169: Cannon’s Prestige Pictures (with Jessica Ritchey) (Patreon)

The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns for a show about Cannon Films, and the aggressive attempt by “The Go-Go Boys” Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus to bring legitimacy to their schlock studio by financing projects designed to win them awards and prestige.

Despite the critical success of some of these offerings, and some high-profile wins and nominations, none of these films were financially successful thanks to Cannon’s hapless marketing strategies and their bad reputation within the film industry (including staggering money losses, a shareholder revolt and an SEC investigation into their accounting practices). Cannon would file for bankruptcy by the end of the eighties.

We discuss 5 of these prestige projects: the dark journalism thriller Street Smart (which Cannon financed for Christopher Reeve in exchange for starring in Superman IV, the film that put Morgan Freeman on the map), Andrei Konchalovsky’s masterful Runaway Train (the best film the studio ever made) and his followup, the American gothic drama Shy People (an award winner at Cannes which vanished without a trace), Nicolas Roeg’s Castaway (the film Oliver Reed was promoting the night he almost beat up David Letterman), and Barbet Schroeder’s black comedy about alcoholism Barfly with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.

Street Smart, Runaway Train and Shy People are currently available to stream on Tubi.

Follow Jessica Ritchey on Bluesky, and support her work on Patreon.

Trailers

Street Smart (Jerry Schatzberg, 1987)

Runaway Train (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1985)

Shy People (Andrei Konchalovsky, 1987)

Castaway (Nicolas Roeg, 1986)

Barfly (Barbet Schroeder, 1987)