and fall, and winter, before building up into major releases in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago the following spring, nearly a year after the first playdates. Chicago would finally get the film on February 1st, 1980, where it would gross $400k from 54 theatres. It would open in New York City on February 28th, where it grossed $500k from 96 theatres, and in Los Angeles on March 7th, where it would pull in $223k from 22 theatres. When it was all played out, A Force of One would gross $20.2m.
But American Cinema wasn’t only in the Chuck Norris business. While they were busy putting Good Guys Wear Black to bed and getting A Force of One out to theatres, there was another film they would open.
Eric Karson’s Dirt was a documentary about various off-road competitions that happened throughout the United States and Baja California between 1976 and 1978.
In an ad in the June 6th, 1979 issue of Variety that touted A Force of One’s early box office successes in Norfolk and Denver, they would also note that Dirt had already grossed more than $3.2m while only having played in 15% of the US markets.
But one of the major problems with four walls is that a company is not obligated to release box office numbers if they don’t want to, so sometimes it’s hard to track a movie like Dirt as it moved from city to city when the numbers weren’t always reported, or even where it might have opened. The best estimate of a final gross or initial release timeframe comes from a 1979-1980 fiscal year report from the company to its investors, released in the fall of 1980, which says the film had grossed $9.2m since its March 1979 theatrical debut.
American Cinema’s last movie of the 1970s, and, technically, their first film of the 1980s, was the horror film Silent Scream.
The film follows Scotty Parker, a college student who, needing a place to stay before she starts her fall semester at school, finds a room in a hilltop Victorian mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean, where a homicidal killer is on the loose. The cast is fairly decent, including movie tough guy Cameron Mitchell and comedian Avery Schreiber as two detectives trying to find the killer, Yvonne DeCarlo from The Munsters as the woman who runs the boarding house, and Barbara Steele, the English actress who made her name in horror films like Mario Bava’s Black Sunday and Roger Corman’s The Pit and the Pendulum, as a mysterious woman connected to the murders.
But many of them were not a part of the film originally.
Writer/director Denny Harris shot the film around Los Angeles in September and October 1977, but as he assembled the film in post-production, he wasn’t happy with how the film was coming together. He would make a plea to the producers to allow him time to rewrite the script and reshoot parts of the movie. Harris would hire the writing team of Ken and Jim Wheat to punch up the already shot script, and he would replace most of the unknown actors from the initial shoot with better-known names like DeCarlo, Mitchell, and Steele. He would return back to the streets of Los Angeles in the summer of 1978, where his reshoots would end up becoming 85% of the final film.
Now, remember, this was all before the release of John Carpenter’s Halloween, so who knows what would have happened had Harris not essentially remade his film and got it out into theatres before Carpenter. This time out, Harris would spend a lot of time getting the film just right.
The film would first play at the Tulare Square Theatre in Tulare CA, about 160 miles north of Hollywood, on Wednesday, November 14th, 1979, as the B title on a double feature with Paramount Pictures’ Bloodline, starring Audrey Hepburn, Ben Gazzara and James Mason, which had opened in theatres back in June. A few days later, on November 16th, it would open on three screens in Honolulu, the B title on a double feature with Good Guys Wear Black, which was returning for a second go-round in Hawaiian theatres. These were considered short test runs, and no grosses would be reported. On Friday, November 23rd, American Cinema would give Silent Scream its first official playdates, 15 screens in Fresno CA, and Las Vegas NV, where it would gross $58 in three days.
The film would finally get a wider release on January 18th, 1980, when it would open on 131 screens in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, and as the first slasher film of the 1980s, it would become a massive hit, grossing $1m in its first seven days. That would put it in sixth place at the box office, while only playing in a quarter of the theatres Kramer vs. Kramer, the number one film of the weekend, was playing in. Two weeks later, most of those California playdates were over, and most of the prints were sent to New York City, where the film would gross $1.1m from 96 theatres, in addition to $60k each from 10 screens in Kansas City and from 8 in Minneapolis. It would be the first time American Cinema Releasing would hit the big cities first. Yet, despite these rather sizable grosses out of Los Angeles and New York City, the film would only gross $8m. Most of the reviews for the film were awful, but there’d be a small group of critics who found things to admire about the film despite all its flaws.
