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Irvin Shapiro is a name that may not be well-known to the average filmgoer, but will be familiar to those who know a little bit about the history of international film distribution. Shapiro, one of the founders of the Cannes Film Festival, was responsible for scouring up interesting or important European films and finding theatrical and home video rights in the United States. Without Shapiro, American audiences would not have seen Sergei Eistenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin,” Robert Weine’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” Jean Renoir’s “The Grand Illusion,” or Jean-Luc Godard’s fathomlessly influential “Breathless.” He worked with Stanley Kubrick, George A. Romero, and Martin Scorsese. The story goes that Shapiro first suggested the title “The Evil Dead” to Raimi.
When Raimi was making “Evil Dead II,” he wanted to save a little time. Rather than provide a dialogue-heavy exposition dump explaining the events of the first film, he wanted to merely cut in a few select scenes, constructing a brief, handy flashback. But as Raimi himself explained in “The Evil Dead Companion,” the distribution rights had been scattered to the four winds by Shapiro:
“We tried to get the rights to the footage from Evil Dead to use at the beginning of ‘Evil Dead II.’ Unfortunately, because the picture was sold by Irvin Shapiro to so many different countries, and different distributors in each country, we would have had to go to each one — there were probably around fifty — and gotten clearances to use it in their territory. It was a very weird situation — some of the distributors had even gone out of business.”
So that was that. No one knew who had the rights or even who to talk to.
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