Embassy Pictures

The same company that unleashed a rubber-suited monster on American drive-ins in 1956 also brought audiences *The Graduate* eleven years later. That was the paradox of Embassy Pictures: an entity that marketed a Japanese creature feature and a landmark of the New Hollywood with equal conviction — believing that any film, regardless of its origin or quality, could reach a mass audience if the advertising was loud enough and the booking wide enough. Embassy was less a traditional studio than a marketing force in a distributor's guise, and for a quarter-century it remained one of the most unlikely success stories in the film business.

Its founder was Joseph E. Levine, a Boston-based exhibitor and film importer with a huckster's instinct and a mogul's ambition, who established Embassy in 1942 to introduce foreign films to American audiences. His talent lay in recognizing that a low-cost acquisition could be transformed into a major event. He purchased the Italian muscleman epic *Hercules* (1958) for a small sum, spent heavily on promotion, and launched it simultaneously in as many theaters as possible — the saturation release that would later define the blockbuster era. He applied the same strategy to the Americanized *Godzilla, King of the Monsters!*, adding Raymond Burr and marketing it as a grand spectacle.

The showman's decade

Levine never claimed to be an artist, and he was open about his approach.

You can fool all the people all the time if the advertising is right and the budget is big enough.

Yet Embassy was not solely about hype. Levine reinvested the profits from monster movies and muscle-bound epics into prestige projects, handling the American release of European cinema — including Vittorio De Sica's *Two Women*, which earned Sophia Loren an Academy Award, and Federico Fellini's *8½*. By the mid-1960s, he was backing films that helped redefine American cinema. Embassy released Mike Nichols's *The Graduate* in 1967, a generational milestone and one of the highest-grossing films of its time, alongside Mel Brooks's *The Producers* and, soon after, *The Lion in Winter*. For a brief, astonishing period, the company that had once imported low-budget fare was distributing some of the most critically acclaimed work in the country.

Avco, genre, and the long sale

The shift came at the height of its success. In 1967, Levine sold Embassy to the Avco Corporation, and the company became Avco Embassy Pictures. He remained involved until 1974, and without his flair, the label gradually lost momentum. It found a more rugged second life at the start of the 1980s as a reliable source of genre entertainment — John Carpenter's *Escape from New York*, Joe Dante's *The Howling*, David Cronenberg's *Scanners* — all low-budget films marketed with the old Embassy cunning for a new midnight-movie audience.

The corporate changes proved fatal. In January 1982, a group led by television moguls Norman Lear and Jerry Perenchio acquired the company through their Embassy Communications and revived the Embassy Pictures name. Their primary interest was the valuable TV library, and in June 1985 they sold the entire enterprise to Coca-Cola, then the owner of Columbia Pictures. Coke focused on the television assets and, that November, transferred Embassy's theatrical division and film library to the Dino De Laurentiis Entertainment Group. After more than forty years, Embassy Pictures was no longer an active studio.

What remains is the model. Levine's saturation openings and aggressive marketing strategies are now standard practice in the film industry, and Embassy's filmography — *Godzilla* and Benjamin Braddock, *Hercules* and Snake Plissken — continues to serve as a vivid, eclectic record of American movie culture. Embassy mattered because it rejected the distinction between art and exploitation, insisting that both were, at their core, shows to be sold.