Chuck Norris knew when he had a good thing going. After the success of Good Guys Wear Black and A Force of One, he would team with American Cinema a third time in two years.
The third film, The Octagon, would a somewhat departure from the previous two films. After a $1.1m budget for Good Guys Wear Black, and a $2.5m budget for A Force of One, the budget for The Octagon would be a whopping $4m. Shooting wouldn’t be limited to locations in Southern California, either. In addition to Los Angeles, the film would also do location shooting in New Orleans, Mexico, and in Central America. And unlike the other two movies which were rated PG, The Octagon would be a bit more violent and a bit more bloody, and would eventually secure an R rating.
Eric Karson, the director of Dirt, would make his dramatic narrative debut here, with Norris playing Scott James, a retired karate champion who is drawn into an international conspiracy that requires him to take out a group of ninjas terrorists who have been trained by… wait for it… his Japanese half-brother. Joining Norris this time around are Lee Van Cleef from For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Canadian actor Art Hindle from The Brood and Black Christmas, comedian Jack Carter, and in early roles, Ernie Hudson and Tracey Walter.
The main set of The Octagon was built just outside the Magic Mountain theme park in Valencia CA, where the rock band KISS fought The Phantom of the Park, at a cost of $300k.
Although the set was rather elaborate and built on land owned by American Cinema, and could have been used over and over again in other productions, not unlike the White House set Rob Reiner had built for his 1995 film The American President which would be used for a number of films and television shows for a year after, director Eric Karson had the screenwriter specifically write the destruction of the Octagon into the script, so that no other production could use it and rush itself into theatres before the film could be released.
Not that he would have much to worry about. The film would shoot between December 1979 and February 1980, and American Cinema would have the film in theatres six months later. The film would open on 244 screens in Dallas, Kansas City, and St. Louis on August 8th, 1980, where it would gross an impressive $1.5m. The following weekend, it would add another 37 screens in Chicago, where it would gross more than $550k, including a mind-blowing $135k from just one theatre, the 2 seat State-Lake Theatre.
But instead of waiting until the following spring to open in New York or Los Angeles, as they had with Good Guys Wear Black and A Force of One, American Cinema got The Octagon into those major markets one week after the Chicago opening. Although they would get the film into 23 theatres in Los Angeles, and gross an impressive $340k, the distributor opted to only open the film in two theatres in New York City, the 978 seat Cinerama Theatre and 450 seat RKO 86th Street. Combined, those two theatres would gross $91k, including $64k at the Cinerama, which would set a three-day house record.
Within eight weeks, the film would have already grossed more than $18.5m, according to an ad in Variety in mid-October for the MIFED Film Market, and it would become an even bigger hit for Norris and the company, racking up nearly $25m in ticket sales when it played out by Christmas.
“A fabulous ’79 is springboarding a bigger and better ’80” the ad touted, and it wasn’t that big a humblebrag. They were having a good year, despite only having released two movies the entire year. Their next film, however, would change the direction of the company forever.
Vernon Zimmerman’s Fade to Black would be American Cinema’s first movie they didn’t produce or develop themselves, and it would be the first movie they would release as a traditional theatrical release. No four walls. They had high hopes for the film, as well they should have. It had one hell of a killer hook, pun fully intended.
Dennis Christopher, who had played the lead role in the surprise 1979 box office hit Breaking Away, stars as Eric Binford, a shy and lonely cinephile whose love of movies who, after a lifetime of being treated like crap by everyone he crosses paths with, snaps after he is unintentionally stood up on a date with Marilyn, a Monroe lookalike who has become the literal embodiment of Eric’s cinematic desires.
Eric decides to get revenge on those who have hurt him over the years, dressing up as characters from his favorite classic movies as he takes out those who have done him wrong. Tim Thomerson stars as a criminal psychologist who is investigating the murders, and Australian actress Linda Kerridge, who really does look like Marilyn Monroe, plays the young woman who Eric becomes obsessed with. The film would also feature early roles for Mickey Rourke, as one of Eric’s tormentors, and future thirtysomething star Peter Horton.
