In the late fifties, Tony Tenser was publicity manager at a tiny British film distribution company called Miracle Films. His love of making deals and gift for orchestrating publicity stunts brought him into contact with a strip club manager named Michael Klinger. The two men formed a partnership, Compton Films, which spawned such productions as: Naked as Nature Intended, The Black Torment and Repulsion. When they split in 1966, Tenser formed Tigon British Films. Over the next six years he produced everything from comedy to westerns, from horror to sci-fi; the titles ranged from Witchfinder General to Not Now Darling. As one of the most influential producers in the British film industry, Tenser was instrumental in launching the careers of such diverse talents as: George Harrison Marks, Robert Hartford-Davies, Michael Reeves, Stephen Weeks and Michael Armstrong. Among the many actors who worked for him were Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, Boris Karloff, Donald Pleasence, Klaus Kinski, Barbara Steele, Julie Ege, Raquel Welsh and...er, Norman Wisdom. This interviews covers his career from his early days as a ABC cinema manager, through distributing the first Bardot movies to his last film as an independent producer, Pete Walker's seminal Frightmare.

DS: How did you first meet Michael Klinger?

TT: I was Publicity Manager for a firm called Miracle Films, it was a small firm but well established with the press. The name Miracle Films was an anagram of the three partner's names, more or less, and the obvious catchphrase of course was "If it's a good film, it's a Miracle," so I avoided that! We had a film opening at one of the Cameo cinemas with Brigitte Bardot. Miracle had her first three main films and I saw the first one which was called La Lumiere d'en Face- The Light Across the Street (1955) I went through my blurbs and things and came up with the "The Sex Kitten" tagline. We had this film called And God Created Woman - Et Dieu Crea la Femme (1956). We tried to avoid using the word God in the title, you can upset people or whatever, and I decided to alter the title to "And Woman... Was Created," but I added a punchline to it. "But the Devil Shaped Bardot!" and that seemed to go better than the other film. We originally had a model of her which we put up in the front of the cinema and it got a lot of attention, but then admissions began to slack a bit, and we needed something else to boost sales.
As you know, London, even in those days, 35 years ago, had a lot of strip clubs. I thought, what if a number of striptease girls objected to women taking their clothes off in films? So I was introduced to this fellow Michael Klinger who had The Gargoyle, a strip club. We had a chat and I said, "I want to borrow half a dozen of your girls to do a demonstration, going through the West End on Friday lunch time and finish up picketing outside the cinema." He said "What a wonderful idea!" So he gave me about eight of his girls- one of them had two Afghan dogs! We notified the police that there was going to be small demonstration but explained that it was just a publicity thing, so the police didn't bother us. It was a very good stunt , all the press were there and it worked very well -the receipts went up again. That was how I met Klinger, who was full of fun, great fun. A good partner to have at that time.
He said "I'd like to get out of this striptease and get in to the film business." I told him it was very difficult to get started and there was a lot of money involved, but there was something that hadn't been approached yet - a cinema club, showing films that normally would not get a censor's certificate. Quite a number of films are not given a censor's certificate and not always for sex or violence reasons. Some have religious, political problems or whatever. We found a place in Old Compton Street and called it The Compton Cinema Club, and I offered Miracle the chance to go into partnership. They said that they didn't want to do it, so I said they should get themselves a new Publicity Manager because I was resigning. The cinema we built was 120/160 seats… something like that. It was in the basement of an office block in Soho and it was a back projection, which meant a small lens behind the screen so that people could walk about and not have a shadow on the screen. It was quite successful, and to make it more legitimate we had a number of well-known founder members, including the censor John Trevelyan, Bryan Forbes, people like that.

DS: With the club occupying your time, why go into film making?

TT: We soon found that we couldn't get enough new films, or when we put the censored bits back in the big distributors wouldn't allow the films to be shown in a cinema club. I had a chat with Klinger and suggested we form a distribution company to buy films for distribution, firstly to show in our cinema then to make the cuts or whatever, and show them across the country. And so we became Compton Film Distributors. There was a market for what they then called "nudie" films - though today they wouldn't get a U certificate. They used to show women's tops and that was it. So we decided we would make one. We could show it as it was and then show it in the cinemas where more people could go and see it. As a rule the films were so cheap to make and there was no real dialogue - we added the dialogue later on - so there wasn't really a risk.

DS: The Cameo cinema chain were involved as well weren't they?

TT: They kept the Cameo Poly in Regent Street, which showed subtitled foreign movies as their flagship for these films, We went into a partnership with the two directors of the company to form Compton Cameo Films Ltd. They would choose the films, we would buy them. They would give the film a West End showing, and then we'd get them round the rest of the arthouse circuit. It was good business- very good money. I remember the two directors very well. One of them, Basil, was the nephew of one of the owners, and his partner was Charlie Brown, who started out as a projectionist and became Managing Director.
Basil was really the business side but they worked very, very well together. They used to come to me or they used to phone me up and they were always in opposition to each other, because one was looking purely at the cost side of things, the other one was artistic. Charlie used to have a cigarette holder- very artistic sort of man. The first film we made together was called Naked As Nature Intended and we got George Harrison Marks in to direct. At that time he had a couple of adult photography magazines. Klinger knew Harrison Marks very well, and his wife, Pamela Green - if you remember she was a big pin-up of the day. Marks was a great pal of his, I think they went to the same school together. Marks was a very interesting man and a very good cameraman you know. He was an excellent photographer of nudes, but he also excelled in photographs of cats, that were much more beautiful than some of his nudes! We called the film Naked As Nature Intended, it was a very straightforward film; there was no acting in it, hardly any dialogue and Pamela Green of course.
I'll tell you a funny thing about Naked As Nature Intended. It was released at one of the West End cinemas… there were four Cameo cinemas, nudist type of cinemas that played this type of film. It was the World Premiere, but we didn't have any guests of course! We had a Christmas card done of a photograph of Harrison Marks dressed in a Ruritanian Admiral's uniform as a doorman standing outside the cinema, with a little caption underneath saying "Do you read the small print in contracts?" We sent it to him, it was Klinger's idea. I don't think George liked it really, he took it the wrong way. But we thought it was very funny. We did another nudie film, called My Bare Lady. But that was just for America and I don't think we released it here.

