Hartley had already made two cracking documentaries (Not Quite Hollywood and Machete Maidens Unleashed!), but it was during the making of his first narrative movie, Patrick, the ’70s Ozploitation remake, that he found himself pressed to make a third to close the series out. He was drawn to this project because ’80s moviemaking was an untold story, but more importantly the Cannon story had some pathos – it’s inspiring and heartbreaking. “Cannon Films were the epitome of the ’80s in terms of stars and films,” Hartley reflects. “It’s also a great story – it’s about a couple of outsiders taking on the might of the studios. There’s a real David and Goliath element to this.”
The outsiders in question are cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus. Before coming to the US, they were award winning movie makers in Israel and had grand hopes of replicating their success in the States.
If you’ve seen a Cannon movie, chances are that irrespective of quality, it will have made an impression. “I saw Cannon Films when I was a kid, so I always knew about them. In particular, I can remember seeing Lifeforce in the cinema. At the time, it was absolutely the craziest thing I had ever seen. It probably still is. I can’t imagine it being made outside of Cannon.”
To put it in some context, Lifeforce was directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist) and chronicles space vampires terrorising London. “It’s a very inspirational movie for lots of directors,” Hartley says half-seriously. “Tobe Hooper was a genre hero and it was a movie like none of us film nerds had ever seen before. It was so batshit insane and gigantic on every level. It does straddle genres, like From Dusk Till Dawn, but I’ve got to say, I think it’s a far superior movie.”
Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films treads a very careful line. It manages to be affectionate towards Golan and Globus, while giving it a warts-and-all treatment. Hartley was always mindful of this balance. “It’s irreverent but not nasty,” he affirms. “When I was researching this, there was one book on the topic, Hollywood A Go-Go, which was a total hatchet job. That was the last thing I wanted to do – it would have been too easy. I had affection for their movies and they were inspirational, but at the same time I didn’t want to shy away from the truth.”
“Anyway, it’s not my opinion in the movie – it’s the opinions of the 90 people we interviewed for it! All of them worked in the trenches with Cannon – none of them are critics or reviewers. I only wanted people who worked side by side with Menahem and Yoram”.
On that note, the cast assembled for the documentary is mind-blowing (Molly Ringwald, Dolph Lundgren, Richard Chamberlain, Franco Zeffirelli and the list goes on and on). Tracking everyone down gave rise to some pretty fascinating stories in and of itself. “This was a good one,” Hartley laughs. “We found Christopher Pearce and got him on board. He was the third in command at Cannon and everyone assumed that he was dead! He had told his ex-wives he was dead, but he had actually retried to Florida! People were asking us for photographic proof that he was alive. But that’s what it was like. There was a lot of investigative work – a lot of detective work.”
Hartley approached Golan and Globus to participate in the documentary, but not only did they decline, in true Cannon form they raced to pull together their own documentary and beat Hartley to the punch by three months. “Initially I was upset,” says Hartley candidly. “Purely because I thought the documentary was going to lack something without them in it. However, the more I got into it and started using archival material, I started to think that it was good that we were only seeing that. That was when Cannon was in its heyday. Also, if we got them involved now, maybe the two gentlemen would have been re-writing history and lost their connection to that time. There was that Roman Polanski documentary that only used archival material and it didn’t suffer!”
Interestingly, Hartley never intended to make a career out of documentaries (and still doesn’t). “I always wanted to make narrative features,” he explains. “I came to this by way of music videos. In no way am I a documentarian – in fact that’s an insult to the real ones! Actually, Electric Boogaloo plays more like a rockumentary than a documentary anyway. With lots of documentaries, it’s more about information than entertainment. In contrast, we let entertainment rule. After all, this is not some documentary about a yak. This is a fast paced thrill ride through a time and place in Hollywood that’s not been heard about before.”
BY MEG CRAWFORD
