The Kids at Cannon

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."

Riding high on Joe's box-office booty, the Cannon Group, which now includes some 20 employees and six titled executives, is looking at masses of scripts. "It's a mammoth job," says Dewey. "We have them read." Already scheduled, for production or for imminent release, are a film by Novelist Howard Fast called The Hessian, set during the American Revolution "but with contemporary overtones," an Israeli comedy called Lupo, which is intended to "scoop" Fiddler on the Roof, and a movie about demolition derbies called Jump.

Dewey and Friedland, like their Hollywood forefathers, have also apparently learned that imitation is not only the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also one of the surest signs of success. Jump, which is about stock-car racers in Appalachia, is described as "like The Hustler, except that the Paul Newman character doesn't have a pool cue--he drives a car." The budget on that one will be Cannon's limit, $300,000. With that kind of money, they reason, even if the picture bombs in the big Northern cities, they can still turn a handy profit down South.

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