Bolero (1984)

Certain movies can make a studio. You’ve probably heard time and time again that New Line Cinema was the house that Freddy built. That was due to the massive success of A Nightmare on Elm Street and its sequels when New Line Cinema was starting out. The money that the studio got from the releases of those movies led to their ability to fund other projects that would also find success. This would eventually lead to bigger movies that were more popular and profitable like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Austin Powers, Rush Hour, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

That said, there are also movies that can break a studio. Going back to New Line Cinema, they were independent until 2008. At that point, they folded into Warner Bros. as another arm in the major production company. They were no longer distributing their own work, and anything they produced would be under the watchful eye of Warner Bros. That was due to the financial failure of The Golden Compass in 2007. It was successful internationally, but New Line Cinema had sold the rights to international distribution, meaning that they didn’t see any profits through that avenue. Time Warner, their partner at the time, decided that the company needed to merge with their more successful studio, Warner Bros.

You might be wondering right now how New Line Cinema ties into this week’s post. Bolero, the movie I’ll be writing about, wasn’t a movie made by New Line Cinema. It wasn’t distributed by New Line Cinema. It didn’t build up the company or lead to its demise. Why, then, have I brought the lifespan of New Line Cinema into the discussion? It’s because Bolero was one of those movies, a make or break example, for another studio. Bolero led to the eventual downfall of The Cannon Group. It was the movie that led to MGM cutting their distribution deal with The Cannon Group due to breach of contract, pushing The Cannon Group on their path to financial woes that would plague the remainder of their existence.

Bolero was a 1984 flick directed by John Derek. Lida MacGillivery (Bo Derek) graduated college and was off on her newest adventure as a grown woman. She was going to find a man to take her virginity. She travelled with her driver Cotton (George Kennedy) and her friend Catalina (Ana Obregón) to distant lands to find a lover. First, they went to Morocco, where Lida found a sheik (Greg Benson), who fell asleep while licking honey off her naked body. After the failure in Morocco, they went to Spain. Lida quickly fell in love with a bullfighter named Angel (Andrea Occhipinti). Soon after taking her virginity, Angel was gored by a bull. Lida nursed him back to health and showed him that they could still have wild, passionate sex.

MGM had some major issues with Bolero when it was presented to them for distribution. John Derek had put together an erotic film that was all about sex. The primary goal of the characters, particularly Lida and Catalina, was to lose their virginities. They were looking for men who could help them with that. John Derek wasn’t going to shy away from the explicit content, either. The sex scenes were in there, in full. It wasn’t necessarily real sex. There was no penetration shown. But there were people rubbing up against one another while naked in ways that, at times, were difficult to tell if it was acting or reality. There was full frontal female nudity, and male butts. There was even a ballsack at one point.

That explicit nature was what Golan and Globus, the people behind The Cannon Group, loved about the movie. In fact, they wanted more of it. There was already too much. I’m not the kind of person to say that sex scenes don’t belong in movies. There are certainly times and places for sex scenes. In much of Bolero, the eroticism was wholly justified. It was a movie about young women wanting to have sex. It made sense that the sex would be shown, to show how they felt in the moment of achieving their goal. The sex scenes were an essential part of the storytelling in the way that the bullfighting was. Without it, there would be something missing from the overall arc.

However, the movie went too far with one of the supporting characters in the film. When Lida and her friends made it to Spain, they befriended a teenage acquaintance of Angel, Paloma (Olivia d’Abo). She lived with Angel and became a close friend of Lida and Catalina. She talked openly about wanting to have sex with Angel, who was kind of a pedophile. His girlfriend before Lida was a woman who he had met and slept with when she was fourteen. Paloma wanted to take that woman’s place, since she was now fourteen years old. That was a little strange for a movie to be so open about. It was definitely weirder for Angel to not be looked at negatively for wanting to have sex with fourteen-year-old girls. It got even worse when Paloma got naked in multiple scenes of the movie. Bolero had multiple scenes of full frontal fourteen-year-old girl nudity.

