Manson International

• 1. Introduction

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  Manson International took its name from the surnames of the two men who founded it. Edmund Goldman, a former executive at Columbia Pictures, joined forces with Sam Nathanson in 1953 to create what they called Manson Distributing Corporation. Their initial proposition was simple: American audiences had little access to films made abroad, and someone had to bridge that gap. Godzilla was among the titles that passed through the company's hands in its earliest years. From that beginning, Manson would reinvent itself multiple times. It eventually became what its own history describes as one of the pioneer film sales agencies in the country. What drove each of those reinventions? How did a company that started with foreign imports end up making its own pictures? And how did a small independent operation find its way into the library of one of Hollywood's oldest studios?

• 2. Exploitation and Inheritance

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  By 1962, when Manson formally incorporated, the company's focus had already shifted away from foreign films. The new product was what the trade called "sex trip movies." Manson classified its titles under a two-tier system, marking each picture as either "hard" or "soft" depending on its content.

  The next major change came in 1975, when Edmund Goldman's son Michael assumed control. Michael Goldman redirected the business toward marketing and international licensing of independent films, moving decisively away from the adult content niche. By the early 1980s, Manson would have a new name and a new identity.

• 3. The Production Years

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  Now called Manson International, the company was doing something it had never done before: making films. Radioactive Dreams was the production that marked that shift.

  Alongside film production, the company was building operations in international television distribution and handling arthouse pictures. At its peak, Manson International held the distribution rights to the libraries of the Intercontinental Releasing Corporation. The sale that ended the company's independence came in 1987.

• 4. Absorbed by Hollywood

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  The Management Company Entertainment Group, or MCEG, acquired Manson. This production company was owned by Jonathan D. Krane. The sale had an immediate consequence: the Intercontinental Releasing Corporation switched its distribution to United Film Distribution Company. Manson's name faded from the corporate record, but its assets kept moving.

  In 1995, MCEG and Orion Pictures merged to form Metromedia International Group. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer then acquired Metromedia in 1997. MGM now holds the Manson library, though with certain exceptions. Among those exceptions are the Intercontinental Releasing titles. MCEG had acquired them separately on the 16th of November, 1994, before any of the later mergers took hold. Blood Feast, the first title in Manson's international catalog, was released in 1963. The last entry, Street Asylum, followed in 1990. For anyone tracing the rights to those titles today, the chain leads through MCEG, Metromedia, and ultimately to MGM.