Vestron Pictures - Part Three

The 80s Movie Podcast

This week, we finish our three part episode on the 1980s distribution company Vestron Pictures.

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The movies discussed on this week's episode are:

The Adventures of a Gnome Named Gnorm (1990, Stan Winston)
Big Man on Campus (1989, Jeremy Paul Kagan)
Dream a Little Dream (1989, Marc Rocco)
Earth Girls Are Easy (1989, Julien Temple)
Far From Home (1989, Meiert Avis)
Paperhouse (1989, Bernard Rose)
Parents (1989, Bob Balaban)
The Rainbow (1989, Ken Russell)
Wonderland (1989, Philip Saville)

TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

At the end of the previous episode, Vestron Pictures was starting to experience the turbulence a number of independent distributors faced when they had a successful film too soon out of the gate, and the direction of the company seemingly changes to go chasing more waterfalls instead of sticking to the rivers and the lakes they were used to.

Welcome to Part Three of our miniseries.

As we enter 1989, Vestron is seriously in trouble. More money has gone out then has come back in. It seems that they needed one more hit to keep going for a while longer. But if you were to look at their release schedule for the year, which included a pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, there wasn’t really anything that felt like it could be a Dirty Dancing-like break out, except for maybe the pickup from the recently bankrupt DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group.

But we’ll get there in a moment.

Their first film from 1989 is a certifiable cult film if there ever was one, but the problem with this label is that the film tagged as so was not a success upon its initial theatrical release. Bob Balaban, the beloved character actor who had been regularly seen on screen since his memorable debut in Midnight Cowboy twenty years earlier, would make his directorial debut with the black comedy horror film Parents.

Bryan Madorsky stars as Michael Laemle, a ten year old boy living in the California suburbs in the 1950s, who starts to suspect mom and dad, played by Mary Beth Hurt and Randy Quaid, might be cannibals. It’s a strange but fun little movie, and even Ken Russell would compare it favorably over David Lynch’s Blue Velvet during one contemporary interview, but sadly, it would take far more time for the film to find its audience than Vestron could afford.

Opening in 94 theatres on January 27th, the $3m Parents could not overcome a series of negative reviews from critics, and it would only gross $278k in its first three days. Vestron would not strike any additional prints of the film, and would cycle the ones they did have around the country for several months, but after four months, the film could only attract $870k in box office receipts. But it would become something of a cult hit on video later in the year.

In 1992, British filmmaker Bernard Rose would make his American directing debut with an all-time banger, Candyman. But he wouldn’t gotten Candyman if it wasn’t for his 1989 film Paperhouse, an inventive story about a young girl whose drawings seem to manifest into reality. British actor Ben Cross from Chariots of Fire and American actress Glenne Headly from Dirty Rotten Scoundrels plays the young girl’s parents.

Outside of Gene Siskel, who would give the film a thumbs down on his movie review show with Roger Ebert despite acknowledging Rose’s talent as a filmmaker and being fascinated by the first two-thirds of the movie, the critical consensus was extraordinary. But it appears Siskel may have never actually written a review of the film for the Chicago Tribune, as the film still has a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But the film would only earn $6,700 from its single screen playdate at the Carnegie Hall Cinemas when it opened on February 17th, and the film would get little support from Vestron after that. More single playdates in major cities that added up to a $241k box office tally after fourteen weeks in release.

Marc Rocco’s Dream a Little Dream would be the third film in The Two Coreys Cinematic Universe. Corey Feldman plays a high school student who, through one of the strangest plot twists in the whole body switching genre, finds himself switching places with two time Academy Award-winner Jason Robards, playing a professor who is looking for immortality through entering a meditative alpha state. Meredith Salinger and Piper Laurie also find themselves switching bodies as well, while Corey Haim plays the goofball best friend with not a whole lot to do. The supporting cast also includes veteran character actors Harry Dean Stanton and Alex Rocco, the latter who agreed to do the film because it was directed by his son.

