Re: Gone With or Without fanfare
Posted: August 9th, 2014, 11:33 am
Along with his cousin, Menahem Golan produced some of the more memorable and some of the schlockiest films of the 1970s and 1980s. He died yesterday while walking with his family.
From the Hollywood Reporter:
Legendary filmmaker Menahem Golan, co-founder of The Cannon Group production company and Israeli cinema pioneer, has died. He was 85.
According to multiple Israeli news outlets, Golan lost consciousness while strolling outside his house in the city of Jaffa with family members in the early hours of Friday evening. Ambulances rushed to the scene, and following attempts of more than an hour to resuscitate him, paramedics pronounced him dead.
With cousin and partner Yoram Globus, Golan ran Cannon Films for a decade, releasing more than a dozen films a year in its prime. They bought the ailing company, which was launched in 1967, for $500,000 in 1979 and fueled an appetite for B-films that was created by the invention of the VCR. For a time, Cannon was on the brink of becoming the seventh Hollywood “major” studio.
"I'm in complete and utter shock; I cannot come to grips with the news", Globus told THR from his home in Tel Aviv.
“Menahem lived, breathed and ate cinema, and he is undoubtedly a founding member of the Israeli cinematic landscape, locally and all of its appeal internationally,” he added. “We both managed to make our mark in Hollywood in our years working there and had the great fortune in life to make a living from our one and only hobby — not something that a lot of people get to do.”
Golan produced more than 200 films including the action hits The Delta Force (1986) starring Chuck Norris and the Death Wish sequels toplined by Charles Bronson.
He also produced such high-octane fare as Missing in Action (1984), also starring Norris, and its sequels; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986); the lightly regarded Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), which effectively disabled the franchise for years; Masters of The Universe (1987), starring Dolph Lundgren; and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport (1988).
In the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, which played this month at the Melbourne International Film Festival, THR critic David Rooney noted that music supervisor Richard Kraft likened the Cannon product pipeline to bowel movements dumped onto the international market with scant concern for quality or plot coherence: “You flush it. You make another one.”
Cannon, though, also was behind much loftier fare, like John Cassavetes’ Love Streams (1984), which won Berlin’s Golden Bear, Robert Altman’s Fool for Love (1985), Franco Zefferelli's Otello (1986), Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987) and Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987).
For more:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/m ... ion-724260
From the Hollywood Reporter:
Legendary filmmaker Menahem Golan, co-founder of The Cannon Group production company and Israeli cinema pioneer, has died. He was 85.
According to multiple Israeli news outlets, Golan lost consciousness while strolling outside his house in the city of Jaffa with family members in the early hours of Friday evening. Ambulances rushed to the scene, and following attempts of more than an hour to resuscitate him, paramedics pronounced him dead.
With cousin and partner Yoram Globus, Golan ran Cannon Films for a decade, releasing more than a dozen films a year in its prime. They bought the ailing company, which was launched in 1967, for $500,000 in 1979 and fueled an appetite for B-films that was created by the invention of the VCR. For a time, Cannon was on the brink of becoming the seventh Hollywood “major” studio.
"I'm in complete and utter shock; I cannot come to grips with the news", Globus told THR from his home in Tel Aviv.
“Menahem lived, breathed and ate cinema, and he is undoubtedly a founding member of the Israeli cinematic landscape, locally and all of its appeal internationally,” he added. “We both managed to make our mark in Hollywood in our years working there and had the great fortune in life to make a living from our one and only hobby — not something that a lot of people get to do.”
Golan produced more than 200 films including the action hits The Delta Force (1986) starring Chuck Norris and the Death Wish sequels toplined by Charles Bronson.
He also produced such high-octane fare as Missing in Action (1984), also starring Norris, and its sequels; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986); the lightly regarded Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987), which effectively disabled the franchise for years; Masters of The Universe (1987), starring Dolph Lundgren; and Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Bloodsport (1988).
In the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films, which played this month at the Melbourne International Film Festival, THR critic David Rooney noted that music supervisor Richard Kraft likened the Cannon product pipeline to bowel movements dumped onto the international market with scant concern for quality or plot coherence: “You flush it. You make another one.”
Cannon, though, also was behind much loftier fare, like John Cassavetes’ Love Streams (1984), which won Berlin’s Golden Bear, Robert Altman’s Fool for Love (1985), Franco Zefferelli's Otello (1986), Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987) and Barbet Schroeder’s Barfly (1987).
For more:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/m ... ion-724260