Nik Powell and Steve Woolley started Palace in the early '80s as a specialist video distributor and subsequently moved into film distribution and production. It became 'a studio in miniature' as one writer put it but had collapsed as a viable concern by 1992. If Goldcrest represents '80s mainstream film culture then Palace represents its underside. Its distribution catalogues were a gallery of '80s independents including John Cassavetes, the Coen brothers and John Waters from the USA, Mike Leigh and Peter Greenaway from Britain, together with an assortment of international art-house names such as Fassbinder,
Oshima and Bertolucci, and Sam Raimi's horror classic - The Evil Dead (1983). Its less experimental production record includes a number of Neil Jordan titles, The Company of Wolves (1984), Mona Lisa (1986) and The
Crying Game (1992), Scandal (d. Michael Caton-Jones, 1988) about the Profumo affair of the 1960s, and the ill-fated Absolute Beginners (1985).
Bibliography
Angus Finney, The Egos Have Landed: the Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures, 1996.
Tom Ryall, Encyclopedia of British Film
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