A 2014 documentary by Mark Hartley about the rise and fall of The Cannon Group. In particular, it focuses on Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the Israeli filmmakers who owned Cannon from 1979-1989 in an ultimately failed bid to become Hollywood moguls. During their reign, Cannon would produce some of the most cheesiest, exploitative, yet beloved films ever made, primarily action-focused, making a star out of Chuck Norris and breathing new life into Charles Bronson's career.
This page is a work-in-progress.
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films provides examples of the following tropes:
- Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Bo Derek recounts that Golan threatened to take away her ranch when Bolero opened poorly. He threw her and her director husband under the bus for making Bolero "too sexy" (even though Menahem demanded the film be more sexy), and finally Cannon stole photos of Derek from her suitcase and put them in ads.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Nearly everyone interviewed have described Menahem Golan as being this. The number of naive things he said or did is enough to constitute its own page!
- Follow the Leader:
- Menahem saw himself as the next Ken Russell and saw The Apple as his Tommy. Which isn't exactly wrong.
- Menahem successfully capitalized off of the breakdancing craze with Breakin.
- Yoram's Lambada and Menahem's The Forbidden Dance were taking advantage of what they thought was going to be a growing dance craze with Lambada. The box-office failure of both movies proved otherwise.
- King Solomon's Mines (1985) and its sequel Allan Quartermain and the Lost City of Gold were Cannon's attempts at making their own Indiana Jones films.
- Dueling Works
- Breakin had to deal with the similarly-themed Beat Street. Fortunately for Golan-Globus, Breakin was one of Cannon's biggest hits. Beat Street took in $16,595,791 domestically compared to Breakin's $38,682,707)
- Lambada and The Forbidden Dance (is Lambada)!, produced individually by Globus and Golan shortly after they split up. Both movies opened on the same day and both movies flopped.
- Harmful to Minors: While filming Tevye and His Seven Daughters, Menahem decided to place his own infant child in a speeding wagon, despite his wife's protests. During shooting, the baby was so close to falling off of the moving wagon and his wife lunges after it, only to be stopped by Menahem, who responded "Never in the middle of the shot!"
- Hot-Blooded: Cannon executive Christopher Pearce recounted witnessing a heated argument between Golan and Globus. It was about what deli they were going to take Pearce to!
- Irony: Martine Beswick felt that the subject of corrupt Hollywood producers in The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood could easily apply towards Golan and Globus.
- Mistaken for Gay: An unintentional one; Menahem shut down production of Over the Brooklyn Bridge for an entire day after Elliott Gould called him a "cocksucker," which according to Gould, "he took literally."
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Michael Winner was, to quote Alex Winter, "the perfect Cannon director." He gave the studio the most provocative, controversial material imaginable. The rape scene Death Wish II caused quite a ruckus in the UK, so much so that a moral guardian hoped that Winner would get raped.
- Not What I Signed on For: Martine Beswick's reaction to the pool orgy in The Happy Hooker Goes Hollywood.
- Sex Sells:
- Even before Golan-Globus bought the company, Cannon had a reputation for selling erotica to the masses.
- Director Just Jaecken basically described the original script of Lady Chatterley's Lover with Sylvia Kristel as "You open the door, you fuck; you open the door, you fuck."
- Cannon kept pushing for more sex on Kristel's other film, Mata Hari. One idea was to have Kristel get laid on the trenches.
- Trigger-Happy: During the production of Operation Thunderbolt, the pilot of a cargo plane became exhausted after doing take after take of the plane taking off and landing. When he told Menahem that he couldn't do more, Menahem pointed an Uzi at the pilot's head and told him to go back into the cockpit.
