Embassy Home Entertainment story

Follow up to A blog about (AVCO) Embassy Pictures

This company was from a Los Angeles neighborhood known as the Avenue of the Stars and also operated a British unit of its own. It was founded in 1981 as Andre Blay Corporation by the titular former head honcho of Magnetic Video Corporation, who used the Blay video name for his product. The company was short-lived; in 1982 it was sold to Jerry Perenchio and Norman Lear (a creator of great sitcoms whose activities in People for the American Way may well make him a Society of Mildly Annoyed Liberals honoree) who had recently acquired the Embassy studio. The company accordingly changed its name to Embassy Home Entertainment, with Blay rising to CEO status at the distributor. It would therefore carry the Avco Embassy films he used to distribute on Magnetic along with new Embassy product. The company would, too, operate a label for budget films called Charter Entertainment which had a different numbering system from Embassy. Embassy, including Embassy Home Entertainment, was acquired by Coca-Cola in 1985; Coca-Cola also ran Columbia Pictures and they feared that running two film studios at once would result in the company being brought down by anti-trust regulations (of the kind that by then were repealed by President Reagan). And so, Embassy Home Entertainment was purchased by Nelson Holdings International in 1986 and was renamed to "Nelson Entertainment" on August 15, 1987 and Nelson was bought out by New Line Cinema on December 9, 1991. Some Embassy/Charter videos were still in print by the early 1990s with a New Line Home Video logo on the tape label.