Embassy Pictures

Embassy Pictures Corporation (also and later known as Avco Embassy Pictures as well as Embassy Films Associates) was an American independent film production and distribution studio, active from 1942 to 1986. Embassy was responsible for films such as The Graduate, The Producers, The Fog, The Howling, Escape from New York, and This Is Spinal Tap, and television series such as The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time and The Facts of Life. Embassy was founded in 1942 by Joseph E. Levine as a foreign film distributor, before branching out into film production in 1945. In 1967, Embassy was acquired by Avco. The company struggled in the 1970s before focusing lower-budget genre films at the end of the decade. In 1982, television producer Norman Lear and his partner Jerry Perenchio bought the studio, and it became involved in television production. In 1985, Embassy was sold to The Coca-Cola Company, which sold the studio to Dino De Laurentiis in October of that same year. Today, StudioCanal owns ancillary rights to the majority of Embassy's theatrical library, while Sony Pictures Television owns worldwide television syndication rights to the studio's films and TV shows. The company was founded in 1942 by Joseph E. Levine, initially to distribute foreign films in the United States. The company entered film production in 1945, co-producing with Maxwell Finn the documentary Gaslight Follies, a compilation of silent film clips narrated by Ben Grauer. Embassy found success in 1956 bringing the Japanese film Godzilla to the American general public (in a re-edited version), acquiring the rights for $12,000 and spending$400,000 promoting it under the title Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, and earning $1 million in theatrical rentals. They then made a$100,000 deal to bring the French-Italian film Attila (1954) to the United States in 1958 and spent $600,000 promoting it, which returned$2 million in rentals. Their breakthrough came the following year with Hercules, starring Steve Reeves and released by Warner Bros.