Warner Home Video-graphy - Part 2 - Orion Pictures, The Complete First Season (1979-82) · 11:29am Jun 25th, 2017
Orion Pictures was founded in 1978 by Robert S. Benjamin, Arthur Krim, and Eric Pleskow. Not particularly new film moguls, two of them were with United Artists as far back as 1951. They did, however, grow incredibly annoyed with the, um, dictatorial attitude that studio's parent Transamerica was taking to the quite successful studio back in the '70s and along with UA Senior VPs William Bernstein and Mike Medavoy; all five of the UA heads, unexpectedly, left the studio on January 13, 1978 with 63 important Hollywood figures taking out an advertisement in a trade paper warning UA that it had made a fatal mistake in letting the five men leave (in 1981, with Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, they would prove to be correct).
In February, all five of them founded the Orion Pictures Company, with their combined thinking that the constellation of that name had 5 stars. This was so not true, but it managed to hold a $100M line of credit, and it arranged to have the Warner Bros. studio to distribute its films. Orion, however, was contractually given free rein over distribution and advertising, as well as the number and type of films the executives chose to invest in at a certain time. They went to make deals with Barbra Streisand, James Caan, Jane Fonda, Peter Sellers, Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Francis Ford Coppola, Blake Edwards, John Milius, Peter Frampton, Ray Stark and a proposed production company owned by then-teen heartthrob John Travolta, all as a way to get the Orion studio off to a good start. Of them, Streisand, Fonda, Voight and Frampton would be about the only people involved who would never headline an Orion film and Travolta's production company never did get off the ground, now did it?
But Orion's first film did get off the ground on April 27, 1979, and it was called A Little Romance [2001] based on the Patrick Cauvin novel E=mc2 Mon Amour. The director was George Roy Hill, who famously made the Robert Redford/Paul Newman vehicles Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the Fox studio and The Sting for the Universal studio. Neither of the two are in this romantic film though; it got some mixed to very negative reviews upon release; a typical response to it came from Roger Ebert, who wrote that it "gives us two movie kids in a story so unlikely I assume it was intended as a fantasy. And it gives us dialog and situations so relentlessly cute we want to squirm."
Orion also launched the acting career of another would-be teen idol of the '80s, Matt Dillon, who displayed his "not your average teen idol" qualities in Over The Edge [22008] to wide critical applause. When it came out in 1979, there was controversy over its themes revolving around teen gang members; critics didn't allow those to bog their enjoyment of it down . . . but Orion was afraid of bad press and only showed it in a few cinemas. But it would become a popular film with TV airings in the '80s, and became a cult classic, as did The Wanderers [22009], one of the decade's period pieces, set in 1963 Bronx and showcasing some good old fashioned period music and fights between teenage gangsters of the time over whose turf was it anyway. It was their first legitimate hit at the box office but it would find a lot more of an audience to the extent of which Warner theatrically reissued it nationwide in 1996. Orion also had American ownership rights for Monty Python's Life of Brian [2003] which Krim and friends obtained from the Handmade studio, which was co-owned by ex-Beatle George Harrison, about a Jew born on Jesus' birth date who is mistaken for the Messiah . . . needless to say, religious groups stopped by to decry its "BLASPHEMY!" and it was banned in Norway for a little while (the studio took note of this in its adverts). Another film they had was Time After Time [22017] with Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells, who in the 20th Century goes on the hunt for Jack The Ripper.
And then Orion would hit the big 1-0. ''10'' [2002], "one of the best films Blake Edwards has ever made" according to Roger Ebert, involves Dudley Moore in a man in middle age who becomes infatuated with a sexy young woman played by one Bo Derek, leading to a wild comic chase and a Mexican encounter. Moore's career was reignited by this film while Derek's began. It was the seventh highest-grossing film of 1979.
