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Unfortunately it was just not the right day for a “white wedding” since Billy, as it turned out, did not feel the project right for him. He was looking to star in a film rather than do a tune for one. So without too much fanfare Billy Idol departed the smallest house in the world quicker than it took him to take a leak. Jenny and I sat there afterwards and pondered an image from his last album, “too much flesh and not enough fantasy,” for our albino rocker Billy as Jenny dubbed him thereafter.

After this Jenny would become artistically involved with actor Paul Sand who was fascinated by her, having overheard one of Jenny’s conversations while having lunch at the Rose Café one morning. Soon Paul was part of our group. Paul is a very talented actor and writer who also happens to be crazy. One of our favorite pastimes when discussing him was trying to figure out if he really knew he was gay or was just simply too eccentric to figure that out for himself. I found out months later that my friend Barbara Steele had almost the very same encounter with Paul. They also met in a coffee house in Venice, a couple of years before Jenny and I met him, and once again Paul was fascinated with Barbara and they went thought the motions of going out together but her ‘gaydar’ remains flawless and she soon tired of the charade, which is a loss for them both as Paul Sand is a hoot and deserves a place at anyone’s table, even as a cardboard faux Casanova.

While Jenny focused more and more on getting her script made, my situation at home was getting rather desperate. Michael and I were both low on funds and he was in no position to help with the monthly bills, even through he was well into his fifth month as my most unlikely roommate. This is where Jenny proved to be aces once again. She advised us to get over to CANNON ASAP while she put in a call to Chris Pierce, who was then in charge of developing project for the company, to give Mike and I scripts to read on a weekly basis at $35 a go. This proved to be a life-saver, so Michael Armstrong and I officially became script readers for THE CANNON GROUP. Every week we would receive at least 12 scripts to read, which worked out to six apiece. We were advised to make two sections – one for projects suitable for Charles Bronson, and the other for Chuck Norris (Chris once repeated the slogan for a Norris picture at Cannon “It has to be 100% GRADE A CHUCK”). While a lot of what we would get very easily could be done by either one of them, occasionally something really good would come through (I remember one in particular by Rospo Pallenberg), but of course these films would never get made. I remember how much Mike and I laughed over seeing what Cannon was up to. One day we drove over to drop off our 12 scripts for the week, only to see a giant billboard on top of the roof at the CANNON offices below La Cineiga which declared: CHARLES BRONSON – soon to be seen as THE GOLEM.

This film of course never happened, but you know what, if they had put old Charlie in monster make-up, it could not have been any worse than, say, THE APPLE or MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE. My favorite recollection of this film has to be running into that (“Actors actor” of the little people’), the ubiquitous Billy Barty, in the front lobby at Cannon. Barty had a substantial role in MASTERS. Billy, whose career went all the back to THE WIZARD OF OZ, said to me “Yeah this is a blockbuster all right, we spent four hours yesterday waiting for HE-MAN to get out of make-up. He had this giant boil on his ass and the make-up guys had a time covering it up. You know his costume is such that his ass is hanging out of it 24/7, but the guy is built, no doubt about that. Did you see that broad he’s livin’ with…what’s her name? Oh yeah, Grace Jones. Man, they ought to take the camera’s over to their place and make a real movie.” Billy was, if nothing else, candid in his observations.

Michael Armstrong had worked for a few weeks on the $30 million dollar LIFEFORCE for Cannon just before coming to the States, and told countless stories of just how out of control director Tobe Hooper was at that time. Tobe had made three pictures for Cannon, all of them bombs, and was still reeling somewhat from all the rumors of just WHO directed POLTERGEST, which remains Tobe Hooper’s only post-TEXAS CHAINSAW hit to this day. Mike described miles of film being shot every day, so that no editor could make any sense out of what was being shot on any given day. By the time Mike left, the film was hopelessly over budget. Upon release, LIFEFORCE barely made back 10 million worldwide. That and his other films for Cannon like the tired remake of INVADERS FROM MARS and the very unintentional funny CHAINSAW sequel with Dennis Hopper certainly helped bring the company to its knees by the time the dust settled on both Hooper’s career and Cannon’s ability to survive.

The go go boys both openly admired Roger Corman, and yet learned nothing from him about following and marketing trends, or about survival in the film business, even though one of them actually worked for Roger when he first arrived from Israel. Why they embarked on genre projects like PIRATES that were out of favor with the public, or fads like the Lambada craze months after it was over and done with in America, remains a mystery. They made MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE two whole years after the popularity of the comic was stone cold dead, yet they sunk millions into what Yoram was calling “The new STAR WARS.” This kind of thing did not endear them to the shareholders or the banks that lent them money.

There are literally hundreds of similar stories regarding CANNON GROUP, yet looking back now with the vision and clarity of time, there is still much to recommend the efforts they made in allowing all types of films to come into being, some perhaps not so worthy, but in this brave new world of bad being so-bad-it-is-good, then CANNON FILMS is right up there with such now-revered companies as AMERICAN INTERNATIONAL PICTURES, REPUBLIC PICTURES, as well as their British counterparts like TIGON PICTURES and THE AMICUS COMPANY. The CANNON legacy is a rich one and it can be said with some authority that we will not see their like again in this century.

Now if you are wondering what ever happened to Jenny Craven and Michael Armstrong after success eluded their efforts to remain players in the Hollywood of the 1980’s, well Jenny finally returned to England, whereupon her mother, Lady Craven, in time passed away leaving her secure and well provided for, so perhaps one day Jenny will finally write her own memoir of those “Alice in Wonderland” experiences in show business. Michael Armstrong teaches theater and screen acting in London where he still has a bit of a reputation nowadays as a survivor of “swinging London,” and does the odd lecture for film students on his three genre films when asked.

And what of the go go boys? Yoram and Menahem have reunited at least three times since my experience with the company. Menahem Golan wrote and directed a film that almost no one has seen called THE VERSACE MURDERS starring Franco Nero as the murdered fashion icon and, from all accounts, this one is a classic bad movie I for one have added to my must-see list of grade Z blockbusters… After 300 films and countless attempts to reorganize themselves as moguls they are both, as of 2008, somewhat immortal and as such should be worshipped by film geeks of future generations for simply shepherding so many bad movies into existence. We just cannot begin to thank them enough for their vision and especially their tenacity.

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