Film lovers should recognize a number of the movies that are lovingly paid homage to, from 40s noirs like Kiss of Death and White Heat, to 60s horror films like Psycho and Night of the Living Dead, with a great ending at the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
The film would open on 75 screens in New York City on October 17th, 1980, and would be the highest-grossing film in the city that weekend, with $700k in ticket sales.
But in its second week, it would drop down to only four theatres in the city. Ironically, though, its per screen average would go up from $9k to $14k.
When it opened on 43 screens in Los Angeles on Halloween day, it would gross a decent $240k. Ironically, one of those theatres would not be the Chinese Theatre, which factors into the movie and was right across the street from American Cinema’s new office, which they had moved into over the summer.
The following week, 37 screens in Chicago, four in San Francisco, and a pair in Washington DC would bring in $279k.
But these would be the highs for the $1.8m movies. By the time the film was played out around Christmas, the film would gross a decent $8m, but since only about half of that was coming back to the company in rental fees, they would end up losing money on a release for the first time.
Things would not get better for the company.
Shortly after the release of The Octagon, Chuck Norris would inform Michael Leone that although he greatly appreciated the opportunities they afforded him, Norris was going to be making his next movie, An Eye for an Eye, for another production company. Norris would continue to see his star rise through movies like Silent Rage for Columbia Pictures, Forced Vengeance for MGM, and Lone Wolf McQuade for Orion. By 1983, Norris would sign a long-term contract with Cannon Films. His films with Cannon were crappy, jingoistic pabulum, but they were cheap to make, they traveled well across the globe, and would make Norris and the Go-Go Boys rich. Despite the Cannon contract, Norris would go on to make his single best movie, 1985’s Code of Silence, for Orion Pictures.
Michael Leone was gobsmacked by this revelation. He was expecting Norris to keep making movies with American Cinema, and he was using that leverage with distributors around the world to start planning more ambitious projects with higher budgets and bigger international stars.
The first of these projects was Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen.
Inspired by the novels of Earl Derr Biggers, Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen was the latest installment in the prolific Charlie Chan film franchise, of which there were no less than 44 movies produced between 1931 and 1949. One of the big problems with the series though was that although most of the supporting cast was Asian, Chan himself would always be played by a white man in yellowface with a horribly exaggerated Asian-ish accent, often throwing out what one writer examining the Chan movie series would call “nuggets of fortune cookie Confucius” wisdom.
In fact, after 1949’s Sky Dragon, Charlie Chan hasn’t appeared on movie screens until this new movie. But if Jerry Sherlock, the very white Charlie Chan fan who considered himself an expert on “the Orient,” was aware Asian Americans perceived Chan as “a yellow Uncle Tom,” a character who, for them, symbolized hurtful stereotypes they had struggled for decades to escape, he didn’t give a damn. He would cast the very white, very British, two-time Academy Award-winning actor Peter Ustinov as Chan.
To say the global Asian community, as well as Asians in the entertainment industry, were deeply hurt and upset about this casting news would be an understatement.
Shooting would begin in Los Angeles and San Francisco in early May 1980, and protests would follow the production every single day it was shooting away from a controlled studio setting. Several major set pieces scheduled to be shot in San Francisco’s Chinatown had to be canceled because of the protests, and the film would end up finishing production two days earlier than originally scheduled because of the cuts.
As the film got closer to its scheduled February 13th, 1981 release, the protests heated up again. The film would have its world premiere at the Pacific Hollywood Theatre on Hollywood Blvd. on February 13th, and more than fifty protestors from a group called “C.A.N. Charlie Chan” were there to protest.
Four television stations in the Bay Area would refuse to air any commercials for the movie, which would have brought in more than $50k of revenue, or about $163k in 2022 dollars.
The plot of the film finds Chan, now retired from detective work, coming out of retirement at the request of the San Francisco police department, to help solve a series of murders in the city. Richard Hatch, fresh off Battlestar Galactica, plays Chan’s grandson, Lee Chan, Jr., with support from Oscar winner Lee Grant, Angie Dickinson, Brian Keith, Roddy McDowell, and, in her third film appearance, Michelle Pfeiffer.
