Mark Hartley read my review of his documentary on Cannon Films, Electric Boogaloo. I was mixed and he wanted to address some of my complaints. (We had already booked the interview ahead of time because I wanted to ask questions about Cannon films regardless.) Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is a documentary about Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus’s film company that proliferated in ‘80s action movies. The documentary features many of Cannon’s stars and filmmakers sharing stories about key Cannon films. It plays again on Tuesday, Sept 23 at 11:25 and will surely be distributed like Hartley’s films Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed.
Related: Fantastic Fest 2014 Review: ‘Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films’
CraveOnline: Menahem Golan was still alive when you were making this film. Was he well enough and able to participate in Electric Boogaloo had he chosen to?
Mark Hartley: I guess so, yeah. We contacted him quite a while ago. This project went through a lot of development. I had more contact with Menahem than with Yoram. They were keen at first and then they wanted to be involved a little bit more than just being talking heads in the film, and that wasn’t going to be possible with our finance plan and also just in terms of telling an honest story. So they eventually stopped communication with us and made their own film.
Did they finish their film? I couldn’t find it.
Yes, it played at Cannes.
So it’s coming out. Have you seen their film?
I have, yeah. I waited until we’d totally finished ours but I think they’re good companion pieces. Although theirs is called The Inside Story of Cannon Films, it’s more about the relationship between Menahem and Yoram. They don’t really go into any individual films. It’s not at all humorous which I thought there’d be a lot of humor from their anecdotes.
Did you reach out to Chuck Norris and how did that correspondence go?
I’m a little bit sick of people asking about the people we didn’t get in the documentary. We managed to interview 90 people for this film. Obviously there were some people we got that were very hard to get and some people that we couldn’t get. Obviously we tried to get everyone but with a film like this, we could only shoot in a certain amount of time. We’re based in Australia, we’re flying out to America to shoot, it’s hard to corral everyone. It’s also hard to get everyone to agree be in it.
That’s true. I was very impressed to see Bo Derek interviewed, and she still looks great. How was your day with her?
She was really lovely. It was great with all these people. I have to be honest and say that the film is very different than the film I thought it would be. I read your review where you mentioned it’s mean-spirited. I don’t think it’s mean-spirited at all actually. From the feedback I’ve gotten, people say it’s actually very fair to what it was like working with Cannon. I think it’s more candid, honest and irreverent than mean-spirited. Certainly yeah, the project did change because I thought there’d be far more of an inspirational story. I thought it was going to be a David Vs. Goliath story. And then when we actually interviewed the people, the other thing about this documentary that I think people should realize is that everyone we interviewed were people who worked at Cannon. They were all there in the trenches. They were all there beside Menahem and Yoram. These aren’t fans, these aren’t historians. These are all people who were all there giving their firsthand impressions. I think you won’t find a more honest documentary about Cannon. So what changed was I thought it would be a very inspirational David vs. Goliath story but when you actually talk to the people who were there, it turns into far more of a cautionary tale.
I suppose I was maybe expecting the documentary you expected to make at first and maybe I’m still processing what it actually turned out to be.
It’s interesting because there are certain films in there like Lifeforce that I love and I would have loved it to be much more celebration about how crazy Lifeforce is, but it’s not my story. It’s the story of the people who were there so in a way you have to restrict yourself to the story that you’re being told by the people firsthand.
Certainly, and I understand Marina Sirtis was very upset by her experiences. Did you have to be very sensitive talking to her about it?
Yeah, certainly I knew with Marina and with Robin Sherwood from Death Wish II, Bronson’s daughter who also gets raped, I didn’t quite know how extreme it was to work with Michael [Winner] on set but I knew that he was tough and I knew that these are pretty emotionally charged scenes to do on screen. She opened up. I think for some of these people it was all about finally having a chance to talk about this stuff. I’m sure Marina never gets asked about anything other than “Star Trek” so to get asked about two films at the very, very start of her career which weren’t good experiences for her, just the fact that she says yes to the interviews let me believe that she actually wanted to talk about this stuff.
I believe she’s spoken highly of Charles Bronson. It was other people on Death Wish 3.
It was just dealing with Michael. Obviously we can’t put everything in the film and for legal reasons we certainly couldn’t put everything in the film.
So there was some material you couldn’t clear with legal?
Yes, but that was more to do with Michael Winner and basically trying to have some control over her career.
Were there any subjects you had to reign in because they were going really overboard talking shit about Cannon?
No, I think that the documentary has a heart in some way. I think people are genuinely fond of Menahem. No one in the film disputes that he didn’t love cinema, that he was driven by his love of film. The problem is that that was the downfall of the company. As Mike Rosenberg said, he only thought with his heart and you can’t hold that against anyone. No, people obviously had stories that they wanted to tell and that they thought needed to be told. A lot of them were critical of Cannon but a lot of them were very nostalgic of Cannon as well because a lot of these people got their break.
I understand you don’t want to talk about all the things that aren’t in the film, but do you have great stuff for the DVD?
Hopefully. We did segments on Firewalker and 10 to Midnight. There’s a really good section on Tough Guys Don’t Dance and lots more. There’s an extended Winner sequence. There’s a Spider-Man and Captain America sequence. Look, I think the film plays slightly too long anyway. People either want it to play 30 minutes longer or 30 minutes shorter depending on who you talk to. Unfortunately, all this material has got archive in it so we have to work out how we can include it with the archive or do we cut it without the archive. We haven’t cleared it.
In one amusing sequence, no one seemed to know what Stallone’s salary for Over the Top was.
Someone does, but with both that and the amount of films that they make, I thought it was better to print the legend. These things were so wildly reported, everyone had a different idea of it. I just wanted to emphasize that no one really was sure about any of these facts. I think $13 million is the figure that he actually got paid.