When the film opened on March 3rd, it would be Vestron’s second widest release, opening on more than 1,000 theatres. But just like the previous year’s License to Drive, the pairing of Corey Haim and Corey Feldman did not set the box office on fire, opening in fifth place with $2.57m in ticket sales, compared to the #1 film of the week, the Morgan Freeman drama Lean on Me, which would gross twice as much as Dream a Little Dream while playing in 125 fewer theatres. In its second week, the film would lose 56 theatres and 52% of its opening weekend audience, falling all the way to 13th place with a gross of only $1.25m. By week three, the movie would move to dollar houses, and trudge along for several more months, until it closed in the middle of summer with only $5.55m in the till.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, writer/director Jeremy Paul Kagan had directed and occasionally written several big ticket movies, including the 1977 Henry Winkler drama Heroes, which also starred Sally Field and, in his first post-Star Wars movie, Harrison Ford, and the 1985 Meredith Salinger/John Cusack adventure film The Journey of Natty Gann. Which makes his Natty Gann follow up, Big Man on Campus, such a head scratcher.

A modern adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Big Man on Campus was written by Allan Katz, who had been working in television for nearly twenty years writing for and producing shows like All in the Family, Sanford and Son, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and MASH. Katz would also star in the movie as the titular hunchback, even though he had never once acted on any of his shows. But at least he had a good cast supporting him, including Gerrit Graham, Melora Hardin, Jessica Harper, Tom Skerritt, and Cindy Williams.

I can only find one playdate for the film ever, in Los Angeles at the American Cinematheque in March 1989, so while this mostly qualifies as a direct to video release, I feel compelled to at least give it a token mention here.

Have you ever heard of a movie called The Fruit Machine? Of course you haven’t, because that’s a horrible name for a movie, no matter what it’s about. When Vestron acquired this British drama about young gay men who go on the run after they witness a murder, the first thing they did was change the title to Wonderland. Not that Wonderland gives you any more of an idea of what the movie is about than The Fruit Machine. But, whatever.

Today, the movie has two things going for it. One, an early role for Robbie Coltrane, playing a transvestite who operates a nightclub for gay men and transvestites called, you guessed it, The Fruit Machine. Second, the musical score was written by Hans Zimmer, in one of his earliest film jobs. Ironically, Wonderland would be the the third movie scored by Hans Zimmer to be released by Vestron in a four month period, after Burning Secret and Paperhouse.

Wonderland would open at the Quad Cinemas in New York City on April 28th, to poor reviews but a decent $11,500 opening weekend. But the film would not be able to maintain much of an audience, and after five weeks, Wonderland was out of the Quad Cinemas, never to play another theatre in America, with just $50k in the till.

Ken Russell’s third and final film in his contract with Vestron was The Rainbow, an adaptation of a 1915 novel by D.H. Lawrence, whose 1920 novel Women in Love had been adapted by Russell in 1969. Glenda Jackson, who had won the Academy Award for her role in Women in Love, here plays the mother of the character she played in the other film. Here, she co-stars with Sammi Davis as Ursala, the younger sister of Jackson’s Women in Love character, who finds herself attracted to Anton, a young man in town, as well as her gym teacher Winifred.

As one would expect from Ken Russell, the supporting cast is top notch, including future Eighth Doctor Paul McGann, regular Russell collaborator Christopher Gable, and Blowup star David Hemmings. The film would open at the Paris Theatre in New York City on May 5th, where it would gross a very good $22k, spurred on by great reviews from most of the city’s major critics, several of which noted the film to be Russell’s best in a number of years. So it would be sad that the film would end up being the lowest grossing of the three films he’d make with Vestron, only earning a total of $444k after three months in mostly single playdates in major markets.

In 1985, Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum would work together on a forgettable horror comedy film called Transylvania 6-5000, whose name was a pun on a popular 1940 song recorded by Glenn Miller. In 1986, the pair would work together again in David Cronenberg’s amazing remake of the cheesy 1950s horror film The Fly. In late 1987, shortly after the pair married, they would work together for a third time, on another comedy, and on a movie that was this time based on an actual song.

