Embassy Pictures

Embassy Pictures Corporation (also known as Avco Embassy Pictures as well as Embassy Films Associates) was an American independent film production and distribution company, which was active from 1942 to 1986. Embassy was responsible for films such as The Graduate, The Producers, The Fog, The Howling, Escape from New York, This Is Spinal Tap, and Swamp Thing, 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 into film production in 1945.

In 1967, Embassy was acquired by Avco. The company struggled in the 1970s before changing focus to 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, who 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. Levine invested $120,000 on dubbing, sound effects and new titles and spent $1.25 million on promoting the film. It was one of the highest-grossing films of the year, with rentals of $4.7 million, starting a growth in the sword-and-sandal genre.

After releasing the Hercules sequel, Hercules Unchained (1960), Embassy expanded to add 13 offices nationally as well as offices in Rome, London and Paris and signed deals with Italian production company Titanus and producer Carlo Ponti and began distributing art films, often European ones. In 1961, Embassy bought North American distribution rights for Two Women after Levine seeing no more than three minutes of its "rushes". The film, based on a novella written by Alberto Moravia, had been directed by Vittorio de Sica, and starred Sophia Loren (Ponti's wife) and Eleanora Brown, who acted out the respective roles of a mother and her young daughter whom World War II had displaced from their home. Levine's promotional campaign focused on one still photograph, which showed Loren, as the mother, wearing a torn dress, kneeling in the dirt, and weeping with rage and grief. Predicting that she would win the Academy Award for her performance, Levine brought Loren to the United States for interviews, bought space for, and placed, large advertisements in newspapers, and saw to it that Two Women appeared in the cities of residence of Academy Award jury members.

Levine's efforts paid off when the film was a hit and Loren became the first cast member of a foreign-language film to win the Academy Award for Best Actress. Embassy also acquired rights to and distributed Divorce Italian Style (1961); Salvatore Giuliano (1962); Federico Fellini's film 8½ (1963), as well as Ponti's producing credits including Boccaccio '70 (1962), and de Sica's Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Marriage Italian Style (1964). Embassy also produced an adaptation of The Thief of Baghdad (1961), also with Reeves in the lead, and Rick Carrier's Strangers in the City (1962).