This episode continues an irregular series that takes a look back at a minor cinematic phenomenon that happened more often in the 1980s than in any other decade: the one-time-only distribution company.
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We talk about the 1985 cocaine crime drama The Texas Godfather, featuring Vince Edwards and Paul L. Smith, the 1986 comedy Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter, starring Paul Sorvino, Abe Vigoda and Lorne Greene, and the 1986 gender switch comedy Willy/Milly (aka I Was a Teenage Boy, aka Something Special), starring Pamela Segall, Patty Duke, John Glover and Seth Green.
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On this episode, we’ll be continuing with our ongoing series on orphan films, movies that were the sole release from their distributor.
Our first movie this week is a movie that even I had never heard of until I started doing the research for the next movie I’m going to be talking about today. While I was verifying what I remember about that movie from its release in 1986, I discovered I was right and wrong about who distributed that, but happily discovered this film, which was produced by the same company as the other film, and happened to also be the only film distributed by the company who put it out into theatres, which in this case, was the company that produced it.
I’ll try to clear that up a bit.
In the early 1980s, a couple of would-be filmmakers, Robert Burge and Lou Wills, created a production company called Vandom International Pictures, in order to develop and produce independent feature films to be written and directed by Burge. In 1984, they would start production on their first film, an action film that was neither written nor directed by Burge, but if you have the chance to make a movie even if it’s not what you planned on doing first, you take it, because you never know if you’ll get another chance.
The movie, written by former Dean Martin Show and Carol Burnett Show writer Robert Hilliard, was not the kind of movie one would expect from a former writer for Dean Martin and Carol Burnett. Entitled The Milkman, the story told the tale of a New York City district attorney who secretly runs a cocaine-smuggling ring down in Lone Star state. But when one of his nemesis from The Big Apple tries to move in on the operation, the DA quits his job and heads south to keep things intact. Despite their status as first time filmmakers, Burge and Wills were able to sign a couple of name actors to appear in their film. Vince Edwards, best known for his six year run as Dr. Ben Casey on television, would be cast as the DA, while character actor Paul L. Smith, who memorably appeared as Bluto in Robert Altman’s musical version of Popeye, played the gangster who wants to muscle in on the drug operation.
Directed by first-time director Douglas F. Oneans, The Milkman would shoot throughout the Beaumont TX region for four weeks during June and July of 1984. And sometime during post-production, Burge and Wills would change the name of the movie to Sno-Line. That’s Sno, S N O, dash, line. You know, because cocaine.
Along with the new title would come a new teaser poster that would be sent to theatres in hopes of securing some theatrical runs. The poster would belie the main storyline for the movie, by concentrating on four of the supporting characters, making it look like some kind of cross between Miami Vice and some mid-70s pre Smokey and the Bandit Burt Reynolds movie like W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. And this is the actual tagline used on the poster:
Frankie wanted fast cars and women.
Victor wanted a fix.
Michael wanted revenge.
And Eddie had a plan.
But it meant taking it on the SNO-LINE.
Yeah, I wouldn’t know what the hell that meant if I was a theatergoer in 1984 or 1985 and saw that poster hanging in the lobby of my local movieplex.
When Vandom completed post-production on the film, they would send screening copies to many of the studio and independent distributors to make a distribution deal, but would receive no bites outside of a video distribution deal with Vestron Video, who themselves would soon enter the theatrical distribution game, but that’s another story for another show. But one of the conditions of the deal Vestron would place on the deal is that Vandom would need to get the film into theatres first. Because theatrical was, and continues to be, an important part of a movie’s life cycle.
But how do you get a movie into theatres if no one wants to distribute your movie? Bruge and Wills took it upon themselves to distribute the film to theatres.
Now, here’s where it gets complicated.
