Special news for Empire Pictures fans (this might interest you, Chadzilla)

Interview with Moshe Diamant; Diamant says he never read a 1996 Fortune magazine article about Italian thug Giancarlo Parretti which mentioned Diamant. Under a section titled "Special Effects In Hollywood - How To Make Bad Loans
Disappear":

"Another troubled borrower to which CLBN gave fraudulent help was Empire Entertainment, producer of such dreck as CRASH AND BURN, CRAWLSPACE, and GHOULIES. Empire had borrowed $26 million from CLBN and by 1988 was in default and nearly bankrupt. Georges Vigon, head of European lending for Credit Lyonnais, feared that if Empire failed, the Dutch central bank and other regulators might force CLBN to call its growing number of shaky Hollywood loans. That would destroy the bank's entertainment business, possibly ending Vigon's career.
"Vigon enlisted the aid of two Hollywood producers, Eduard Sarlui and Moshe Diamant, who also were longtime clients of CLBN. They created a new company, Epic Holdings, which acquired Empire. Epic in turn was owned by a shell company in the Netherlands, Formax, whose stock in turn was owned by a newly formed Panamanian corporation, Route of the Stars, or ROS. ROS's ownership was evidenced only by bearer certificates carrying no names. The bearers were Sarlui and Diamant, to whom CLBN (Credit Lyonnais Bank Nederland [CLBN]) loaned $200 million, some of which was used to pay off Empire's old loans. Empire's other creditors, however, were not paid. And, since the the new owners of Empire were hidden behind a cloud of anonymous shares at the top of a corporate pyramid in Panama, creditors had nowhere to turn. The structure was similar to Giancarlo Parretti's corporate structure, which had been used by some Credit Lyonnais officers to conceal bad loans at the Cannon Group."

Moshe Diamant: "We had a company, Epic, that was indirectly controlled by CLBN. It started as an innocent thing on our behalf and ended up as part of a bigger scheme than we imagined. The bank said they would increase our line of credit from $60 million to $200 million if you will get the assets of Empire. And instead of you paying off Empire's debts, you'll give us stock in the new company. And we left it to them to structure it. We assumed it was legitimate. It survived about seven months until we realized they were trying to hide bad debts from Empire and other companies. We sued them. They sued us. We ended up compromising. CLB were financing us for years. Of all the companies they financed, most of the companies disappeared when CLBN went down, including the individuals involved. When my problems started with them, I just moved on. I made a deal with Tom Pollock at Universal and kept on making movies. It didn't affect me like it effected others."

Luke: "Did you ever meet Giancarlo Peretti?"

Moshe: "Many times. It was so obvious that he was a crook. He didn't hide it. Our main vendor, CLBN, said he was great. We wouldn't sell him anything. The whole line of credit with CLBN started because Peretti made an offer to buy our company TransWorld Entertainment and CLBN said, 'No, don't sell it. We'd rather use it to buy Empire. You'll have a bigger line of credit and you'll have a bigger company and you won't need to sell it'. CLBN wanted us to put TransWorld into Epic together with Empire's assets and Dino DeLaurentiis's assets. They had a plan that sounded good. Our library of about 200 films was sold to MGM for $280 million. The bank was corrupt. They made mistakes in every area, not just entertainment loans. They found out that people were stealing money and taking bribes. The bank's representatives that worked with us disappeared. We started a lawsuit against the bank and we couldn't find them. Georges Vigon is in jail. One day the bank stopped sending us money. So we went to Paris to see them. And we saw, wow, this bank is in trouble."

Okay, so what does this interview have to do with Empire, MGM, and TROLL 2? Well to re-translate the story, Empire was on it's last limb during the late 80's. Despite have some of their later films distributed theatrically and on video via New World Pictures, Empire's other films were then handled by it's new co-distributor TransWorld Entertainment. After Empire closed, TransWorld Entertainment held the Empire films, with the exception of New World Pictures owning 6 Empire titles. In the early 90's, TransWorld created Epic Pictures and Columbia/Tri-Star Home Video leased the three Empire films SPELLCASTER (1988), CATACOMBS (1988), and ARENA (1987) for video released.

Now TROLL 2 was originally released internationally as TROLLS and was picked up by TransWorld Entertainment/Epic Pictures along with the film CONTAMINATION .7 (1991). TransWorld/Epic bought U.S. distribution rights to the films, loaned them to Columbia/Tri-Star for video release, and re-titled them (i.e., CONTAMINATION .7 was released on video as THE CRAWLERS, TROLLS was re-titled TROLL 2). After Columbia/Tri-Star was finished with the video distribution of the films, they went back to TransWorld/Epic, which was bought out by MGM.

Hope that explains it all.