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OS: Two films you produced for director Moshe Mizrachi, I LOVE YOU ROSA (1972) and THE HOUSE ON CHELOUCHE STREET (1973), were nominated for the Best Foreign Language Academy Award. In 1978 you were nominated for a film you directed, OPERATION THUNDERBOLT, and Mizrachi competed and won the award with a film he made in France, ROSA. How did you react to that?

MG: He is an excellent director. I was very proud of Mizrachi. OPERATION THUNDERBOLT was an action film, not an artistic film. The fact that we were amongst the 5 nominees, the 5 best foreign films in the world, next to directors like Bunuel, was enough.

OS: That was one of your 1978 successes; the other was LEMON POPSICLE, which was sold all over the world. After that, in 1979, you and Yoram bought The Cannon Group.

MG: Cannon was a New York based company that had one hit film, JOE, starring Peter Boyle, which was when they turned Cannon into a public company. They lost a lot of money throughout the years and had about 60 films they never sold outside the US. Yoram and I approached them with an offer to give us those films, mostly ‘tits and ass’ movies, and we would sell them for a %25 commission. In May we took them to Cannes and made $2 million out of sales to Germany alone! That left us with a half a million dollars commission and with that money we bought Cannon. We used their own films to buy them.

We moved to Los Angeles and started by producing THE HAPPY HOOKER GOES TO WASHINGTON and B-action pictures.

OS: Was there a need in the industry that you thought you could supply?

MG: The unions were very strong and the majors were tight with them. There were strikes that gave power to the independents because they were not dependent on the unions, they made films with young people who were all over Hollywood and couldn’t get jobs.

Cannon deserves credit for the biggest achievement with the Directors Guild of America. I was in New York, directing OVER THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE (1984) with Elliot Gould and Margaux Hemingway and the DGA tried to shut down my production. They formed a picket line of directors so my actors couldn’t get to the set. I agreed to negotiate with the heads of the guild, together with my lawyer, Sam Perlmutter. It was impossible that a film made by the majors for $50 Million would get the same union terms as a film made with a budget of $1 Million. It wasn’t fair. We invented a rule that any film made for under $3 Million gets a separate set of terms and salary requirements. We signed what became known as the “Cannon contract”. Later we got these contracts with the technician unions as well.

That’s how the independents developed, this contract allowed members of the unions to work on independent productions.

OS: You started the Ninja craze in 1982 with ENTER THE NINJA.

MG: It started when Chinese Karate films became popular. I looked for something new in Asian martial arts and found information about the Ninja culture in an encyclopedia. The Ninja were middle-class people in Japan – lawyers, government clerks, etc. It was a secret organization that helped the Feudal government. It actually preceded the Chinese Karate battles. They used very special methods, developing their sixth sense. That fascinated me and I said I could write story ideas out of it, so we made ENTER THE NINJA and AMERICAN NINJA later on. Many imitations followed.

OS: You discovered Michael Dudikoff in AMERICAN NINJA, but it was supposed to be Chuck Norris at first.

MG: Yes but by then he was too old for that part. Dudikoff was a handsome young martial-artist, we started using him in films as soon as he came to us.

OS: How did your relationship with Norris start?

MG: Chuck came to us with an idea for a film; it was after we made a few action pictures. He made a film with Orion before that. We signed him to a 7-year contract; it’s the first time this was done since classic Hollywood. 7-years at 2 pictures a year.

OS: What was your biggest hit with Norris?

MG: The MISSING IN ACTION series.

OS: In 1982 you produced DEATH WISH 2. You bought the rights from Dino De Laurentis, who produced the original.

MG: It wasn’t easy but he wasn’t in a good financial state and sold us the rights. We made 4 sequels.

OS: It also started a long-term relationship with director Michael Winner. You made THE WICKED LADY (1983) with him next.

MG: There was a dispute in Cannes that year. They appointed me as a judge in the festival and then, out of the blue, informed me that they had invited someone else instead of me. I sued them, and to settle it, they agreed to screen THE WICKED LADY in the competition. But it wasn’t worth much because the film wasn’t good.

OS: How did you get involved with Andrei Konchalovski? Cannon brought him to America and had a long-term production relationship with him.

MG: Konchalovski was introduced to me at Cannes. He told me a story about a soldier in Yugoslavia who returns home after WWI with shell shock, not able to have sex with his wife. I told him, “Go downstairs, get some coffee and start thinking this way: He is not a Yugoslavian soldier, he is an American soldier, the war is not WWI, it’s Vietnam, and make the story contemporary.” Ten minutes later he returned and with the revised idea, which became MARIA’S LOVERS.