Earth Girls Are Easy was the name of a song that appeared on comedian Julie Brown’s 1984 EP Goddess in Progress, and was originally developed as a movie at Warner Brothers Studio. The studio would get cold feet when Absolute Beginners, the big British musical directed by music video director Julien Temple, failed big time everywhere in the world except for the UK. Temple was slated to direct Earth Girls Are Easy, and Brown, as the co-writer and co-star of the film, was committed to the filmmaker, even if it meant Warners putting the film into turnaround.

Which they did, in 1986.

It would take nearly a year to get the project back on track, after being rejected by every other major studio and production company in Hollywood, until the French banking giant Credit Lyonnais agree to finance the film, provided they could cut the budget from $14m to $10m, and if the filmmakers could make a distribution deal with the bank’s preferred distributor, the then newly-formed DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group.

The film, about a manicurist in Los Angeles who helps three aliens blend into human culture after they accidentally crash land their spaceship into her pool, would begin production in Los Angeles in October 1987. Davis played the manicurist, and Goldblum one of the aliens, alongside Damon Wayans and Jim Carrey, while the remaining cast would include a number of great comedic actors like MASH’s Larry Linville, Michael McKean, Rick Overton, and Charles Rocket, as well as Los Angeles media personality Angelyne as basically herself.

While the film was nearing completion in early 1988, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group would go out of business, leaving Credit Lyonnais in need of a new distributor for their investment. But after Temple turned in his first cut of the film, Credit Lyonnais would send Temple back into his editing bay, where he and his team would spend nearly another five months winnowing out various scenes and completely excising a big and expensive musical number based on one of the other songs on Brown’s 1984 EP, I Like ‘Em Big and Stupid, because it just didn’t work for the film. Additional scenes would be shot, and the budget would end up being $11m.

The film would have its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September 1988, and attract attention from a number of distributors including MGM/UA, New World Pictures and Twentieth Century-Fox, but Vestron would end up putting in the winning bid.

The film would originally be set for a February 1989 release, but would get delayed until May 12th. When it finally opened on 317 screens in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Philly, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington DC, the film would gross $893k, putting in twelfth place for the weekend, but its per screen average would be the fourth best amongst the films in the top twenty. The film would fall one place in its second week, losing 35% of its opening weekend audience, grossing $577k. The film would slowly hemorrhage theatres and box office until the plug was pulled in mid-July with only $3.9m in tickets sold.

The sole lasting legacy of the film is that Damon Wayans enjoyed working so much with Jim Carrey that when Damon’s brother Kenan Ivory Wayans was putting together a new comedy television show together thanks to the success of his movie I’m Gonna Get You Sucka, Damon would get his brother to give Carrey a chance. In Living Color would make Carrey and the Wayans Brothers stars, and would change the course of comedy. So there’s that…

In late June, the Lightning Pictures imprint would release their first movie in nearly two years, Far From Home. The film starred the then-fourteen year old Drew Barrymore as a young girl traveling cross country with her father, who get stuck in a small desert town in Nevada on their way to back to Los Angeles, who must deal with some very strange characters in the trailer park they’re staying in, as they slowly discover nothing is as it’s supposed to be. Matt Frewer, Max Headroom himself, plays the dad, who must protect his daughter while he figures out how to get the hell out of town alive.

Truth be told, the movie sucks, and it’s really creepy in how it sexualizes Barrymore, but there’s one hell of a great supporting cast doing their best to keep the joint from totally stinking the place up. Richard Masur, Academy Award nominee Susan Tyrell, Anthony Rapp from Adventures in Babysitting, Jennifer Tilly, and beloved character actor Dick Miller. When Vestron opened the film in four theatres in third-tier regions on June 30th, it was little surprise the film got some very bad notices, although one unnamed reviewer for Variety felt the need to note that Barrymore, who again was only fourteen at the time, had “a baby face, dreamy eyes and a playboy model’s body.” The film would gross just $3,763 in its first and only weekend in theatres.

