Hollywood a Go-Go. The True Story of The Cannon Film Empire

by Andrew Yule

240 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 1987

Reviews

[A Cesspool · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outrageous this has yet to be digitized (à la electronically preserved via e-reader distribution).

Plenty of contemporary cinephile podcasts just scrapping around in the dark, mostly waxing nostalgia, grading Cannon’s filmography (at face value), when really they have no business itemizing Cannon’s catalog (specifically, early-mid 80s) without prefacing Andrew Yule’s essential Golan & Globus monograph.

fyi: published early-1987, Hollywood a Go-Go obviously doesn't memorialize Cannon's complete legacy-bio; But Yule commemorates all the milestones, negligence and buccaneering responsible for Cannon's inevitable downfall.
Requisite companion reading: David McClintick's 1996 expose The Predator: How an Italian thug looted MGM, brought Credit Lyonnais to its knees, and made the Pope cry, imho.

[Gareth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cannon Films are famous (more accurately infamous) for their slate of schlocky films including Missing In Action and Masters Of The Universe, and even more so for the fact of their eventual collapse. I was keen to learn more about them. Hollywood A-Go-Go is perhaps not the book I wanted on the subject.

Andrew Yule focuses heavily on the financial side of things, which makes sense since we’re talking about a company here, but as it happens I don’t have much of a head for ledgers. My eyes glazed over during the many passages about deficits, amortisation, tables and sheer lists of percentage or dollar data.

Little of that tells me what was going on with these movies or the people making them, which is really what I wanted to know. If you’ve come here to learn what went wrong with MOTU or Superman IV, forget it: there’s no detail at all about He-Man’s catastrophic budget meltdown, and only a cursory reference to the company suddenly yanking $5 million from Superman. Gee, I wonder if that was noticeable on screen?

Yule doesn’t seem that interested in the creative side of things, which in turn doesn’t tell us much about WHY these memorable moguls (and cousins) Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus did business this way — whether they were actively trying to pull one over on people by relentlessly making too many movies for cheap and then under-reporting their losses until it all caught up with them, or whether they simply thought it would all work out eventually. Golan, at least, seems to have a genuine zeal for what he’s doing, even if most of it is by all accounts horrible; Globus is barely characterised at all, although it’s hard not to see some of his character when he’s quoted as saying: “Sooner or later we will have a blockbuster — it must come, by the odds. Even when you play roulette, it comes.” Oh, Yoram.

Yule’s writing style can be frustrating. It’s a mix of reporting heaps of data at us and interjecting with mean, often snide comments about the cousins. I kept wondering if a company as disastrous (and yet mysteriously afloat for several years) as this one needed any editorial help to look silly. Yule’s enthusiastic snarks-with-exclamation-marks can’t help prejudicing his argument. (And sometimes they’re not even in conversation with it, like when he spends much of a page lambasting Brooke Shields on the state of her eyebrows.)

I suppose the last mark against it is unfair as it depends on hindsight, but I can’t help myself: the book doesn’t even cover the end of the company, so it has no ending. Was this the right time to publish a clearly ongoing story?

Interesting subject, questionable execution. It wasn’t for me.

[Richard Albiston · Rating 1 out of 5]

Simply dreadful. It is one of the worst pieces of non-fiction writing that I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. Full of misplaced sassy comments and pathetic put downs based on hearsay and half-truths. Yule also uses, by his own admission, 'guess work figures' to "prove" profit and loss on different balance sheets. The entire body of the book is drenched in a thick layer of antisemitism, Xenophobia and an anti-immigrant sensibility that was prevalently used against Golan and Globus in the period this book was written. There are also several instances where important players names are continually misspelled, if the author cannot even get this right, how can we trust the accuracy of the rest here?
Luckily in the years since, better, fairer and more comprehensive works on this subject have been produced.