Walter Reade Organization
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The Walter Reade Organization, Inc. (WRO) was an American company whose activities included film and television production and distribution. While prolifically distributing art house films (often foreign) to theaters and television, WRO also released a number of genre films, including Night of the Living Dead and English-dubbed versions of three Godzilla films: Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, Ebirah, Horror of the Deep, and Son of Godzilla. Infamously, Night of the Living Dead entered the public domain in the U.S. immediately upon Continental's original theatrical release, owing to the film's lack of a copyright notice under the pre-March 1, 1989 rules. WRO's versions of their three Godzilla films also lacked copyright notices, a fact exploited by public domain home video distributors in the 1980s and 1990s.
Overview
The Walter Reade Organization was formed in 1962 as Walter Reade-Sterling, Inc. (often stylized as Walter Reade/Sterling, Inc.) via the merger of the theater and concession operator Walter Reade, Inc. and the television production and distribution company Sterling Television Co., Inc. As part of the merger, the independent theatrical film distributor Continental Distributing, Inc. became a division of Reade-Sterling.[3]
In 1970, WRO's former television vice president Alan Gleitsman bought the company. That same year, he founded the television syndication company Alan Enterprises, which acted as exclusive television distributor for WRO and eventually "swallowed Reade."[4][5][6] Alan Enterprises syndicated 16mm prints of WRO's three Godzilla films as early as 1972.[7]
By the 1980s, Alan Enterprises began offering video masters of the three WRO Godzilla films to television stations. Spliced into the print sources for these video masters are alternate ending titles that included copyright notices indicating Toho as the owner and the films' domestic release years as the year of first publication. The WRO logo is also excised from these video masters.[8] Prior to 1996, these copyright notices were invalid because they were inserted only after publication in the U.S. Public domain home video releases used the older, copyright notice-free 16mm prints with the original ending titles.
The U.S. copyright for the three WRO Godzilla films was restored on January 1, 1996, when the Uruguay Round Agreements Act went into effect, which guaranteed the protection of foreign films still in copyright in their countries of origin.
Selected releases
- Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster (1965)
- Godzilla versus the Sea Monster (TV 1968)
- Son of Godzilla (TV 1969)
Videos
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Trivia
- The U.S. premiere of a later Toho kaiju film, Shin Ultraman, took place at the Walter Reade Theater in New York City in 2022.[9]
References
This is a list of references for Walter Reade Organization. These citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which this article is based. These references appear inside articles in the form of superscript numbers, which look like this: [1]
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Bibliography
- Boxoffice. Vol. 81 no. 20. Editor-in-chief: Ben Shlyen. 3 September 1962 – via Archive.org.
|volume=has extra text (help)CS1 maint: others (link) - Motion Picture Exhibitor. Vol. 75 no. 26. Editor-in-chief: Albert Erlick. 3 August 1966 – via Archive.org.
|volume=has extra text (help)CS1 maint: others (link) - Beverly, Beyette (8 May 1990). "AWARD: Gleitsman Promotes Change". The Los Angeles Times – via Newspapers.com.
- "A BONE-CHILLING FESTIVAL OF SCI-FI/HORROR CLASSICS !!". Broadcasting. Vol. 84 no. 26. Editor-in-chief: Donald V. West. Broadcasting Publications, Inc. 25 June 1973.CS1 maint: others (link)
- "PROGRAMMING". Broadcasting. Vol. 79 no. 20. Editor-in-chief: Donald V. West. Broadcasting Publications, Inc. 16 November 1970.CS1 maint: others (link)
- "QUALITY FILM ENTERTAINMENT from the Walter Reade Organization, Inc. TELEVISION DIVISION". Broadcasting. Vol. 82 no. 4. Editor-in-chief: Donald V. West. Broadcasting Publications, Inc. 24 January 1972.CS1 maint: others (link)
This is a list of references for Walter Reade Organization. These citations are used to identify the reliable sources on which this article is based. These references appear inside articles in the form of superscript numbers, which look like this: [1]
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