Eurociné, formerly Films BAP, is a French independent film production and distribution company owned by the Lesoeur family since 1957, and tracing its corporate lineage to 1937. It technically is France's third oldest film company after Gaumont and Pathé, although it has gone through several bouts of inactivity.
Operating under director Robert Péguy before and immediately after World War II, it specialized in family fare. Following a period of dormancy, it was acquired by Marius Lesoeur, who repurposed it as an outlet for some pioneering co-productions with Spain, many of which involved cult helmer Jesús Franco. In the 1970s, Lesoeur and his son Daniel became lead producers, abandoning all artistic pretense to churn out exploitation quickies, a number of which recycled existing footage under collective pseudonyms. In the late 80s, Eurociné returned to more respectable pictures headlined by mid-level Anglo-Saxon stars, but they did not generate the expected revenue, and it has focused on sales ever since.
History
Films BAP (1937 to 1957) Eurociné traces its lineage to Films BAP, a company created by French film pioneer Robert Péguy and Charles Battesti, the owner of a Saint-Maur-des-Fossés theatre called Cinéma de l'Horloge. The firm was formally established on 19 February 1937 in Paris, although Battesti and Péguy had already worked under the BAP label in 1935–36. The company's star was Jacotte Muller, or "Little Jacotte", a child actress discovered at the Théâtre du petit monde, a stage venue for young performers created by Pierre Humble, who collaborated to some of her vehicles. Roger Tréville was another company regular. Although BAP was cleared by occupation authorities to operate during World War II, Péguy did not produce any work for the company during the conflict. Péguy's post World War II projects were unsuccessful and the company went dormant.Bier 2013, Event occurs at 12:50.
Eurociné (1957 onwards)
Acquisition by Lesoeur and rebrand Marius Lesoeur, movie producer with the SOPADEC company and one-time carnival owner, took a stake in BAP Films in 1957. He bought out Battesti and Péguy in 1958. Eurociné's official history ambiguously states that Lesoeur "discovered that film was a continuation of his life as a traveling entertainer" during the shooting of BAP's 1937 production Monsieur Breloque Has Disappeared, before taking full control of the company years later. In a 1999 interview, Marius' son Daniel gave another circuitous explanation: "The Eurociné company was founded in 1937. The film Grandfather [a 1938 BAP production] was produced under our imprint, although someone else served as executive producer at the time. Founder Marius Lesoeur, my father, made his first appearance as a producer with the film Une Belle Garce [a 1946 picture not made by BAP]." French film historian Christophe Bier found no evidence that the elder Lesoeur participated in any BAP films, and suggests that the family may be blurring the lines regarding his achievements, harkening back to carnival showmanship.Bier 2013, Event occurs at 12:50.
Lesoeur, using BAP's former corporate entity, appears to have started doing business as Eurociné around 1960, although it co-existed with SOPADEC for a brief period. In those early years, André Castillon, a jeweller from Gers and fellow résistant, was nominally listed as Eurociné's manager. Lesoeur also released some films through an affiliate called Eurocinéac (short for "Euro Ciné Action"), which was managed by Georges Estin. Marius' son Daniel joined his father shortly after his takeover of Eurociné in the early 1960s, first working assistant jobs before graduating to executive roles.
Minority co-productions At that time, Marius Lesoeur focused on co-productions with Spain, whose cheap labor provided him with solid films at a much lower cost than his home country. But even then, he remained a minority producer, merely trading francophone rights against an investment as small as a few ten-thousand francs, which often went uncredited for regulatory reasons.Bier 2013, Event occurs at 24:10. After a period of film noirs and musicals, whose real-life parallels exposed him to the wims of Spanish censorship, Lesoeur became one of the backers of Eduardo Manzanos Brochero's Golden City, Spain's first Western set. Against the objections of Manzanos, who did not believe they could emulate an American setting, he pushed to replace the Spanish character El Coyote with the Californian Zorro, who held broader appeal and paved the way for the Eurowestern boom.D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 13:42. After joining Manzanos and Lesoeur for another Zorro, Italian producer Alberto Grimaldi suggested the Frenchman invest a larger amount in a project with Sergio Leone. To his later regret, Lesoeur chose the safe option and declined, sealing his company's fate as a minor player.Bier 2013, Event occurs at 24:49. Problems encountered by Lesoeur on some relatively ambitious, pre-Eurociné films, may have contributed to his risk averse approach.
Following a pair of fluff musicals, Eurociné's third collaboration with director Jesús Franco begat the seminal The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962), which kickstarted the era of Spanish Fantaterror. After seeing the film, Amando de Ossorio approached Lesoeur to pitch him his own horror debut, Malenka, but the producer passed on it in favor of another western, Tomb of the Pistolero, and the film was not made until years later. Nazario Belmar, the Catholic backer of Franco's post-Orloff effort Death Whistles the Blues, attempted to steer him towards a career as one of Spain's high-brow filmmakers, which at one point had been his dream. But, finding Lesoeur's business model a better outlet for his urge to film, he broke up with the former and signed up for Eurociné's The Sadistic Baron von Klaus. Both Lesoeur and Franco would frequently revisit the horror genre, which they later infused with more overt erotic influences.
