Believe it or not, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be running a six-day tribute to Cannon Films from 11.19 to 11.24. What’s next — a black-tie tribute at Alice Tully Hall to Elie Samaha? From the online program guide: “Israel’s answer to Simpson and Bruckheimer, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus and their production and distribution company, Cannon Films, bestrode the 1980s with gleeful exploitation-movie schlock and quality auteur cinema from Godard, Cassavetes, Mailer and Ruiz.”

The idea, I’m guessing, is to stay away from the films of Michael Dudikoff, Chuck Norris, Albert Pyun and Charles Bronson and crap like Masters of the Universe, Superman IV and Over The Top and focus on the small handful of semi-decent flicks that Cannon cranked out — i.e., Barbet Schroeder‘s Barfly, Andrei Konchalovsky‘s Runaway Train, Richard Franklin ‘s Link, Norman Mailer‘s Tough Guys Don’t Dance and — if you want to be extra-accomodating — Tobe Hooper‘s Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Forget Jean-Luc Godard‘s King Lear, which I dismissed as a masturbatory time-waster and, as a senior Cannon employee put it at the time, “a total fuck-you letter to Menahem.”

Here’s that piece I ran last August about my experience as a Cannon staff writer from ’86 to ’88, called “That Cannon Stamp.”