Masters in Their Universe
I really don't know a lot about movies. That's a hard thing to admit, but Mark Hartley's documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is such a deep dive into 80s action and exploitation pictures that I felt like I needed both a helmet and an appendix to get through the first five minutes. As a child of that decade, and a repeat-watcher of such Cannon staples as Tobe Hooper's Invaders from Mars, Over the Top, and Masters of the Universe, I assumed Electric Boogaloo would be a breezy trip down memory lane. Instead, Hartley offers up an exhaustive (at times exhausting) history of movie-mogul cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus that wrings a film-length college course from their catalogue of kitschy crap.
If you're familiar with other scrappy-film-studio stories, such as the origins of New Line Cinema or Miramax, Electric Boogaloo will fit like a diamond-studded glove: two family members with access to foreign films that hadn't cracked the U.S. market set out to make it in the American movie business. Golan and Globus enjoyed great success in their native Israel producing the teen-sex-comedy series, Lemon Popsicle, and put together a stateside remake called The Last American Virgin. The film landed squarely in the high-school hijinks era of Porky's and Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and helped the duo plant a stake in the marketplace.
Soon, they acquired Cannon Films and began churning out high-concept/middling-budget exploitation and action movies. Where major studios concentrated on making eight pictures a year, Cannon churned out dozens, thanks to Golan's innovative practice of pre-selling distribution to foreign investors (often based solely on a title, some hastily developed poster art, and a recognizable name attached to the project). The involvement of icons like Charles Bronson, Chuck Norris, Sybil Danning, Sylvester Stallone, and up-and-comer Jean-Claude Van Damme kept the studio humming, and even allowed Golan to pursue his passion for directing. More importantly, that cachet's cash allowed Cannon to absorb the blast from its bombs--like Golan's disastrous post-apocalypse-hippies musical, The Apple.
Electric Boogaloo derives its title from one of Cannon's most pop-relevant movies: Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, a film that embodies the charm and chaos that both built and ultimately destroyed the company. When Golan-Globus latched onto a property that somehow became a hit, they immediately went into production on a sequel, with little regard for story, or an examination of the context that made the film popular. In interviews with the principal cast of Breakin' (who all returned for the sequel), it's clear the producers either had no idea or didn't care that Lucinda Dickey didn't get along with co-stars Adolfo "Shabba-Doo" Quinones and Michael "Boogaloo Shrimp" Chambers--mainly because they came from the disparate performance disciplines of jazz and break dancing. The film also went bigger, and gaudily colorful, effectively sweeping the original's gritty L.A. street-performer life under the rug.
From archival footage shot at the height of the studio's popularity, it's clear that Golan-Globus cared only about making movies--not necessarily the craft of making good ones. This is the studio that turned Death Wish into a cartoonish five-picture franchise and made Masters of the Universe unrecognizable from the billion-dollar toy line that spawned it. This is the studio that paid Sylvester Stallone an unheard-of $25 million to star in the arm-wrestling epic Over the Top and traded Clyde the Monkey for a costumed little person when Going Bananas went into production. In fairness, Cannon also gave us Lifeforce, a space-vampire flick so deliciously twisted it probably couldn't have been made anywhere else.
Artistic vision wasn't the only casualty of Cannon's get-it-done approach to filmmaking. It was often a machismo factory that created an environment of second-class citizenship for female performers. Many of the films depicted women as nude lust objects, rape victims, or whiny sidekicks to their weapon-happy male leads (British censors cut four minutes out of a Death Wish 2 rape scene)* In the talking-heads interviews that comprise much of this documentary, there's a cavalier "that's just how it was" attitude regarding the studio's treatment of women; even a montage of people describing Sharon Stone as unpleasant on the set of her two Allan Quatermain movies feels a bit like piling on.
Hartley's film makes an interesting case that Golan-Globus' laser-focused drive, penny-pinching, and disregard for almost anything that didn't directly involve rolling cameras stemmed from a childhood belief that one can conquer the silver screen if one is simply cunning and determined enough to do so. In this sense, Electric Boogaloo feels like a companion piece to Ed Wood. The pluck, the passion, and big-picture cluelessness of one of cinema's oddball, low-budget titans is evident in Cannon's decision to shoot Chuck Norris' bombs-and-bullets epic Invasion U.S.A. in a shopping mall and neighborhood that were slated for demolition.
It's also the reason I opened this review by saying I really don't know that much about movies. I'm in good company, though, because critics and audiences can only judge a film by what they see on screen. From compromises rooted in studio and on-set politics; to the realities of slashed budgets; to plain ol' misguided creative vision, and myriad other factors that make "bad" movies "bad", there are only a relative few who are truly in the know on any given film--and even their information is shaded by the prism through which they experienced any given triumph or catastrophe.
Hartley's peek behind the curtain of Cannon Films made me want to know more about the personalities and the process that went into making not just their movies, but all movies. It's an entertaining and enlightening cautionary tale that serves as a road map for how not to treat people and ideas in the collaborative process. It's also a hell of a commercial for that end-of-the-world hippies thing. Did I mention it's a musical starring Catherine Mary Stewart?
Homework, here I come!
*Note: I didn't say they cut the rape scene, they merely reduced it by four minutes.