Lead producer and grindhouse years Mainstream co-productions dried up after a few years, but genres ushered in by the sexual revolution provided Lesoeur with new low-risk opportunities. In 1968, Eurociné made their first feature as main producer with the pseudo-social guidance film Nathalie l'amour s'éveille (),D. Lesoeur 1999, Event occurs at 4:45. also their first to be directed by French veteran Pierre Chevalier.D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 24:00. In its heyday, the company released five or six films a year. Their themes were chosen during bimonthly meetings with France's six independent regional distributors.D. Lesoeur 1999, Event occurs at 9:09. Even in the Gallic market, these films were not widely seen, but they were good sellers in developing countries. Foreign distributors, especially Italian ones at MIFED (), also provided key pointers.D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 4:36. The success of Salon Kitty created demand for Nazisploitation product,D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 22:33. and Eurociné obliged, although their films were considered tamer than others in that niche.
The Lesoeurs' production ethos, which emphasized marquee appeal over the films' actual contents, has been construed by some as a reflection of their sideshow roots. Daniel Lesoeur simply defined his family as "artisans". Crews were very small, and actors were often not provided with a script in advance. Many scenes from their movies were shot at the company's small Champs-Élysées offices or at the Lesoeur's secondary residence in Soisy-sur-École, where they stored props and furnished several sets.D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 23:20.Bier 2013, Event occurs at 39:26. According to Franco, this mindset was compounded by Daniel Lesoeur's promotion to producer. The company became infamous for its use of stock footage,D. Lesoeur 1999, Event occurs at 17:41. and some new films were built from the ground up to recycle large chunks of a previous one. While Daniel has downplayed the practice's frequency, a few of the company's respectable 1960s Westerns did receive a sexed up makover.
Franco's status with the Lesoeurs typically exempted him from having to build his films entirely around others', and despite escapades with better producers like Harry Alan Towers, he found the freedom of working for them to be worth the compromises as it resulted in two of his favorite works, Female Vampire and The Sadist of Notre Dame. However, directors with less leverage were not as well treated, decrying not only the Lesoeurs' untenable budgetary limitations, but their tendency to deflect blame onto them. During the mid 1970s, softcore was superseded by hardcore pornography. Eurociné seldom dealt in the genre, but some of the many alternate versions it churned out featured explicit inserts. Franco accepted that at least some of Daniel's tinkering was dictated by the changing French marketplace, and collaborated to these.
Broadening genres and English-language films Not desiring to venture into full-on hardcore, the Lesoeurs returned to fantasy films. Mimicking their Italian peers, they ventured into the latest zombie, cannibal and sword-and-sorcery trends, a stark departure from the stripped-down Gothic of their earlier efforts. The resulting movies, such as Zombie Lake, Cannibal Terror and Golden Temple Amazons, were profitable but their more complex visual demands proved ill-suited for Eurociné's artisanal infrastructure, and they were met with consternation by genre enthusiasts. According to Jean Rollin, who worked for Eurociné as a film doctor, the Lesoeurs were unfazed by their product's lack of professionalism.
In 1981, Daniel Lesoeur attended the newly-created American Film Market, which gave him new insight on North American distribution avenues.D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 34:22. In 1983, Eurociné sold a horror package to U.S. TV syndicator Cinema Shares International. In 1985, several of its films were acquired by Charles Band as part of a package put together by international sales broker JER Films, which he released through his Wizard and Force Video labels. Band also repackaged these titles with new art, and relaunched them through the sales division of his own Empire International.
While the ready-made Spanish dubs that came with many of his co-productions gave him a slight boost, Lesoeur soon found that Anglophone distributors were unwilling to pay any sizeable amounts for dubbed material.D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 34:22. After a few, unsuccessful attempts to have French actors speak English on set,D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 35:07. Daniel enrolled the English-fluent Sybil Danning for the girls-with-guns film The Panther Squad, a successful video pickup for Vestron. From then on, the Lesoeurs made the choice to invest in more films with Anglophone actors.D. Lesoeur 2023, Event occurs at 35:38. These early global efforts remained modest in scope, with budgets between FF1 and 2 million. By the mid-1980s, half of the company's revenue came from foreign territories, a rarity in the French film business.
Non-exploitation films and end of production With the decline of neighborhood theatres in the late 1980s, Eurociné launched a series of projects that increasingly eschewed exploitation in favor of more serious material. Starting with 1988's Dark Mission, these films featured more upscale talent like Mark Hamill, Christopher Lee, Robert Forster and George Kennedy. They cost up to five times more than the old-style Eurociné productions, however their budgets remained too limited given their loftier, mainstream ambitions.Bier 2013, Event occurs at 1:15:25. Even in France, they were dropped straight-to-video in a bulk 1996 release, years after they were made.