Yeah, it’s easy to understand why MGM didn’t want to distribute this one. The sexual story with explicit sex scenes would be enough to give Bolero an X-rating. There was no NC-17 at the time, so X was what it would have gotten. The underage nudity would make that X-rating a sure thing. MGM would only distribute the film if the necessary cuts were made to receive an R-rating. Golan and Globus wanted it more erotic, so they obviously disagreed. John Derek was confident in his vision as it was, so he disagreed. MGM wouldn’t budge on their stance, and it ended up destroying the relationship between the studio and the production company.

How did this negatively affect The Cannon Group? The company survived for another ten years. It didn’t necessarily die directly from the release of Bolero. However, Bolero was a crucial turning point. MGM cut their distribution agreement with The Cannon Group. That meant The Cannon Group had to self-distribute their movies. That meant The Cannon Group had to put more of their money into marketing and distribution, which meant they also had to earn more money to make back what they spent. This was particularly costly with their production output rising to forty-three films in 1986. Without that MGM deal, they were losing more money. The company would ink a deal with Viacom in 1986, and would later get some licensed properties like Superman and Masters of the Universe, but it wasn’t enough to save the company. They would be bought out by Pathé by the end of the decade and The Cannon Group would never be the same. It shut down by 1994.

To sum it all up, Bolero might not have been the sole movie to kill The Cannon Group. The company lived on for ten years after its release. Bolero just set the company on its course to failure. They were rising high, producing more movies every year. They were finding an audience through their theatrical releases and making enough money to fund future movies. But then Bolero came along and took away a major theatrical distribution arm. It severed the deal that was helping push The Cannon Group forward. Without that deal, they couldn’t release their movies as wide as MGM could have. They couldn’t grow their audience as quickly. They were making more movies than they had an audience for, because the avenue to the audience had been cut off. Bolero did that. It was the movie that did that.

The tale of The Golden Compass leading to the demise of New Line Cinema as a standalone studio was much more definitive than Bolero causing the end of The Cannon Group. A much more definitive movie would be Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. The failure of that flick was the final straw, which led to the purchase by Pathé. However, The Cannon Group would have never been on the path to creating that low-budget licensed property if it weren’t for Bolero. Bolero steered the ship in that direction. It caused the financial troubles that would lead to licensed properties being made on low-budgets. It created the difficulty for The Cannon Group to find a theatrical audience. It may not have been the toppling domino that caused the demise, but it could be seen as the finger pushing the domino.

Any movie could make or break a studio. You never know what movie it will be until the movie goes into production. You might not even know until the release that it is the movie which will cause the rise of a studio’s fortunes, or the fall of a studio from grace. The studio business is a fickle one. Every single movie can be as important as any other. For many people, every movie is important. Their livelihoods depend on the success of whatever movie they put out. And if the movies don’t succeed, the people behind them could lose their careers. It’s a make or break business.

Here come a few quick notes to close things out:

• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (week 403) was mentioned in this post.
• John Derek directed Bolero and Tarzan the Ape Man (week 273).
• Bolero starred Bo Derek, who was also in Orca (week 144), Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190), and Tarzan the Ape Man (week 273).
• Finally, George Kennedy was in View from the Top (week 83) and Bolero.
• Have you seen Bolero? What did you think? What movies can you think of that made a studio or destroyed a studio? You can discuss this and more in the comments or on Twitter.
• If there’s a movie that you think would fit well into Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know. Find me on Twitter and tell me. You could also drop the movie title in the comments. I’m always looking for movies I might not otherwise know.
• Make sure to check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for more fun throughout the week.
• Before you go, it’s time to take a look at what’s up next for Sunday “Bad” Movies. There’s this idea of twin films, where two studios happen to release similar movies around the same time. In the summer of 2005, Sky High was released. A year later, another movie came out about young superheroes in training. It was called Zoom, and I’ll be watching it for next week’s post. See you then!