More artful than any of those films was The Great Santini [22010], set in 1962 and produced by Bing Crosby Productions (named for and for a long time run by the then-recently deceased crooner). It starred Robert Duvall as a U.S. Marine Corps officer from Beaufort, South Carolina (a real town BTW), whose problems as husband and father are at odds with his success as an F-4 Phantom military aviator. Critics gave the film the grandest of reviews and Robert Duvall got an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. But it was wrecked by poor marketing. Warner's people thought that it lacked any bankable actors - but Robert Duvall's in it and he's bankable, right? - and that the subject matter was problematic (we lived after the Vietnam War and The Deer Hunter was quite the big one for that time). They did not use the traditional "start this thing in New York and we'll let people hear of it from there" marketing strategy. Instead, they premiered it in North and South Carolina where almost no one saw or heard much of it. Then the title got to Warner: "This thing has to revolve around a circus act. It's got to." They tested it - and it also flopped - as Sons and Heroes in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Reaching Out in Rockford, Illinois, and The Ace in Peoria, Illinois. The film was then pulled by Orion, who gave the cable rights to HBO and also made it an in-flight film. Charles A. Pratt, who produced, kept faith in the film and raised enough money, some coming from Orion, to release The Great Santini in New York under its original title, where reviews were great and business was steady, but two weeks later the movie debuted on HBO, and audiences stopped coming.
Their last release of 1979, Promises in the Dark [22011] is a quite obscure romantic drama. After a promising start, 1980 became a horrible year for the company. It released Simon [22007], Die Laughing [22013], Battle Beyond the Stars [72023, outside of North America], Heart Beat [22012], Peter Sellers' last film and posthumous release The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu [22014] and The Awakening in North America [22006, with Charlton Heston hunting mummies] all to massive failure. In fact, about the only hit Orion had all year was the comedy classic Caddyshack [2005]; to learn more about that film, see Stephen Cezar's excellent video titled "The Rise and Fall of Orion Pictures".
The next year for Orion wasn't much better, as 1981 brought Sphinx [22015], The Hand [22016], Wolfen [22019], Under The Rainbow [22004], the international finance thriller Rollover [22022], and the even less-traditionally-advertised Prince of the City [22021, with no TV advertising due to it costing $8M, and all advertising going strictly to print, such that there was a three-page spread in The New York Times]. At least they had more than one successful film that year, as Arthur [22020], Excalibur [22018, largely Irish], and Sharky's Machine with Burt Reynolds [22024] all made a lot of money; Arthur was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 1981. Due to budget issues, Orion skipped Raiders of the Lost Ark, and shipped the production of it off to Paramount; it would land them the Indiana Jones series, one of their most successful and lucrative franchises, i.e., ones aside from Star Trek anyway.
The year was 1982 and time for Orion to wave goodbye to the Warner studio, who would inherit ALL rights to the films Orion made for the latter after that. Orion bought out Filmways and remodeled the unusually small conglomerate as Orion Pictures Corporation, giving them a distribution arm all to themselves and the studio also switched video distribution for new films over to Vestron and Thorn EMI. Needless to say, Orion did owe a couple of films to Warner before they left, both of which were from famous director Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios: The Escape Artist [not issued by WHV] and Hammett [22026]. Needless to say, when Woody Allen came to Orion, his first two films for that studio, A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy [22025] and Zelig [22027], were distributed through Warner Bros.
This part of the videography only covers films that were released when Orion released its films through Warner Bros. Warner Bros. retains all rights for those films to this date. The exceptions are the Woody Allen vehicles for the studio, which are at MGM, who has owned all the post-Warner Orion inventory since 1997. When Warner went to a 5-digit number, Orion films would use 2 as the first number in the US/Canada and 7 as the first number overseas. This part of the videography is so short that the portions above the first horizontal line are much longer than it.
2001 Little Romance, A (1979)
2002 "10" (1979)
2003 Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)
22004 Under the Rainbow (1981)
2005 Caddyshack (1980)
All films from this point use a 5-digit number.
22006 Awakening, The (1980)
22007 Simon (1980)
22008 Over The Edge (1979)
22009 Wanderers, The (1979)
22010 Great Santini, The (1979)
22011 Promises in the Dark (1979)
22012 Heart Beat (1979)
22013 Die Laughing (1980)
22014 Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu, The (1980)
22015 Sphinx (1980)
22016 Hand, The (1981)
22017 Time After Time (1979)
22018 Excalibur (1981)
22019 Wolfen (1981)
22020 Arthur (1981)
22021 Prince of the City (1981)
22022 Rollover (1981)
72023 Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) Released in the US in the New World series.
22024 Sharky's Machine (1981)
22025 Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy, A (1982)
22026 Hammett (1982)
22027 Zelig (1983)