The reviews for the film, outside of a mixed review from Vincent Canby of the New York Times, were rightfully brutal. “Hopelessly unfunny and uninspired,” said the Los Angeles Times. “Falls upon every cliche ever thought of,” said Variety. And The Hollywood Reporter declared the film to be “utterly devoid of charm, style or humor.” Siskel and Ebert would agree it was one of the worst movies of the year.
The film would open on 51 screens in New York City and 14 in Los Angeles, and the opening weekend grosses were $375k, roughly half of what Fade to Black had opened to a few months earlier. By week three, the film was completely gone from all theatres, and American Cinema would have trouble booking it in more than a handful of theatres across the rest of the nation. The $15m films would be completely gone from theatres before the end of March, with less than $2m in ticket sales.
The company’s next hopes were pinned on entertainer Mac Davis. It’s hard to explain Mac Davis in 2022 to people who weren’t around in the late 70s and early 80s. He was an amiable enough man who after getting his start writing songs for Elvis Presley and Nancy Sinatra in the 60s, became a popular country singer in the early 70s, which he was able to parlay into his own somewhat successful variety show on NBC that ran between 1974 and 1976. He was able to turn that gig into a leading role in the 1979 football-themed North Dallas Forty with Nick Nolte. When that movie became an unexpected hit, Davis would give this whole acting thing another shot, and the results would be Cheaper to Keep Her.
Davis plays William Dekker, a newly divorced swinger, because, remember, this is the early 80s, who goes to work for an attorney as an investigator. He needs to track down and find divorced men who have reneged on their alimony and child support payments, with the money he earns from these assignments going to cover his own alimony payments.
The cast also includes Tovah Feldshuh as the lawyer Dekker works for, beloved comedic actors Jack Gilford and Rose Marie, and the great Ian McShane, still more than twenty years away from becoming a star from his starring role on Deadwood.
Like Charlie Chan, the reviews for Cheaper to Keep Her were downright vicious.
Gene Siskel would vivisect the movie, both in his Chicago Tribune review and on his Sneak Preview show with Roger Ebert. On the show, Siskel would name the movie his Dog of the Week, calling it a pathetic comedy with misleading advertising, while in his written review, he would note the film was a cheaply made, sloppily photographed comedy that isn't even on a par with the few made-for-TV movies I've seen. He would predict the film would disappear from Chicago screens within a week.
Although it wouldn’t open in Chicago until March 27th, 1981, he wouldn’t be too far off when the film opened in Los Angeles and San Francisco on March 13th. On twenty screens between the two California cities, the film would gross $37. The Chicago opening was better, $52k from twelve theatres, but it wouldn’t be enough to save the film. After seven weeks, it would be pulled from release with a gross of less than half a million dollars.
Next up for American Cinema was an action crime comedy called High Risk that actually featured actors you’ve heard of, including James Brolin, Lindsay Wagner from The Bionic Woman, Cleavon Little from Blazing Saddles, and James Coburn, and two Oscar winners in Ernest Borgnine and Anthony Quinn.
That’s actually a pretty darn good cast.
In the film, four naive Americans in need of easy cash, played by Brolin, Little, Chick Venera, and future X-Men star Bruce Davison, decide to fly to Colombia and raid the safe of a notorious drug lord, played by Coburn, with connections to the corrupt military regime. Wagner shows up halfway through the movie, as a woman they meet in a Colombian jail, who ends up being helpful in escaping, and Quinn shows up later as a local rebel leader.
Writer/director Stewart Raffill, who had directed the mid-70s hit The Adventures of the Wilderness Family and would go on to direct two of the most notoriously bad movies of the 80s and 90s, Mac and Me and Tammy and the T-Rex, says he got the idea to make High Risk after he had been hired to make a documentary about people in Spanish prisons who had been imprisoned for smuggling hash out of Morocco, only to found out while he was editing the footage together that those who had financed the documentary were actually drug runners who wanted to find out how these people were able to smuggle hash out of North Africa before they had been caught.
The film would shoot in Mexico and Nicaragua during the spring of 1980, and American Cinema would pick up the distribution rights later in the fall, setting a release for the early summer 1981 season.