Vandom would release the film into theatres, at least in and around Beaumont TX, on Friday, September 13th, 1985. But since it wasn’t released in Los Angeles or New York City, and I have no access to the Beaumont Enterprise newspaper archives, I cannot tell you how many theatres it played in that day, or how well it did, or really, even, which title it was released under. Some records indicate the movie was released as The Texas Godfather, which makes sense with its partially mafia-based storyline. Some records indicate it was released as Sno-Line, which also makes sense but is not as good a title as The Texas Godfather. But no matter how many theatres it played in, or how well it did, or what title it was released under, it appears the movie never played in any theatre outside of southeast Texas. Vestron Video would release the movie on VHS in 1986, with a variety of titles depending on what part of the world you were living in. In many counties, it would be released as Texas Godfather. In some counties, it would be released as Sno-Line, but would get new artwork that made the film look like a Mad Max movie. In France, the video box would keep the Mad Max ripoff artwork but be released as Cocaine Connection. Not The Cocaine Connection. Just Cocaine Connection.
With their first film under their belt, they were able to find the financing for their second film, which this time would be co-written by and directed by Robert Burge. Alongside Texas Godfather writer Robert Hilliard, Burge’s directing debut would be a broad comedy about a bank executive who is under the dual strain of discovering some of his employees stealing money from the bank, and his wife demanding he get a vasectomy after she gives birth to… wait for it… their eighth child.
The aptly titled Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter would a better known cast than Texas Godfather, including Paul Sorvino, Abe Vigoda and Lorne Greene, along with several actors from Texas Godfather, including a young actress named Cassandra Edwards, making her lead debut as Sorvino’s put upon wife.
Like Texas Godfather, Vasectomy would be shot in and around Beaumont TX during the summer of 1985, and like Texas Godfather, Vasectomy would be pretty much ignored by every distributor once the film was completed. The only offer Vandom would get was from a company called Seymour Borde and Associates, which was actually a sub-distributor for independent distributors like New Line and Miramax, whose specialty was southern markets like Texas and Florida, and the company whom Burge and Wills had consulted with when they were planning the release of Texas Godfather. So while Seymour Borde and Associates had assisted a number of distributors to get their films into theatres in the South during the 70s and 80s, they were never credited with those releases, and they had never released a movie they had acquired themselves.
So despite not having any experience releasing a movie in major markets like Los Angeles or New York City, Vandom and Borde went all-in on the release, selecting September 26th, 1986 as their release date. The film would open in about 400 theatres nationwide, including on 80 screens in New York and 41 in Los Angeles.
Problem is, Vasectomy would have the luck of opening against a film that would become not just a smash hit but a cultural milestone. Crocodile Dundee. Not that anyone at Vandom or Borde could have possibly known when they picked that release date that this little movie from Australia with no stars would explode into the American consciousness the way it did. Nor did it help that the few newspapers who even reviewed the film were not very kind in their assessments. Critic Janet Maslin of the New York Times, usually rather verbose with her reviews, devoted a mere 199 words to her very negative critique of the movie. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times would devote a bit more space to his review, but the assessment would be similar to Maslin’s, calling the endeavor very depressing.
The film would be out of theatres after only two weeks with a gross of less than half a million dollars.
Vandom would never make or release another movie.
Paul Sorvino’s career would get a major boost in 2000, when Martin Scorsese cast the actor in Goodfellas, and his visage adorned many of the advertising materials for the film, alongside De Niro and Pesci and Liotta.
Cassandra Edwards would leave acting after one more role, as a colleague of Vince Edwards’ Dr. Ben Casey in a 1988 TV movie pilot for a proposed updated series. That show would not get picked up. For Lorne Greene, the star of Bonanza and Battlestar Galactica, Vasectomy would be his final appearance on screen. He would pass away less than a year after the movie was released.
Both Vandom International films, Texas Godfather and Vasectomy: A Delicate Matter, have been unavailable for home viewing in any form since their VHS releases more than thirty years ago. You can find a Japanese subtitled copy of a Texas Godfather VHS tape on YouTube, under the Sno-Line title, but Vasectomy is impossible to find anywhere.
Our third film today is, like Texas Godfather, one that is known by multiple titles.
Back in 1985, Pamela Segall was an 18 year old actress who had made her film debut three years earlier as Dolores Rebchuck in 1982’s Grease 2, and had co-starred on The Facts of Life in 1983 and 1984.
