Mike Fleming Jr: Hemdale Back From Dead With Provocative ‘Torn'; Donald Trump's Beak-Wetting Right Out Of ‘The Godfather Part II'

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EXCLUSIVE: Hemdale Films, the one film production company to generate back-to-back Best Picture Oscar winners (Platoon and The Last Emperor), is re-emerging for the first time in forever. Revived by Eric Parkinson as a releasing label, Hemdale will release Torn: The Israeli-Palestine Poster War on NYC Streets. The provocative documentary by director Nim Shapira focuses on the street war that broke out between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups that tore down each other's messages about the 250 hostages taken by Hamas during the October 7 terror attack in Israel. The posters inflamed heated passion among those who put them up to raise awareness of the hostages and those who tore them down to show their opposition to Israel's subsequent Gaza offensive. It led to heated arguments and often violence. Hemdale will open the film in theaters September 5 in New York and Los Angeles with a rollout to follow in the fall and a digital release later on.
Shapira focused on 10 deeply personal stories for a film that unravels the ideological conflict and explores the limits of empathy in today's fractured public discourse. Pic has so far had over 50 pre-release screenings across the U.S. and Canada, igniting discourse in major cities including New York, Boston, Chicago, Toronto and San Francisco.
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So how did Hemdale, the once highflying independent company started by John Daly and actor David Hemmings — best known for playing a Roman senator in Ridley Scott's Gladiator — emerge from film history to be back in the game 30 years after becoming defunct?
First brought in to the label at the behest of owner Credit Lyonnais in 1991, Parkinson kept a candle in the window all these years for Hemdale, after the company became functionally idle following the sale of its Oscar-winning film library to MGM in 1996. Parkinson said he walked away with the Hemdale name rights, then waited for the right film to relaunch the brand as a releasing division under Hannover House, the 32-year-old independent media company.
Hemdale was started by Daly, who sold insurance, and Hemmings way back in 1967. They first managed rock bands like Black Sabbath, which coincidentally just played its final concert for the Ozzy Osbourne-fronted metal band. Hemdale financed live productions like Grease, and promoted boxing matches like the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman clash 'Rumble in the Jungle.' But the true passion for Daly and Hemmings was film, and they had an enviable run. For a while. The hits ranged from The Terminator to Hoosiers, Salvador, River's Edge, At Close Range, Platoon, The Last Emperor and Return of the Living Dead. As is often the case with taste-making indies, money was always a problem.
I recall James Cameron once telling me that he had to find the money to end his seminal film with Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor and her 'You're terminated, f*cker' factory scene. Daly told Cameron he didn't have the money for that, and to end the picture earlier, when Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese places the explosive in the gasoline tanker driven by the cyborg played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. You wonder if that franchise would have become all that it did, had they cheap-ed out on the ending. Cameron, who earlier sold his rights to producer Gale Anne Hurd for $1 with the caveat he could not be replaced as director, would not be denied.
That predated Parkinson, who arrived on the scene in 1991 as a crisis manager planted by the French bank Credit Lyonnais to protect its investment in Hemdale and other Hollywood holdings.
'My title was President of the 'to be formed Home Video Division,'' he recalled. 'And the video division did great. We generated a lot of money. We were able to pay down the debt from $110 million to $58 million, and I attribute a lot of that to Terminator and tying in the re-release of Terminator with Terminator 2. After a period of time, Credit Lyonnais lost interest in the movie business because of the amount of money it invested, mostly in Giancarlo Parretti, and MGM. They took a lot of the companies, Orion, Dino De Laurentiis, Embassy Pictures, Hemdale, Cannon Pictures, all those companies that had loans. They rolled them all into MGM to try to make that business work. After five years there was a forced unwinding of Hemdale, and that hit John and David harder than anybody else. It had been there whole lives. I was still a young guy in my late 30s, and I made the deal that at some point in time, if I had meritorious pictures, then I would relaunch the label. The brand name was the only thing that wasn't sold with the assets.'
He reincorporated Hemdale, and waited for the right acquisition to come along. He sparked to Torn.
'It had to be something I felt would honor the memory of John's commitment to quality. And that's not to say that Hannover House releases don't have quality, but let's be honest, some low-budget horror films aren't going to be quite as commercially or critically meritorious as something that potentially has an Oscar nomination.'
Parkinson hopes Hemdale can become active again, not just as a distributor but as a maker of movies. They are percolating Tempus Porta, a film gearing up to shoot in Malta, and they're attempting to work with Oliver Stone again on A Child's Night Dream. That's a novel Stone wrote before he served as an infantryman in Vietnam, getting wounded twice in combat and winning the Bronze Star, Purple Heart and other medals, experiences that informed his Best Picture- and Best Director-winning film Platoon. Stone's son Sean has been pining to direct it.
There is a perception out there that the legal settlement between Donald Trump and Paramount Global that will put $16 million toward Trump's presidential library will clear the way for swift passage of the Skydance acquisition. But how to rationalize the black eye to CBS News and its signature news show 60 Minutes? One could take a cue from a pivotal scene from arguably Paramount's greatest ever film, The Godfather Part II. That would put Don Trump in the role of Don Fanucci, known as The Black Hand. That was the extortionist in the Little Italy neighborhood who confronts young Don Corleone and his mates by demanding that he be allowed to 'wet his beak' by extracting sums, and taking dresses for his daughters.
Once tormented by network news, Trump has found an easy mark now that he's got the leverage. That included a payout from ABC News over another dubious legal claim, and getting Amazon and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos to reportedly pay large for a documentary on First Lady Melania Trump that I cannot imagine is wanna see if you aren't part of the Trump family. Had Trump not been elected, all of these parties would have told Trump's lawyers to pound sand.
This becomes mostly about legacy. Just because you have leverage doesn't mean you have to use it for self-serving purposes. As we're seeing now with Trump's threats to strip Rosie O'Donnell of her citizenship, this complex man just cannot rise above pettiness. All this beak-wetting goes in the column with his felonies and the other unsavory stuff. It should not mar 60 Minutes, which hopefully will remain a beacon of American democracy, long after Trump leaves office and while Trump argues his own legacy. It will be diminished by the petty beak-wetting, the price to get out of the way of a Skydance-Paramount Global deal that seems the best thing for Hollywood. This should not permanently stigmatize 60 Minutes or CBS News. If anything, the line from Michael Mann's The Insider is more relevant than ever, the one about 'Our standards have to be higher than anyone else, because we are the standard of everyone else.'
Hollywood is fortunate to have a guy like David Ellison taking the reins, that rare man with unlimited capital who loves to make movies. Everyone appreciates that the storied Paramount lot on Melrose won't be sold off, and Paramount's picture and TV businesses have the best chance for success since Sumner Redstone's estate lawyer Philippe Dauman strangled the studio's ambition in favor of stock buybacks. But Ellison should remember that, even more than the movies he makes, his legacy might well be shaped by whether or not he protects 60 Minutes and CBS News from becoming the doormat of conservatives.
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