High Risk would open on 27 screens in four markets, including eight screens in Los Angeles, on May 29th, where it would gross a not-bad $149k. It would be the second-highest opener that weekend, behind John Waters’ Polyester, but overall, it would open in 17th place. It would hang on a few more weeks in smaller markets, but it was clear that after the film opened on 33 screens in New York City on June 26th and grossed about $125k, less than a three-movie Bruce Lee mini-festival that had opened on the third fewer screens, that High Risk was not going to be a high reward for the company. The film would be gone from theatres before the end of July, with less than a million dollars in ticket sales. This is kind of a shame because it wasn’t that bad a film, and several critics echoed that sentiment. Janet Maslin of the New York Times would find the film unusual but surprisingly decent while praising the casting. Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times would note it was “a far cut above the usual action-adventure film.” And Gene Siskel, in his review for the Chicago Tribune, would call the movie “a pleasant surprise.”
The next American Cinema film for 1981 was planned as their fourth movie with Chuck Norris, but when Norris decided to try his fortunes elsewhere, Leone went looking for his next Chuck Norris, and he would find one in Joe Lewis.
Like Chuck Norris, Joe Lewis discovered martial arts while in the military in the 1960s. Like Chuck Norris, Joe Lewis became a champion on the karate tournament circuit. And, according to Hong Kong cinema historian Bey Logan, Joe Lewis was Bruce Lee’s first choice to play the villain in The Way of the Dragon, the role that would give Chuck Norris his first major motion picture exposure. When Leone came knocking on Lewis’s door in 1980, Lewis had seen what American Cinema did for Chuck Norris, and was ready to have that for himself.
Force: Five has Lewis as, shockingly, I know, a martial-arts expert who assembles a team of fellow martial artists to rescue a senator's daughter from an island ruled by the evil leader of a fanatical religious cult. If you think it sounds more than a bit like the plot for the 1976 Jim Kelly martial arts movie Hot Potato, you wouldn’t be wrong. Joining Kelly on the adventure were several other martial arts stars, including Richard Norton and Benny Urquidez, and a young actress making her first major motion picture, Amanda Wyss, who would later find fame as Lisa in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Tina in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Like many of their films, American Cinema would rush Force: Five through production and post-production, in order to get the film into theatres as quickly as possible. But there was extra incentive to get the film into theatres pretty quick. Avco Embassy, the mini-major distributor who had purchased the rights to release Chuck Norris’s An Eye for an Eye, had scheduled that film to be released in mid-August, and wouldn’t it be a feather in American Cinema’s cap if their Chuck Norris replacement could gross more than the new Chuck Norris film. Let me ask you this, dear listener… how do you think it all turned out?
The $3m Force: Five went into production in Los Angeles on January 26th, had finished shooting before the end of February, and was ready to be released before the end of May. Leone would set a release date of June 26th, a full seven weeks before the new Chuck Norris film. The film would open on 52 screens in Indianapolis, Minneapolis, and St. Louis, with a gross of $402k. Not bad, considering other new movie choices at the time included the new James Bond movie, For Your Eyes Only, The Great Muppet Caper, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Stripes, and Superman 2. The following week, the film would open on 73 screens in New York City, and the gross would just that one region would be a healthy $445k. After three weeks, the film would have grossed an impressive $1.2m from just those four markets. And when the film opened in Los Angeles on July 31st, the city’s mayor, Tom Bradley, declared a “Martial Arts Day” in recognition of the movie’s opening in town, noting in his speech that most American martial arts movies were being filmed in Los Angeles.
If only mayoral proclamations could help bookings. Force: Five would only open on six screens in Los Angeles, but it would gross a decent $42k.
By the time the Chuck Norris movie An Eye for an Eye opened in theatres in mid-August, Force: Five was mostly played out around the nation, with a gross of just under $3m.
The Chuck Norris movie would gross $9.5m. Not as much as his movies with American Cinema, but more than triple what the movie that almost starred him grossed with his replacement.
Now, long-time listeners of this show know that, when I do these episodes about a specific distributor, at some point, the proverbial other shoe is going to drop.
