Blade runners, deer hunters and blowing the bloody doors off : my life in cult movies by Deeley Michael

Author:Deeley, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Deeley, Michael, Motion picture producers and directors
Publisher: New York : Pegasus Books
Published: 2009-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

The Lion's Last Gasp

everybody in town. For me, these gatherings at George's were a very useful introduction to the Hollywood A-list.

I had been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since the producer Walter Mirisch (The Magnificent Seven, West Side Story), successfully proposed me in the late 1960s. And since 1964 I hadn't made a single picture that didn't have a US distributor and at least part-financier. The Woodfall films were made with United Artists' backing and British Lion dealt with various US majors. In short, I felt myself comfortable with the Hollywood system.

It was a big physical upheaval to move out of London on a more or less permanent basis but it was the only way to assert control of our new adventure; it would also be easier to raise money there. The late 1970s had been a real struggle in London. The city had been virtually deserted by the US majors and no private investment was available to fill the vacuum. In Hollywood, money was there for the grabbing - it was just a case of finding the right scripts.

The US majors and the bigger independent companies have been controlling cinema worldwide for nearly a century. Their enormous libraries and large annual output of movies and television films over the years have provided them with an ongoing cushion of revenue to offset the ups and downs of annual box-office revenues. For a producer with access to good material and the studios there is a striking difference from the European experience. EMI Films Inc. had that clout - I was only asking the studios to invest fifty per cent of the budget against their market of sixty per cent of the world. They had script, cast and director approval, no responsibility for budget overruns and no supervisory tasks at all.

Provided I could find a studio that liked the basic material, the deal was so attractive to them that it could be wrapped up very quickly. The five aforementioned pictures made during my spell were easily set up with five different studios and each one was net-profitable to its studio as well as to us at EMI.

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