This week on The 80s Movie Podcast, host Edward Havens falls down a research rabbit hole and uncovers one of the strangest forgotten films of the 1980s: Oklahoma Smugglers, a little-seen 1987 action-comedy that seemingly vanished from existence after a limited Southern theatrical release and a lone VHS release in 1988. What happened to this lost movie — and why couldn’t anyone see it for decades?

Along the way, we explore the growing problem of disappearing films, from silent-era lost cinema to modern streaming removals, and how obscure independent movies can slip through the cracks of film history. Featuring discussion of film preservation, regional theatrical distribution, forgotten VHS releases, and the bizarre history behind one of the rarest 80s movies ever discussed on the podcast.

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TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

You were probably expecting the third part of the Miramax Films in the 1980s series, and we will get to that one the next episode. But as often happens while I’m researching, I’ll fall down a rabbit hole that piques my interest, and this time, it was not only discovering a film I had never heard of, but it fits within a larger discussion about disappearing media.

But before we get started, I need to send out a thank you to Matthew Martin, who contacted me via email after our previous episode. I had mentioned I couldn’t find any American playdates for the Brian Trenchard-Smith movie The Quest around the time of its supposed release date of May 1st, 1986. Matthew sent me an ad from the local Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review dated July 18th, 1986, which shows the movie playing on two screens in Spokane, including a drive-in where it shared a screen with “co-hit” Young Sherlock Holmes. With that help, I was also able to find The Quest playing on five screens in the Seattle/Tacoma area and two in Spokane on July 11th, where it grossed a not very impressive $14,200. In its second week in the region, it would drop down to just three screens, and the gross would fall to just $2800, before disappearing at the end of that second week. Thank you to Matthew for that find, which gave me an idea.

On a lark, I tried searching for the movie again, this time using the director’s last name and any day in 1986, and ended up finding 35 playdates for The Quest in Los Angeles, matinees only on Saturday, October 25th and Sunday, October 26th, one to three shows each day on just those two days.

Miramax did not report grosses.

And this is probably the most anyone has talked about The Quest and its lack of American box office. And with that, we’re done with it. For now.

On this episode, we’re going to talk about one of the many movies from the 1980s that has literally disappeared from the landscape. What I mean by that is that it was an independently made film that was given a Southern regional release in the South in 1987, has never been released on video since its sole VHS release in 1988, and isn’t available on any currently widely used video platform, physical or streaming.

I’ll try to talk about this movie, Oklahoma Smugglers, as much as I can in a moment, but this problem of disappearing movies has been a problem for nearly a century. I highlight this as there has been a number of announcements recently about streaming-only shows and movies being removed from their exclusive streaming platform, some just seven weeks after their premieres.

This is a problem.

Let me throw some statistics at you.

Film Foundation, a non-profit organization co-founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990 that is dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema, has estimated that half of all the films ever made before 1950 no longer exist in any form, and that only 10% of the films produced before the dawn of the sound era of films are gone forever. The Deutsche Kinemathek, a major film archive founded in Berlin in 1963, also estimates that 80-90% of all silent films ever have been lost, a number that’s a bit higher than the US Library of Congress’s estimation that 75% of all silent film are gone. That includes more than 300 of Georges Méliès’ 500 movies, a 1926 film, The Mountain Eagle, that was the second film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and London After Midnight, considered by many film historians to be “the holy grail” of lost films. A number of films from directors like Michael Curtiz, Allan Dwan, and Leo McCarey are gone. And The Betrayal, the final film from pioneering Black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, is no longer with us.

There are a number of reasons why many of these early movies are gone. Until the early 1950s, movies were often shot and printed on nitrate film, a highly flammable substance that can continue to burn even if completely submersed in water. During the earlier years of Hollywood, there were a number of fires on studio lots and in film vaults were original negatives of films were stored. Sometimes, studios would purposely incinerate old prints of films to salvage the silver particles within the nitrate film. Occasionally, a studio would destroy an older film when they remade that film with a new cast and director. And sometimes films, like Orson Welles’ original cut of The Magnificent Ambersons, would be dumped into the ocean off the Southern California coast, when studios no longer wanted to pay to store these elements.

Except Oklahoma Smugglers does not fit into any of those scenarios. It’s less than forty years old, in color, with a synchronized soundtrack. It’s crime was being a small budgeted independently distributed movie from an independent production company that was only released in a small section of the United States, and never got any traction outside of that region.

Not that this alone is why it disappeared.

You may recall hearing about David Zaslav, the head of the mega entertainment conglomerate Warner Brothers Discovery, cancelling the release of two completed films, a Batgirl movie that would have featured Michael Keaton’s return as Batman a full year before The Flash, and a sequel to a fairly successful Scooby Doo animated movie. Warner Brothers had spent more than $200m between the two films. They were shot, edited and scored, and ready for release. Then Zaslav decided these were of the quality he expected for Warner Brothers movies, and wrote them off for the tax break. Unless someone at Warners somewhere down the line decides to pay back the tax incentive to the Fed, these two movies will never legally be allowed to be shown, effectively making them lost films.

Again, there are many ways for a film to become lost.

In our case, it seems that Oklahoma Smugglers is an unfortunate victim of being the one and only film to be produced by Cambridge Entertainment Corporation, based in Needham MA. The company was founded on September 10th, 1986 and went into involuntary dissolution on December 31st, 1990, so it’s very likely that the company went bankrupt and no company was interested in picking up the assets of a small independent production company with only one tangible asset, this movie.

So here is what I could find about Oklahoma Smugglers.