And we’re nowhere at that part, which is actually a bit surprising since American Cinema had several relative hit films, and the films that did miss, outside of Charlie Chan, didn’t bomb as badly or as often as other companies who found themselves facing bankruptcy. They had only released a dozen movies by this point, so what happened?
The company was trying to grow itself, and one of the best ways for an independent distributor to grow is to release a steady stream of films. If an exhibitor like Mann or United Artists or General Cinema can rely on your company to keep providing movies for them to play, they’ll give you better deals and better placements, because they can count on you. And to do that, you need a lot of capital. Capital to make the movies, capital to release the movies, and capital to acquire movies to keep your pipeline filled.
In the spring of 1981, as they were going into production on two of what would hopefully be the next wave of successful films, Michael Leone would go to The Bankers Trust Company, a lender who specialized in big loans to companies and corporations, to borrow more than $10m to keep the American Cinema machine moving along. But as the company kept not recouping production costs on the films they did finance, and not recouping the acquisition costs of the films they purchased, Leone would need to borrow more money as a stop-gap, in the hopes that their next film would be a hit that got them back on track.
In the late 1970s, a show that is now colloquially known as a jukebox musical opened on Broadway that would become a smash hit. Beatlemania had no story. Just four guys on a stage, who kinda looked like and sounded like John, Paul, George, and Ringo, especially from the balconies, playing the music of The Beatles. “Not The Beatles,” ads for the show would tout, “but an incredible simulation.” Love for the band hadn’t died off, several years after the band broke up, and for many people, this would be the closest they would ever get to see The Beatles play live.
The show would play more than a thousand shows on Broadway between May 1977 and October 1979, and its success would surely mean a filmed version would someday open in theatres.
The film would be shot in the fall of 1980, completed just weeks before John Lennon was brutally murdered. American Cinema, hoping there would be a resurgence in Beatlemania after Lennon’s murder, would overbid every other distributor in order to secure theatrical distribution rights. They would schedule the film for release beginning August 7th, 1981. Two weeks before that release, American Cinema would borrow another $8m from Bankers Trust, in order to finance the prints and advertising on the film, its planned next wave expansions of High Risk and Force: Five, and a deal to acquire the movie rights to Martin Cruz Smith’s best-selling book Gorky Park.
The company would book Beatlemania into 54 theatres in New York City, including the famed Ziegfeld Theatre. But despite a fairly sizable media buy, New Yorkers were either not over Lennon’s death or despised the thought of a not-The Beatles movie coming out less than eight months after his death, and pretty much ignored the movie. The box office tally would be less than $100k, and after it was clear the numbers would not get better, Bankers Trust would seize the company on Friday, August 14th, literally minutes before Leone was going to have a contract signing press ceremony in the American Cinema offices with producers Howard W. Koch, Jr. and Gene Kirkwood to announce the Gorky Park deal.
There were three movies in various stages of production or post-production that Bankers Trust would become owners of due to their seizure of the company.
I, The Jury was an adaptation of one of crime novelist Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer mystery novels that were written by and were going to be directed by cult filmmaker Larry Cohen. At $7m, it was going to be Cohen’s most expensive film to date and would have featured his biggest name cast to date, including Armand Asante, Barbara Carrera, Alan King, Geoffrey Lewis, and Paul Sorvino.
Production would begin in New York City on April 22nd, 1981, in the hopes of shooting the film before an expected Directors Guild strike could possibly shut down production in June. But after five days of production, American Cinema would fire Cohen, claiming he was already one day over schedule and $100k over budget. Cohen felt he was fired because he was promised $7m to make the film but American Cinema only gave the producers $5.5m, and he made his feelings about being shortchanged known to the powers that be.
The company would bring Richard T. Heffron, whose credits included Futureworld, the 1976 sequel to Michael Crichton’s 1973 hit Westworld, and the 1977 Peter Fonda film Outlaw Blues, in to complete the film. Ironically, American Cinema would have to pay Cohen an additional $500k in order to acquire certain rights Cohen still owned for the rights to adapt the book and two others into movies, and the final film would cost American Cinema more than $11m.
