Batjac Productions
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Batjac Productions is an independent production company founded by John Wayne that produced many of his films in the latter part of the late actor's career. It is an outlet of the Wayne Family Estate.
[edit] About the company
Wayne and producer Robert Fellows founded Batjac in 1952 as Wayne/Fellows Productions. When Fellows left the company years later, Wayne re-named the corporation after a fictitious trading company mentioned in the 1948 film Wake of the Red Witch. (Interestingly, the company name in Wake of the Red Witch was spelled Batjak, but Wayne's secretary misspelled it as Batjac on the corporation papers, and Wayne let it stand.) Having his own company gave Wayne artistic control over the films he made.
Among Batjac's productions: The Alamo (1960 film), Cahill: U.S. Marshall, Big Jake, McLintock!, The Green Berets, Seven Men from Now, and Brannigan.
The most famous of all Batjac's films is Wayne's original 1960 version of The Alamo, a project he had planned for several years. It was an account of the tragic events at The Alamo in Texas involving Sam Houston and the army he led which included Davy Crockett.
[edit] The "Lost" Wayne films
Because of a production/distribution deal with Warner Bros. and United Artists, Batjac was allowed to retain all rights to four Wayne films: the WB-distributed The High and the Mighty, Hondo, and Island in the Sky, and the UA-distributed McLintock!.
After Wayne's death, his family continued to run Batjac, along with control as to how and when these films could be reissued. This led to many years of lawsuits, mostly involving McLintock!, which by the latter part of the 1990s had entered the public domain, although Batjac had granted MPI Home Video the rights to officially release Hondo and McLintock! on video.
Hondo was re-issued to television in its original 3-D format prior to MPI's video release, and McLintock! was unofficially released on other video labels in poor quality prints while the Batjac-sanctioned print was being shown on the Turner networks.
In 2004, Paramount Pictures reached an agreement with Batjac for the distribution rights to the "lost" Wayne films, and digitally restored and remastered these films for theatrical, television, and home video reissue beginning in the summer of 2005.
Batjac today continues to be run by the Wayne family, and oversees a key portion of John Wayne's career.