But that wasn’t even the worst news of the week for Vestron.

On the same day as they opened Far From Home, Vestron had been informed by Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles that the $100 million line of credit the company had with them was being terminated. 140 of the approximately 300 Vestron staff members, mostly from the Los Angeles office, were let go, including the President of Production, the Senior Vice President of Marketing and Distribution, and the Vice President of Publicity and Promotion. While Vestron Video would continue for a while, in large part thanks to a $15.7m payoff during a dispute over home video ownership rights to the 1986 Best Picture winner Platoon, the theatrical distribution unit was effectively dead. Some movies, including the Fred Savage/Howie Mandel comedy Little Monsters, the Harry Dean Stanton-led comedy Twister, and the Kathryn Bigelow-directed action thriller Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis, would be sold off to other companies, but the titles left behind would see their planned theatrical releases cancelled and eventually be released direct to video.

Thanks to some of the legacy titles in their video catalog, including Dirty Dancing, Vestron would be able to stave off the inevitable, but in January 1991, the company would file for bankruptcy, their final film being the Stan Winston-directed fantasy buddy comedy The Adventures of a Gnome named Gnorm. Filmed in 1988 as Upward, the film featured Anthony Michael Hall as an Los Angeles Police Detective who has to team up with a gnome, a puppet created by Winston, the effects wizard who also directed the film, to solve a murder. For Winston, it was deja vu all over again, as his previous directorial effort, Pumpkinhead, found itself in limbo for a while when its distributor, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, filed for bankruptcy in 1987 before they could release that film.

In bankruptcy court, Live Entertainment, partially owned by 1990s mega movie production company Carolco Pictures, would purchase all of Vestron’s assets for $24m. Live used the assets as collateral to secure a line of credit from industry friendly banks, so they could start their own production and distribution company, of which their only moment of note was helping to finance Reservoir Dogs when no one else would.

Eventually, Live Entertainment would be sold off to Bain Capital, a private investment firm co-founded by Mitt Romney, in 1997, and they would rebrand Live as Artisan Entertainment. Artisan today is best known as the little independent distributor of The Blair Witch Project, but they also would enter into an agreement with Marvel Comics to make movies for 15 of their characters, including Ant-Man, Black Panther, Deadpool, Iron Fist, Longshot, Morbius, Mort the Dead Teenager, and the Power Pack.

Artisan would produce two movies based on Marvel characters, Man-Thing and The Punisher, although neither of those films would be released by Artisan. Artisan would declare bankruptcy in 2003, and Marvel would be one of the companies to place a bid for them. Lionsgate would end up becoming the winning bidder for Artisan’s assets, which is how the vast majority of Vestron titles are now owned by a company that didn’t even exist when Vestron closed shop.

Today, Lionsgate is the owner of the assets of a number of the companies we’ve spoken about on this podcast in the past, and will be talking about in the future, including Crown International, the DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group, Embassy Pictures, and New World Pictures. And it’s also a major reason why so many of the movies we discuss in these episodes looking back at past companies are completely unknown today. As big as Lionsgate is, with nearly $3.6 billion in revenue in 2022, they aren’t going to be able to keep up with the chain of ownership for every movies from every company they’ve purchased, and they’re not going to put the money in to the movies that are barely remembered today. The Film Foundation, the non-profit organization co-founded by Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, which is dedicated to film preservation, estimates the average cost to do a photochemical restoration of a color feature with sound to between $80,000 to $450,000 dollars, not including the cost of a 2k or 4k digital scan. I’m going to have a link in the show notes on our website at The80sMoviePodcast.com to a November 2018 article from the Science History Institute about the process of restoring films. It’s not a long read, but it’s a fascinating read. I hope you’ll check it out.

So there you have it, the end of the line for Vestron Pictures, and many of the movies they helped to make and distribute, most of which you cannot find today in any form.

Thank you for listening.

We’ll talk again next week when Episode 105, on the 1985 teen comedy O.C. and Stiggs, directed by Robert Altman, will be discussed.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.