Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2025 March 14 • Friday

"How do you become a filmmaker?" someone asks Menahem Golan. "Don't do anything else," he replies.

That was certainly his approach. And with the help of his cousin, Yoram Globus, who was from a very early age just as obsessed with the business of movies as Golan was obsessed with the movies themselves, he launched the Cannon Group.

Their journey, with its perhaps inevitable rise and fall, is the subject of a documentary called The Go Go Boys: The Inside Story of Cannon Films, "Go Go Boys" being the somewhat derisive Hollywood nickname for the two Israeli independent film powerhouses.

After becoming successful in their native Israel, Golan and Globus moved to Hollywood, got a small office and started making movies. They became successful enough that the Cannes Festival was eventually referred to by some as the Cannon Festival, and they could get financing for future projects with literally nothing to show investors, not even a title.

They owned their own chain of movie theatres and at one point were generating 20% of Hollywood's box-office returns.

While remembered and celebrated for action and exploitation films, Golan's genuine love of movies spurred him to bankroll projects by Zeffirelli, Konchalovsky, Altman and Cassavetes. To get these movies onto screens, Goland and Globus had muscles to flex.

They told their Taiwan distributor, for example, that Death Wish 3 was only available if packaged with Love Streams, too.

They met with Godard and made a deal for a movie with him on the spot, writing and signing the contract on a napkin.

There was never any time to waste. Their breakthrough hit, Breakin', was made in three weeks and hugely successful. But Golan and Globus also didn't have time for their wives and children, a melancholy thread briefly followed in the documentary. The other sad times come with Cannon's losing its grip on the market, after sinking too much money into Over the Top, the dissolution of the cousins' partnership and financial troubles with the SEC and the Italian mafia.

Pretty interesting stuff and more fun to watch than most talking head documentaries. It's helped along by clips from Cannon movies and celebrity interviews. The famous story of Jean-Claude Van Damme's first encounter with Menahem Golan is recounted by both men, with the addition of a re-telling of their first business meeting, which I hadn't heard before.

At the height of their success they make the over of Newsweek.

When they split up—"divorce", they call it—it's shocking but not exactly surprising. And the documentary ends on a sweet note as these two life-long partners sit in a cinema, eating popcorn and looking at the movies they made together.