June 1981 concludes with dragons slayed, James Bond, and Bill Murray in the Army
Plus Ingmar Berman and the Muppets... but not, unfortunately, together
This final weekend of the month is absolutely packed. Again… look at how many of these are movies we’re still talking about and still watching and still sharing 40 years later. Look at how diverse the offerings are. Look at how many different audiences are being served by Hollywood here.
And keep in mind, you’ve still got Raiders of the Lost Ark and Clash of the Titans and Cannonball Run and a bunch of other films playing. It was movie heaven for 11-year-old me, and I truly feel like I was spoiled for choice when I was becoming a movie nerd.
We’re going to dive right in since there’s so much to discuss…
JUNE 26
Dragonslayer
Peter MacNicol, Caitlin Clarke, Ralph Richardson, John Hallam, Peter Eyre, Albert Salmi, Sydney Bromley, Chloe Salaman, Emrys James, Roger Kemp, Ian McDiarmid, Ken Shorter, Jason White, Yolande Palfrey, Douglas Cooper, Alf Mangan, David Mount, James Payne, Chris Twinn
cinematography by Derek Vanlint
music by Alex North
screenplay by Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins
produced by Hal Barwood
directed by Matthew Robbins
Rated PG
1 hr 49 mins
A young magician is tasked with stopping a powerful dragon without the aid of his beloved mentor but with the help of a heavily-disguised new ally.
One of the things we’ve already spent some time discussing in this newsletter is the fragile state of the Walt Disney Company at the dawn of the ‘80s. That’s because it is one of the most interesting movie stories of the decade, and the way it develops is essential to the shape of Hollywood for the next thirty years.
There are few things that are more important to the story of Disney’s falling and rising fortunes than the deal they made for two movies that would be co-produced and co-distributed with Paramount Pictures. While Disney was struggling to find some kind of leadership or vision, Paramount was revving up under the leadership of Barry Diller and the two young executives who were helping him redefine his company, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. The co-production deal was designed to give Disney a foothold in a more adult movie world, something they tried to crack with The Black Hole. The first film they made was Popeye, which I adore, and which I wrote about in the December 1980 edition of this newsletter. There is a popular perception that Popeye was a failure. That’s not true. It wasn’t the megahit that both studios wanted, but it made money and was generally well-liked when it came out. It was the second film they made together where things got really complicated.
I understand why Eisner and Katzenberg turned to Matthew Robbins and Hal Barwood. If you were working in film in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, then you knew who these guys were. They may not have always had their name front and center on everything they contributed to (Close Encounters is a script that definitely owes a lot to the work they did on it), but they were part of that same group of filmmakers who everyone saw as the defining artists of the era. The two of them hooked up at USC where they were part of the same class that produced Walter Murch, John Milius, George Lucas, Randal Kleiser, Willard Huyck, Caleb Deschanel and more. These two movies, Popeye and Dragonslayer, were designed to find the cross-over between the family brand that Disney had developed so carefully and the more adult audience that Paramount was starting to play to directly. Barry Diller was the president of Paramount at the time, but he was leaning on Eisner and Katzenberg to deliver movies that spoke to the new young audience Hollywood had discovered on the heels of Jaws and Star Wars. Maybe if they had found a release date where they weren’t competing directly with Raiders of the Lost Ark and James Bond, they might have had a chance with this strange and dark little movie, but audiences in the summer of 1981 just weren’t having it.
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