The 80s Movie Podcast
Edward Havens
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Oklahoma Smugglers
On this episode, your intrepid host falls down a rabbit hole while doing research for one thing, and ends up discovering something "new" that must be investigated further, the 1987 action/comedy Oklahoma Smugglers. ----more---- TRANSCRIPT From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today. You were probably expecting the third part of the Miramax Films in the 1980s series, and we will get to that one the next episode. But as often happens while I’m researching, I’ll fall down a rabbit hole that piques my interest, and this time, it was not only discovering a film I had never heard of, but it fits within a larger discussion about disappearing media. But before we get started, I need to send out a thank you to Matthew Martin, who contacted me via email after our previous episode. I had mentioned I couldn’t find any American playdates for the Brian Trenchard-Smith movie The Quest around the time of its supposed release date of May 1st, 1986. Matthew sent me an ad from the local Spokane newspaper The Spokesman-Review dated July 18th, 1986, which shows the movie playing on two screens in Spokane, including a drive-in where it shared a screen with “co-hit” Young Sherlock Holmes. With that help, I was also able to find The Quest playing on five screens in the Seattle/Tacoma area and two in Spokane on July 11th, where it grossed a not very impressive $14,200. In its second week in the region, it would drop down to just three screens, and the gross would fall to just $2800, before disappearing at the end of that second week. Thank you to Matthew for that find, which gave me an idea. On a lark, I tried searching for the movie again, this time using the director’s last name and any day in 1986, and ended up finding 35 playdates for The Quest in Los Angeles, matinees only on Saturday, October 25th and Sunday, October 26th, one to three shows each day on just those two days. Miramax did not report grosses. And this is probably the most anyone has talked about The Quest and its lack of American box office. And with that, we’re done with it. For now. On this episode, we’re going to talk about one of the many movies from the 1980s that has literally disappeared from the landscape. What I mean by that is that it was an independently made film that was given a Southern regional release in the South in 1987, has never been released on video since its sole VHS release in 1988, and isn’t available on any currently widely used video platform, physical or streaming. I’ll try to talk about this movie, Oklahoma Smugglers, as much as I can in a moment, but this problem of disappearing movies has been a problem for nearly a century. I highlight this as there has been a number of announcements recently about streaming-only shows and movies being removed from their exclusive streaming platform, some just seven weeks after their premieres. This is a problem. Let me throw some statistics at you. Film Foundation, a non-profit organization co-founded by Martin Scorsese in 1990 that is dedicated to film preservation and the exhibition of restored and classic cinema, has estimated that half of all the films ever made before 1950 no longer exist in any form, and that only 10% of the films produced before the dawn of the sound era of films are gone forever. The Deutsche Kinemathek, a major film archive founded in Berlin in 1963, also estimates that 80-90% of all silent films ever have been lost, a number that’s a bit higher than the US Library of Congress’s estimation that 75% of all silent film are gone. That includes more than 300 of Georges Méliès’ 500 movies, a 1926 film, The Mountain Eagle, that was the second film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and London After Midnight, considered by many film historians to be “the holy grail” of lost films. A number of films from directors like Micha
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