Show Business: Bring Back the Moguls!

Cheap? Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus know about cheap. Some people in Hollywood and other places where movies are made even believe the word was coined for the "Go-Go Boys," as the two Israeli cousins who run the Cannon Group are commonly called. That is not the case, although it is true that their idea of a power lunch is not Le Dome but a salami sandwich at their desks. It is also true that their headquarters on Sunset Boulevard has all the glamour of a discount electronics warehouse, with overflowing wastebaskets, well-scuffed walls and an assortment of mismatched gray carpets, all of them stained. Yet it is also a fact that in a generally depressed business the Cannon Group is doing well. King Solomon 's Mines, which came out before Thanksgiving, has made $16 million. Runaway Train and Sam Shepard's Fool for Love, which open across the country next week, show promise of a big draw at the box office as well. And, brags Globus, "nobody gave us nothing on a plate of gold."

In fact, the company plans to make about 20 films next year, more than any of the major studios. Several of them will be either gory shoot-'em-ups like the current Death Wish 3 or comic-book films like Captain America and Pinocchio--the Robot. Golan hopes that one of their films, Delta Force, which comes out next month with Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin, will be Cannon's first $100 million grosser. The script has terrorists taking over an American airliner and Norris and his Delta Force flying to the rescue, spraying bullets everywhere. The plot sounds very much like last summer's TWA hijacking, which caused the production schedule to be speeded up. But in the much improved Cannon version, the good guys win, and the bad guys are sent to their proper, bloody reward. Golan, 56, and Globus, 42, follow what was once Hollywood's golden rule: audiences love happy endings.

The resemblance does not end there. Even some of their critics compare the Go-Go Boys to Hollywood's founding fathers, who snorted when anyone talked about art in films and were devoted to making money. "They are like the old studio moguls; they eat, sleep and breathe pictures," says J. Lee Thompson, a 50-year show-biz veteran who is directing one of their thrillers, Murphy's Law. "The whole industry used to be like that. It's not now." Globus agrees: "The moguls cared to make money like we care to make money--so that they could make more movies."

The two cousins, who were born in the town of Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee, have wanted to make pictures since they were teenagers. Golan, the elder partner, devoted much of his time to the movies, watching his screen idols, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart and Charlie Chaplin. He spent the '50s working in the theater, and though he became Israel's highest-paid director, he now regards the time as wasted; it kept him from his true love, the movies.

In 1959 he came to the U.S., and the following year he took a job as a driver for Roger Corman, America's master of the cheap and quick. Soon promoted to assistant to the director, he learned everything he needed and then returned home in 1962. Globus, who had gone to business school in Tel Aviv, joined him in 1963 to form Noah Films, which eventually dominated the Israeli film industry. In 1979 they decided to move their base to Mecca, as they call Hollywood, and bought control of the ailing Cannon Group.