OS: You also worked with J. Lee Thompson, who directed the original CAPE FEAR (1962) and THE GUNS OF NAVARONE (1961).

MG: We made one of the DEATH WISH sequels with him, and THE AMBASSADOR (1984) and KING SOLOMON’S MINES (1985). Here I have a story with Sharon Stone. I saw her as an extra on a TV show and called her, “Want to go to South Africa and shoot a film with Richard Chamberlain?” She agreed and we made that film and its sequel with her. After that Arnold Schwarzenegger saw her and cast her in TOTAL RECALL.

OS: Didn’t Schwarzenegger come to you early in his career?

MG: He came to meet me in Tel-Aviv when he was still a body builder, asking that I cast him in a film. I couldn’t believe that this muscleman, who spoke German, would ever make an American motion picture. He said, “Herr Golan, make a movie with me” and I responded, “Herr Schwarzenegger, go to America, don’t do anything for two years, learn English and change your name because Schwarzenegger is not a name for a movie star”.

A few years later I met him on some yacht in Cannes, surrounded by women, he called me out, “Herr Golan, look, I still hardly speak English, I didn’t change my name, and who’s the biggest star in the world?”

OS: Around 1982 you started buying film theaters in Europe. You made a lot of changes to theater standards: weren’t you the first to introduce the multiplex in Italy?

MG: We were the first ones in England too. We modernized the theaters and made them smaller. Before that, especially in London, there were big theaters that fitted 2000 or 3000 people and it was usually 3/4 empty. That type of theater didn’t attract audiences anymore and the smaller ones took its place. Film theaters started attracting viewers back after losing many in favor of TV.

But you can’t be a film producer and a theater owner; it’s a big financial mistake. You need to be physically involved with the theaters. That was ultimately the reason we fell; we overextended ourselves. You couldn’t control the theater chains as well as the productions. We owned most of the theaters in England and had large chains in France, Holland, Italy and Israel of course. We used junk bonds from Wall Street to buy them, a big mistake that hurt Cannon and caused Yoram and I to separate.

OS: What was the reaction in England in 1986 when you took over Thorn EMI and the Elstree Studios?

MG: It wasn’t easy for them to accept us. All of a sudden a couple of Israelis take over all of their theaters.

OS: Was it hard to deal with?

MG: No, they needed us.

OS: This photo on your wall, of you and Yoram with the Queen of England. What’s the story behind it?

MG: They sometimes have premieres at the palace for different benefits, so we donated ORDEAL BY INNOCENCE (1984), which was based on an Agatha Christie story.

I sat next to the Queen during the screening, it was forbidden to speak to her unless she spoke first. There are all these rules, I had to take off my watch so that there would be nothing that can scratch or hurt her. You go through a whole course before a screening with the Queen. In the middle of the film she asks me, “There were 4 deaths already, how many more are in the film?” I answer, “Two or three” and she says, “That’s a lot of casualties. You are going to make a lot of money.”

OS: Cannon’s first big hit was BREAKIN’ in 1984.

MG: My youngest daughter, Yael, told me I had to come to Santa Monica and see what’s happening on the beach. She took me there and I saw groups of African Americans, dancing in a way people didn’t know. I said, “We need to write a script about it”. So I wrote the story and brought in a screenwriter, then I called Joel Silberg who directed a film in the Philippines for me. He directed BREAKIN’ with a cast who were mainly young people we got in Santa Monica.
We wanted MGM to distribute the film and screened it for them when it was finished. The management was there and they said it was a “black film”. Back then the African American community wasn’t a dominant force at the box-office.

I told MGM they had to give us another screening. We handed out tickets to kids on the streets and brought them in. Within 5 minutes of the film’s start, they were all dancing on the seats. So I asked MGM, “Well, what do you think of my movie now?” They told me, “It’s a good film for black audiences”. They planned to screen it on one screen in San Francisco, one in Chicago and one in Los Angeles. I said, “Do whatever you want”.

The distributor in the American system at the time, sent the films to the franchise owners and they decided how many copies they needed. Before they could say ‘Jack Robinson’, 1200 copies were ordered, which was a huge amount for a small film. It grossed $6.5 million on the first weekend and eventually got to $60 million. We made a lot of money and MGM signed a distribution contract with us.

Later we made another film with Joel, RAPPIN’, but it wasn’t very successful. We produced about 10 dance films.

OS: At what point did you start producing films straight-to-video?

MG: It started with the Ninja films and grew from there.

OS: Were you the first to release sequels directly to video?

MG: Yes, no one did that before us.

OS: You were known for selling your films for distribution at Cannes before a script was even written.

MG: We sold them using posters but we had to supply the investors with the films afterwards, otherwise they would have lost their trust in us.

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