And there are many reasons that some departments would have a more accurate figure and others would exaggerate.
I think it’s more the point that Stallone’s agents also beefed that up as well so he could charge more on his next film.
The projects they never made sound as amazing as the ones they did. Do you know much more about what those Cannes market films would have been, or are they literally just titles and marquee names?
The one that I was totally obsessed by, the one I really thought was hilarious is they announced Tobe Hooper’s Pinocchio The Robot. There’s actually footage of Lee Marvin on the set of Delta Force telling a story about Menahem pitching him Pinocchio The Robot. I thought it would be great to talk to Tobe all about Pinocchio The Robot. Tobe had never heard of it.
What are your favorite Cannon films?
Lifeforce when I was a kid. I didn’t know it was a Cannon film but it’s a Tobe Hooper film. I knew it was a Dan O’Bannon film to tell you the truth when I first saw Lifeforce. Lifeforce was the one I remember seeing in the cinema when I was a kid and thinking it probably still is the greatest motion picture experience I ever had because it was such a lavish, over the top, money thrown at the screen, zombie vampire nudie film full of British actors all playing it straight. It still holds up to this day because the practical effects are so incredible.
The lambada films are a great place to end the film. Did Golan and Globus continue separately for a while?
We did have a Captain America sequence after that but I thought it was better ending with the battle of the lambadas which is Cannon’s space race in a way. The one thing that is missing from the film is the idea that these people were actually ahead of the audience. If you look at today’s blockbusters, you’ve got the Pirates of the Caribbean, you’ve obviously got Spider-Man, you’ve got Captain America and you’ve got films like Unstoppable. Cannon had the Spider-Man franchise for a long time, couldn’t get that film up. The only people who would take the punt on Polanski’s Pirates and release that. They made Runaway Train which is shot for shot Unstoppable. So in a way, they were 15 years ahead of the audience’s demand for these films. They just needed one of these films to hit and be that $100 million blockbuster, and we’d still be probably seeing that Cannon logo in front of films today.
Could you imagine if Roger Corman’s Fantastic Four and Cannon’s Spider-Man were the superhero world we were living in today?
Well, let’s not forget that Spider-Man did have a television series with Nicholas Hammond that actually spun off to feature films. They slung two episodes together and they were released in Australia theatrically. So we saw those Spider-Man films in the cinema. Look, I’m sure it was going to be a very, very different film. Captain America just needed a decent budget. But no, I’m sure that even if they’d made Spider-Man back then it still would’ve been rebooted four times.
It seems like a lot of their biggest ideas were hamstrung by budgets.
The thing about Cannon that we talk about in the documentary is that they had the perfect business model which worked so well for them in the beginning. Make films under $5 million, presell them into profit, get them screened all over the world, how can you fail? That’s why Missing in Action, Breakin’, all those early films are gigantic hits. But then they wanted credibility. They wanted to be a major force in Hollywood and they got out of their comfort zone. They started making films with bigger budgets that they couldn’t presell into profit and they started taking risks. They were taking risks on projects that unfortunately they were still short changing.
Did they ever think about instead of taking several risks on big budget projects, taking one risk and put all their resources into it?
I don’t think they did. I think even when they got the budget for Superman IV they siphoned half of it away and spent it on five, six, seven other smaller films and everything suffered.
Did you have any material on the proposed Superman V?
No. Mark Rosenthal mentioned it slightly but no. We do feature some promo art for Superman V.
Did you ever watch the deleted scenes from Superman IV on the DVD?
I have seen the deleted scenes. We did have a section there about the first Nuclear Man. At that point in the story it’s all about the collapse of Cannon. It just seemed to be an aside.
Sure, and that is widely available on the DVD, so it doesn’t need to be repeated. I just think it’s amazing. Is your next film a documentary or a feature?
I’m in between projects but it will most definitely be a feature. Electric Boogaloo is a very, very nice place to end my documentary career.
Oh, this is it?
Yeah.
So if I asked if there were any other eras of film, you’re satisfied with the three you’ve done?
Well, I’m a very accidental documentary filmmaker. Not Quite Hollywood was a tale I was very passionate about because I just love those directors and I’ve worked with all the crews and they have great stories and they were never part of the history books. Machete Maidens [Unleashed], I was a gun for hire on that one. I managed to mold that into a story that I wanted to tell. With Electric Boogaloo, people want you to make one more documentary. Okay, why don’t you make one about ‘80s Cannon? Perfect ‘80s fodder, I’m a big fan of Michael Winner, if I get to meet Michael Winner that that’ll be fantastic. That was kind of the rationale behind it.
It’s great coming to these festivals. People are constantly coming up to me going, “I really love Not Quite Hollywood. It’s made me want to make a documentary on Canadian cinema, or it’s made me want to make a documentary on my own national cinema.” For me, that means my job is done.
It does. It’s your legacy.
Yeah, and I had so much fun making Patrick it really reminded me how much I’d loved working with crews and working with casts. I just really hope that I’ll get the opportunity to work on another set like that again.
Well, I do appreciate you talking with me and I think it’s a good conversation.
Can I say one other thing which I also thought I’d like to mention about your review as well and that is the whole idea of Cannon hasn’t been particularly well documented. I know that there are a lot of people who are fans of Cannon and know all the inside stories, but for most people there’s only ever been one book published on Cannon which is Hollywood a Go-Go which is an absolute hatchet job. So I really do think that this documentary, particularly having all these people who’ve never spoken at all about Cannon, can very rightly be called the untold story. Particularly because it does cover very, very different ground to The Go-Go Boys. I really think if people get the opportunity to see both documentaries back to back, there won’t be a lot more stones to be unturned in the history of Cannon.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