The film was produced and directed by Ota Richter, whose only previous film work was writing, producing a directing a horror comedy called Skullduggery in 1982. The film has its fans, but they are few and far between. Three years later, in 1985, Richter would work with a first time screenwriter named Sven Simon to come up with the story for Oklahoma Smugglers. When the script was completed, Richter would raise the money he would need to shoot the movie in Toronto with a no-name cast lead by George Buzz and John Novak, and a four week production schedule between February 24th and March 21st, 1986. One can presume the film was locked before September 10th, 1986, when Cambridge Entertainment Corporation was founded, with Ota Rickter as its treasurer. The other two members of the Cambridge board, company President Neil T. Evans, and company Secretary Robert G. Parks, appear to have not had any involvement with the making of the movie, and according to the Open Corporates database, the men had never worked together before and never worked together again after this company.

But what Neil Evans did have, amongst the six companies he was operating in and around the Boston area at the time, was a independent distribution company called Sharp Features, which he had founded in April of 1981, and had already distributed five other movies, including the Dick Shawn comedy Good-bye Cruel World, which apparently only played in Nashville TN in September 1982, and a 1985 documentary about The Beach Boys.

So after a year of shopping the film around the major studios and bigger independent distributors, the Cambridge team decided to just release it themselves through Sharp Features. They would place an ad in the September 16th, 1987 issue of Variety, announcing the film, quote unquote, opens the Southeast on September 18th, just two days later.

Now, you’ll notice I was able to find a lot of information about the people behind the film. About the companies they created or had already created to push the film out into the market. The dates it filmed, and where it filmed. I have a lot of sources both online and in my office with more data about almost every film ever released. But what I can’t tell you is if the film actually did open on September 18th, 1987. Or how many theatres it played in. Or how much it grossed that first weekend. Or if any theatres retained it for a second week. Or any reviews of the movie from any contemporary newspaper or magazine. Outside of the same one single sentence synopsis of the movie, I had to turn to a Finnish VHS release of the film for a more detailed synopsis, which roughly translates back into English as such:

“Former Marines Hugo and Skip are living the best days of their lives. Hugo is a real country boy and Skip again from a "better family." Together they are a perfect pair: where Skip throws, Hugo hurls his fists. Mr. Milk, who offers security services, takes them on. Mr. Milk's biggest dream is to get hold of his nemesis "Oklahoma Smuggler" Taip's most cherished asset - a lucrative casino. Mr. Taip is not only a casino owner, but he handles everything possible, from arms smuggling to drugs. The fight for the ownership of the Oklahoma Smuggler casino is a humorous mix of fistfights, intrigues and dynamite where Hugo and Skip get the hero's part. What happens to the casino is another matter.”

Okay, that sounds like absolute crap.

But here’s the thing.

I actually enjoy checking out low budget movies that might not be very good but are at least trying to be something.

I would be very interested in seeing a movie like Oklahoma Smugglers. But I can’t the darn thing anywhere. It’s not posted to YouTube or Vimeo or any video sharing service I know of. It’s not on The Internet Archive. It’s not on any of the Russian video sites that I occasionally find otherwise hard to find movies.

There’s no entry for the film on Wikipedia or on Rotten Tomatoes. There is an IMDb page for the film, with a grand total of one user rating and one user review, both from the same person. There’s also only one rating and mini-review of it on Letterboxd, also from the same person. There is a page for the film on the Plex website, but no one has the actual film.

This film has, for all intents and purposes, vanished.

Is that a good thing?

Absolutely not.

While it’s highly likely Oklahoma Smugglers is not a very good movie, there’s also a chance it might actually be stupid, goofy fun, and even if its a low quality dupe off a VHS tape, it should be available for viewing. There should be some kind of movie repository that has every movie still around that is in the public domain be available for viewing. Or if the owners of a movie with a still enforceable copyright have basically abandoned said copyright by not making the film available for consumption after a certain amount of time or for a certain amount of time, it also become available. This would not only help films like Oklahoma Smugglers be discovered, but it would also give film lovers the chance to see many movies they’ve heard about but have never had the opportunity to see. Even the original theatrical version of the first three Star Wars movies are no longer available commercially. Outside of a transfer of the early 1990s laserdisc to DVD in 2004, no one has been able to see the original versions in nearly twenty years. The closest one can get now are fan created “Despecialized” editions on the internet.

Film fans tend to think of film as a forever medium, but it’s becoming ever increasingly clear that it far from that. And we’re not just talking about American movies either. When I said it is estimated that half the films ever made are considered lost, that includes movies from all corners of the globe, across several generations. From Angola and Australia to the former Yugoslavia and Zambia. Gone forever.

But every once in a while, a forgotten film can come back to life. Case in point, The Exiles, a 1958 film written, produced and directed by Kent Mackenzie, about a group of Native Americans who have left their reservation in search of a new life in Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood. After premiering at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, the film was never picked up for theatrical distribution, and for many years, the only way to see it was the occasional screening of the film as some college film society screening of the one 16mm print of the film that was still around. Cinephiles were aware of the film, but it wouldn’t be until the exceptional 2004 video essay Los Angeles Plays Itself by Thom Anderson that many, including myself, even learned of the film’s existence. It would take another four years of legal maneuvering for Milestone Films to finally give The Exiles a proper theatrical and home video release. The following year, in 2009, with new public exposure to the film, the Library of Congress included The Exiles on their National Film Registry, for being of culturally, historically or aesthetically" significance. In the case of The Exiles, much of Bunker Hill was torn down shortly after the making of the film, so in many ways, The Exiles is a living visual history of an area of Los Angeles that no longer exists in that way. It’s a good film regardless, but as a native Angelino, I find The Exiles to be fascinating for all these places that disappeared in just a few short years before my own birth.

So, that’s the episode for this week.

Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again next week, when we continue our miniseries on Miramax Films in the 1980s.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Oklahoma Smugglers.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.

The Lost 1980s Movie Nobody Could Find For Years: Oklahoma Smugglers (1987)