by Mattie Lucas
Cinema from a Decidedly Queer Perspective
Here | 2024
Director Robert Zemeckis was arguably one of the biggest filmmakers of the 1980s and 90s, delivering mega-hits like Back to the Future (1985), Romancing the Stone (1984), Forrest Gump (1994), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1992), Contact(1997), and Cast Away (2000) throughout those two decades. Things changed in the 2000s, however, as he became fixated on mo-cap animation, as films like The Polar Express (2004), Beofulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009) came to dominate his filmography.
For most of its life, the Cannon Group was a minor studio known for brawny B-movies like Death Wish, Cobra, Missing in Action, and Masters of the Universe. But during the 1980s, under the direction of co-owners Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, who bought the company in 1979, Cannon also used some of its profits to take chances on risky auteur-driven projects in an attempt to gain some prestige. One such project was Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear, a deal Golan and Globus infamously made with Godard on a napkin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the pair were tenaciously courting filmmakers.