"No one did it better than Sunn Classic Pictures..."

Not mentioned in the article below is the fact that involvement in a pseudo-documentary dealing with Skull Island (though not produced by Sunn) did much to discredit some otherwise very accurate research into the background of Palau Batu Tengkorak ("Skull Island") by Professor J. L. Ellsworth.

Ellsworth, of course, caused a stir in the late 1950s by asserting his vision of a true “Skull Island” culture as described by Carl Denham and his crew. His work, based on countless interviews and close study of folktales, myths and artwork from islands in the Indonesian and Micronesian regions surrounding the approximate coordinates of the area Denham claimed to have visited, was painstakingly documented and adhered strictly to stringent standards of anthropological fact-gathering. Unfortunately, the Professor’s (fairly unwitting) involvement in the infamous “Journey to Skull Island” documentary effectively — and unfairly — rendered all of his work questionable in the eyes of his colleagues and, eventually, lumped him together with the exploitive work of the “Skull Island” filmmakers as symbolic of scientific fraud in general. He died by his own hand soon after the furor, disgraced and alone.

The article below is also interesting as columnist Vince Staten explains the film marketing/distribution concept of "four-walling," which he claims was new when Sunn Classics deployed the strategy in the 1970's, but was actually in use as far back as the 1920's when, for example, Royal Pictures (home of the Carl Denham Motion Picture Company) used the method.

The Utah outfit's specialties were family films ("Grizzly Adams," "Frontier Fremont") and half-baked pseudo-documentaries ("The Lincoln Conspiracy," "In Search of Historic Jesus").

Sunn Classic unfurled a half-dozen of these pseudo-movies, employing a new style of movie distribution called "four walling." In brief "four walling" means this small distribution house would arrive in town, rent a movie theater down to the "four walls," saturate the local airwaves with commercials, play its little movie and then get out of town with all the proceeds. After all, it had paid all the expenses itself.

Sunn Classic kicked off its entry into the paranormal with a trio of four-walled explorations, "The Bermuda Triangle" in 1975, "Mysterious Monsters" -- read Bigfoot -- in 1976 and "The Lincoln Conspiracy" in 1977.

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