The Entity was an adaptation of the 1978 Frank DeFelitta horror novel, which had originally been optioned by Universal Studios before selling the rights to American Cinema in 1980. Sidney J. Furie, whose credits included the Diana Ross movie Lady Sings the Blues and The Boys in Company C, was hired to direct the film, and a planned shoot in Europe and the Middle East was scheduled for late 1980. Barbara Hershey would be cast in the lead role of Carla, a single mother in Los Angeles who is violently raped by an invisible assailant at the opening of the story, only ten days before the film began production. Based on the real-life story of Doris Bither, a mother in Culver City CA who claimed in 1974 she was being continually assaulted by a poltergeist, the $9m film would shoot in Los Angeles, sometimes just blocks from where Bither claims to have been attacked, between March and June 1981.
Tough Enough was an original screenplay about a down on his luck country singer in Fort Worth TX who enters a tough man competition to help pay the bills, only to find surprising success in the ring. 27-year-old Dennis Quaid would be cast in his first leading role as the singer-turned-fighter, and his supporting cast would include Stan Shaw, Warren Oates, Pam Grier, and Wilford Brimley. The $5m film would shoot in Dallas and New York City between April and June 1981. The film would be written by Michael Leone’s brother John Leone, who had also written and directed the 1978 Henry Fonda movie The Great Smokey Roadblock.
John Leone had also started Tough Enough as the director, but he would be dismissed as director after the first week of production when the first dailies reached the Hollywood offices of American Cinema. Michael Leone and fellow producer Andrew Pfeffer agreed that despite the family connection, they needed to move quickly to save the production. They would bring in Richard Fleischer, whose thirty-year directing career at that point had included such films as Fantastic Voyage, Doctor Doolittle, and Soylent Green, who would jump right into the production after only five days, but many of the actors, including Quaid and Oates, openly protested the firing of Leone as director, as well as the arrival of an unidentified person who would turn out to be a non-union writer hired to help Fleischer re-shape the movie. While John Leone had been fired as the director, he wasn’t exactly banned from the set. He couldn’t be present for any rewrites at the time because as a member of the Writers Guild, he could not participate in any rewrites because the guild was on strike while the movie was in production.
In December 1981, once Bankers Trust had time to figure everything out with American Cinema’s finances, they discovered the company had more than a thousand creditors who were owed $57m in debt, while the company only had about $4m in rentals from theatres still due back to them.
In order to get some of the money back, Bankers Trust would sell the rights to the already released American Cinema films to Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, and make a separate deal to sell the three completed but unreleased movies, I, The Jury, The Entity, and Tough Enough, to Twentieth Century-Fox, for an undisclosed amount.
Fox would first release I, The Jury into theatres on Friday, October 8th. United Film Distribution would also choose this date to release Q: The Winged Serpent into theatres, the film that Larry Cohen came up within a week to make after he had been fired off I, The Jury. I, The Jury would gross slightly more than $1.5m in its brief theatrical run, while Q would gross more than that from just 100 theatres in New York City after three weeks.
The Entity would be released in March 1983, under a stream of protests from women's rights groups who deemed the film offensive due to its graphic depictions of sexual assault. Barbara Hershey would tell a reporter around the time of release that resented being put in the position of defending the film. “We worked really hard not to make it exploitative,” she would say. “Rape is one of the ugliest if not the ugliest things that can happen to someone. It's the murder of a sort. I have no answer for those people who are offended.”
The protests probably helped the film a bit, as it would gross $3.6m in its opening weekend from 1 theatres, on its way to a $13.27m final gross.
Tough Enough would hit theatres in March 1983, and Dennis Quaid would have to wait a while longer to become a movie star. The film would gross only $725k in its opening weekend from 538 theatres, and disappear shortly thereafter with a final gross of $2.4m.
After the demise of American Cinema, Michael Leone was done with the movie business, although the movie business wasn’t necessarily done with him. In 1996, Chuck Norris would sue Leone and what was left of American Cinema for $100k in unpaid income that Norris says he was still due from Good Guys Wear Black, which a Los Angeles Superior Court ruled was due to Norris in 1987 during the company’s bankruptcy hearings.
Michael Leone would pass away in his home in Del Mar CA, three days shy of his 54th birthday.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 75, This Podcast is Rated PG-13, is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered in this episode.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.