The post-holiday DVD release schedule is so slow, the only remotely interesting thing coming out today is Million Dollar Mystery.
If you're like most people, you have no memory of this thing whatsoever. When a theatrical release from the eighties toplines the likes of Tom Bosley, it isn't likely to pack theaters, and Million Dollar Mystery certainly didn't. This uninspired Mad, Mad World knockoff is notable only as one of the final credits for veteran director Richard Fleischer, and for the lame gimmick that accompanied its release: some lucky audience member could win a million dollars if they figured out the hidden clues in the movie itself.
Actually, the only reason to even mention this thing is because it was an all-too-typical release from the short-lived production and distribution entity DeLaurentis Entertainment Group. DEG was an effort by Italian megaproducer/shameless hustler Dino DeLaurentis to start a mini-studio of his own. Mostly, it ground out competently-made but utterly pointless drivel like the Judd Nelson vehicle From The Hip, or the Schwarzenegger potboiler Raw Deal, or the stupefying James Clavell adaptation Tai Pan, a movie absolutely no one had been clammoring for.
Yet DEG also produced and released David Lynch's Blue Velvet and Michael Mann's Manhunter, easily two of the best American films of the eighties, and movies that no major studio at the time would have touched. DeLaurentis basically went with his gut, not market research, when he decided which movies to greenlight.
In that sense, DeLaurentis had a lot in common with Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus, the heads of Cannon Films, which cranked out so much product in the eighties you could possibly keep track of it all. Between the endless, increasingly desperate Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson vehicles, Cannon occasionally made half-hearted stabs at "quality" product, like Norman Mailer's hapless Tough Guys Don't Dance. Every week would bring some new effort from Golan and Globus, and the only possible rection to most of it was, "What were they thinking?"
American filmmaking now is probably at its lowest ebb ever. Major studios, all divisions of soulless corporations uninterested in risks, control almost everything--most so-called indie distributors are divisions of the majors, and up-and-coming independent filmmakers tend to tailor their efforts to what they think diastributors want. There's a dearth of true visionaries.
True, DeLaurentis and Golan-Globus weren't visionaries. They were hucksters, and most of what they churned out was crap. But a lot of it was fun crap, and you got the feeling they made movies because they loved them. We could use them now.
