Trans World Entertainment (film company)
American film production and distribution company
Trans World Entertainment was an American independent production and distribution company which produced low-to-medium budget films mostly targeted for home-video market. In the early 1990s, the company became embroiled in the Credit Lyonnais banking scandal in Hollywood and was foreclosed on by the bank and subsequently incorporated into the Epic Library. Since 1998, its library has been owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
History
Founding and early years (1983–1986)
The company was founded as a video distribution company in summer 1983 by Moshe Diamant and Sunil Shah.
In 1984, it bought out the video distribution rights to shows handled by various syndicators, including Viacom Enterprises and Ziv International for a 200-title agreement. Also that year, it expanded into the world of theatrical film distribution and production, with a lineup of fully-funded films (three films per year), some of which were exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival; the theatrical film division was headed up by William Dunn.
Diamant met with filmmaker William Malone in 1985 and Malone pitched him a science-fiction horror film in the vein of Alien. The resulting film was Creature. Trans World Entertainment also produced Pray for Death starring Sho Kosugi the same year. Both films were maligned by critics, but were successful in the home video marketplace.
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This entry incorporates text from “Trans World Entertainment (film company)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.