THE KING OF THE GEEZER TEASERS: Inside Randall Emmett’s direct-to-video empire, where many Hollywood stars have found lucrative early retirement.
Among these actors are John Travolta, Nicolas Cage, and Sylvester Stallone. But perched atop the ignominious heap is Bruce Willis, whose prolific partnership with EFO Films, one of the biggest players in this niche of the industry, results in as many as four or five movies each year.
“With Bruce Willis, there’s almost a model for how he features in these movies,” Champ theorized. “One of my clients calls it a ‘geezer teaser’: You have Bruce Willis at the intro of the movie, so people are like, Great, this is a Bruce Willis movie. But he’s actually a secondary character who shows up sporadically.”
In most of Willis’s movies for EFO, “sporadic” would be a generous appraisal of his presence. The actor clocks just seven minutes of screen time in Hard Kill, and in Extraction, he spends less than nine minutes onscreen. In the home-invasion thriller Survive the Night, audiences get almost ten minutes out of the actor, even if they aren’t his best.
The audience being teased by these brief performances seems to consist largely of men older than 35 who spent their teen years renting Jean-Claude Van Damme movies from their local video stores. In that era, as Bertrand Reignier, another Daro Films executive, puts it, action stars like Seagal and Van Damme made relatively cheap movies “with nothing to sell them except for the artwork on the box and maybe an action-packed trailer.” This demographic has now helped fuel the multibillion-dollar VOD market, a virtual replica of a Blockbuster Video.
The halcyon days Reignier describes were dominated by a company called the Cannon Group. When it was acquired by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus in 1979, Cannon was a debt-ridden indie studio known for English-language versions of Swedish soft-core porn films. But in just a few short years, these Israeli cousins transformed the studio into a “mini-major” by tapping into America’s insatiable appetite for B-movies like Enter the Ninja and Cobra and producing an endless string of sequels to hits like Death Wish, The Delta Force, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. By the mid-’80s, Cannon was doing business with Avi Lerner, owner of South Africa’s Nu Metro movie-theater chain. Lerner had started his own film-production company, called Nu Metro Entertainment, to meet the local needs of studios. He served as a producer on Cannon films such as American Ninja 3: Blood Hunt and River of Death. By 1992, Lerner, who is also Israeli, had moved to L.A. and started producing his own low-budget films, specializing in direct-to-video “mockbusters” like Freefall (meant to capitalize on the success of Stallone’s Cliffhanger) and made-for-television creature features like Shark Attack.
If you’re curious to see how the B-movie sausage gets made in Hollywood, it’s well worth a read.