By the mid 70s Bernard Delfont had gotten tired of Nat Cohen at EMI - or, to be fair, felt there was fresh blood needed. So he brought in the team of Deeley and Spkings. Let's look at how they did.
They negotiated a deal for EMI to invest in several Hollywood films - Nickelodeon (1976), The Deep (1977), The Greatest (1977), The Silver Bears (1977), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and The Cheap Detective (1978).
This was actually a very good slate - Spielberg, Bogdanovich, Muhummad Ali, Neil Simon... only The Silver Bears was anonymous.
Welcome to Blood City (1977) was random. Cross of Iron was a old over from COhen.
What the mistake was I think EMI should have kept Nat Cohen as overseer of a slate of British films - say five a year.
But anyway... the first proper Deeley-Spikings slate was:
*Convoy
*The Deer Hunter
*The Driver
*Warlords of Atlantis
*Death on the Nile
*Arabian Adventure.
*Sweeney
*Sweeney 2
I really like this slate. Sam Peckinpah action, Vietnam War movie (this was a risk), a Walter Hill action film, a Doug McClure adventure, an Arabian nights movie, Agatha Christie, some British TV spin offs. Having studio co investment on the first three reduced exposure. I think they just picked the wrong star (in commercial terms ) for The Driver.
This was a first rate slate and entirely appropriate for a British company.
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