MVD Entertainment Group’s popular “Rewind Collection” promotional label well be getting a new member on July 20. That is the street date for both DVD and Blu-ray editions of documentary filmmaker Hilla Medalia’s The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films.
Beginning in the 1950s there arose an independent film production and distribution company that was run by James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff. This was American International Pictures and it was home to Roger Corman and other newbie filmmakers, then came the Edgar Allan Poe films with Vincent Price … and the “Beach Party” movies followed with Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon.
Everything, for something like 17, 18 years, was gold for AIP and then Nicholson died and the magic was gone … 1972, who would fill the void?
The answer came in 1979 when two cousins, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, bought the near-defunct Cannon Films (which was founded during the final years of the AIP cycle) and moved their filmmaking operation from Israel to Hollywood.
With street-smarts and hutzpah they developed a magic action formula of making films, with a modest budget and a tight schedule — starring Chuck Norris, Jean Claude VanDamme, Charles Bronson, Michael Dudikoff and Dolph Lundgren — that found an audience and hit after hit after poured into cinemas worldwide. Cannon Films went from nothing to an empire and within ten years the team of Golan/Globus was producing thirty to forty films per year!!
The Go-Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films follows the history of the Golan/Globus magic … the rise, the glory years and the eventual split. One day the magic was gone. And no one has quite replicated either the AIP or Cannon Films production and distribution model in the thirty years that have passed since Cannon Films closed its doors.
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