The Kids at Cannon - www.cannon.org.uk

THE KIDS AT CANNON

(1970)

Time magazine article

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1971 -click for story

Dennis Friedland and Christopher C. Dewey

The Cannon Group, Incorporated ("Cannon") was incorporated

in New York on October 23, 1967.

The Kids at Cannon

Monday 31 August 1970

Many movie companies are going through a period of drastic cutbacks, both in personnel and production. But over at Cannon things are in a prosperous uproar. The Park Avenue nameplate is bright on the door, the furniture is new and the painters are still at work. The company expects to put six or eight movies into production during next year with a total budget of $2,000,000. If its record so far is any indication, Cannon may soon fulfill the ambition expressed by its 26-year-old president of being "the new United Artists."

These dreams of glory are made possible largely by the success of a hardedged, modest movie called Joe (TIME, July 27), an attempt to dramatize the bitter frustrations of Spiro Agnew's hardhats. Made on a starvation budget of $300,000 (even Easy Rider cost $100,000 more), Joe has already grossed that much in New York City box-office revenue alone. "We didn't think it was going to do this well," admits Cannon President Christopher Dewey. Considering their youth and collegiate looks, this is probably the first time that Dewey and his partner, Dennis Friedland, 27, ever underestimated a market.

Sexual Wanderings. The pair met at Columbia University, where Friedland attended law school and Dewey studied architecture. They shared an interest not so much in film making as in film commerce, so Lawyer Friedland incorporated them as the Cannon Group. They promoted $50,000 worth of independent financing to make a scorcher called Inga, a titillating travelogue of the sexual wanderings of a Swedish teenager. The movie was a smash in what show business calls "the sexploitation trade," grossing $4,000,000 for the two producers.

By this time the boys had developed a canny skill in marketing and exploitation. Besides continued explorations of Swedish sex life (Yes!, What Next?), they began to make films in their own country. Amazingly, they have not had a loser yet, if only because the budgets are so slender, emphasizing short shooting schedules and minimum salaries for all. The only way Cannon could lose money on any of its films would be to burn the negative. The prospects for Joe and for Cannon are so rosy that MGM recently offered to buy not only the movie but the company as well. MGM was rebuffed on both counts.

Bergman Bull. Dewey and Friedland are interested in making good movies. But they also talk about "markets" and "products" just as coolly as any grizzled veteran of the Hollywood studios. "The horror market is wide open," Chris Dewey says. "What we'd really like to do is the Easy Rider of horror movies." Cannon even adopts the big-studio system of cutting movies, and even reshooting and adding scenes if the film maker's version doesn't please them.

"I don't know an awful lot about film history," Dewey says, "but it seems to me that ten years ago critics got hold of this business of Ingmar Bergman and directors being the creators of films and blew it up out of all proportion. Well, that's all bull. There are a lot of people involved in making a movie, not just the director, and if we see something we don't like, then we're going to change it."

Can you help with a better photograph of Dennis Friedland and Christopher C. Dewey for this site?

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I'd also love to hear from anyone who'd like to write their own article or can point me to an article with a fuller history of the original Cannon managers. If you have some information you'd like to add to this page please get in touch. I'm hoping cannon.org.uk can be a good archive and I need input from as many people as possible.

Dennis Friedland http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0295080

Christopher C. Dewey http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0223119

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