Paul Schneider was an up-and-coming director whose first film, 1983’s Sweetwater, was still waiting to be picked up for distribution, despite having a bona-fide star in the lead, Diane Ladd. But despite the lack of enthusiasm from distributors for his film, Schneider would get hired to direct another feature, Willy/Milly, based on a 1968 story by New York Times Book Review writer Alan H. Friedman, in which a young tomboy who always wondered what it was like to be a boy wakes up one morning to discover she is now indeed a boy. Schneider and the production team would audition hundreds of young actresses to look for just the right mix of acting and comedic timing and someone who could pass for both a boy and a girl, and Segall would get chosen for her first leading film role. Oscar winner Patty Duke and character actor John Glover would be cast as Milly/Willy’s parents, and the film would feature up and coming actors Corey Parker and Seth Green in supporting roles.
The film would shoot in and around Atlanta during the fall of 1985, and post-production would be completed in the spring of 1986. And as you’ve heard over and over again during these episodes, the film would be sent out to and rejected by practically every major and minor distributor around. There would be one small nibble, from a company called Cinema Group Ventures. They were a production company themselves, having produced such films as Walter Hill’s 1981 drama Southern Comfort, the 1983 Hudson Brothers comedy Hysterical, and the 1985 Penelope Spheeris drama Hollywood Vice Squad. But they had never distributed a movie themselves, having made distribution deals for their movies with the likes of 20th Century Fox and Avco Embassy Pictures. Well, that’s not 100% true. Hollywood Vice Squad would be quote unquote distributed by Cinema Group but all the bookings and distributing of prints to theatres would be handled by various sub-distributors like Seymour Borde and Associates who specialized in specific markets.
This would be the first time they would be handling distribution on their own. Because they were a small company with limited resources, they would follow the time-tested and proven concept of regional releasing. The film would first open under the title I Was a Teenage Boy in South Florida on May 2nd, 1986, before opening in the Boston/Providence region on July 22nd. But these were small releases, and there are no grosses available for these runs.
Cinema Group would decide to give the film a moderate nationwide push into theatres on November 14, 1986, which happened to be my 19th birthday, opening it under the title Something Special in 182 theatres that weekend. It would gross $214k in its first three days, good enough for 18th place on the box office charts, its per screen average of $1175 putting it far behind the other movies that opened that week, including the 30 screen Indiana regional release of the Gene Hackman drama Hoosiers, the Wesley Snipes drama Streets of Gold, and Every Time We Say Goodbye, the forgotten Israeli-made film that featured Tom Hanks in a dramatic role for the first time in his career.
To Cinema Group’s credit, despite the relative failure of that first moderate release push, they would keep giving the film more playdates. While the film would never open in New York City, they would give it a 28 theatre opening in Los Angeles on April 3rd, 1987, but it would be too little too late.
In the end, the final reported gross for Willy/Milly slash I Was a Teenage Boy slash Something Special would be just over $277k.
Pamela Segall would struggle as an actress throughout her twenties, until she found a measure of success as a voiceover actor for animated shows and video games in the late 1990s. Today, you know her under her married name, Pamela Adlon, the co-creator, main writer and star of the groundbreaking FX series Better Things, based mostly on her own life as an actress and divorced mother of three girls trying to keep everything afloat in the crazy world of Hollywood.
Like our other two films today, Something Special slash Willy/Milly slash I Was a Teenage Boy has never been released for home video consumption since its VHS release, although you can find multiple copies of the film on YouTube, at least in December 2021 you can.
And that’s our episode for today. Short and sweet.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again in two weeks, when Episode 67, Christmas 1981, is released.
Our next episode of The Orphans will premiere in early 2022, and will take a look back at several more of these orphaned films, including the first film to star Blondie lead singer Deborah Harry, and two mid-decade dramas, one a Sally Kellerman movie whose title would be taken for a much popular movie released two years later, and one a low-budget sci-fi drama featuring one of the stars of the early 80s cult show Square Pegs.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.
The FilmJerk Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.