DS: You then decided to go into more mainstream movies…

TT: Somebody came to see us with a film about an innocent young girl who contracts Venereal Disease. In those days that was the most terrible thing; nowadays it's unheard of. The film was called That Kind Of Girl and we made very sure that we could get censorship before we started. No big cast in it, but it did well.

DS: Which studios did you use for those early films?

TT: That was nearly all location, but mainly they were shot on location. We would use Twickenham, Teddington or Pinewood if we needed a studio. Meanwhile we were still distributing other people's movies, mainly foreign stuff. We had titles like Girls Led Astray and The White Slavers, and we also had a few of these- what we call dustbin lid films- Spartacus-type stuff. Italian films dubbed into American accents with a fellow saying "jyshgfu sa fg uagf kjkuhfihfjhdkuifh djnkjfh," and the words come out "goodbye."We did Goliath And The Giants, and there was another film, The Last Goal, which was Yugoslavian. I had a friend ,a Yugoslavian who spoke good English, who used to go looking for films. He showed me the film, which was about Yugoslavian captives in a POW camp. The story is that the Germans are going to have a big visit from a General or Field Marshall, so they decide to stage a football match with the prisoners. One of the prisoners is a professional footballer and he teaches all the others how to play. But the Germans have told this guy that they are going to kill him and the others unless they lose. So the match is on, all the prisoners are watching, the German hierarchy is there and of course they are beating the Germans - they can't help it. Half time and the POWs are told to lose the game if they want to survive. But they can't do it, and at the end of the film the Germans machine-gun the whole team. It's a good film. I think it was later made into a big budget Hollywood film, (Escape From Victory) with Michael Caine in it.

DS: The next Compton movie was The Yellow Teddybears. Is it true you found the story for it in a newspaper?
TT: Most of the films I made I either dreamed up the idea, or I got the idea from reading something. The Yellow Teddybears was a newspaper story about a girls' school where if a girl lost her virginity she would wear a yellow golliwog. I thought, this is going to make a good film, and I had a chat with John Trevelyan, the censor. He said he was not happy with the title, which could be racist, so we changed it to The Yellow Teddybears. Then someone introduced the Ford brothers to me. They were professional scriptwriters, and they brought in Robert Hartford-Davis, the director. We were quite happy with that and it did okay.

DS: With The Black Torment, you moved from this type of contemporary film into Hammer's territory, gothic melodrama…

TT: We decided we had done the sex side, and I thought the next thing was horror films. Like sex/nudie films there is always a good audience for horror movies. Somebody brought in this script of The Black Torment and we bought it. It didn't cost a lot to make. We didn't interfere very much in the shooting. Derek Ford and his brother, Donald, were both very, very good scriptwriters, excellent scriptwriters and I always had a good relationship with them.

DS: Were you were still making documentary style films at this point?

TT: Yes. We made something called London In The Raw, which started off with a baby being born, and showed all the seedier parts of London. It was quite well done really, a very, very economical film to make. It was based on the Mondo Cane thing.

DS: From there Compton moved into a different league. How did you get involved with Polanski?

TT: Klinger was on a six-week sabbatical with his wife, a second honeymoon. Whilst he was away I was running the firm on my own, and my secretary phoned upstairs to say there was a Mr Gutowski and a Mr Polanski to see me. I had heard of Polanski because he made a film called Knife In The Water in Holland, which had got excellent critical reviews. Up they came and they didn't have a script but they had a synopsis, probably about sixteen pages in French, of a film called Lovelihead. My French isn't very good, but I got the bare bones of it and I thought it sounded very good. I guessed that if they were coming to me then they had already gone to everybody else, but Polanski was a name, so I said yes if he directs it. Gutowski wanted to be the in-line producer, Klinger and I would be executive producers. I asked about the budget, and he said £90,000. Well, we had never made a film for more than £60,000 and we didn't want to go broke, because it was a lot of money in those days. So they trimmed here and there and they got it down to £60,000. In the end it came to more than £90,000, but it was such a brilliant film.
Polanski is a brilliant director, we always got on very well with him, but to understand him was very difficult at times. We had an excellent relationship with Gene Gutowski. When we had difficulties with Polanski, Gutowski would act as a go-between to get it right. Any difficulties we had would be on shooting things we felt weren't going to be used in the film. To give you an instance: the scene where she has just killed the landlord, he is in the bath and she goes into the hallway. There are hands coming out of the wall. To do that we had to cut holes in the wall and employ all different kinds of people, ethnic and non-ethnic, children, adults, all different sizes, to put their hands through. They had to be a put in with latex so the hands looked part of the wall. After they had set up the shot they were having a number of stops because this one wanted a pee, that one wanted to do a number two, this one wanted to scratch his head. You couldn't do anything. It was holding us up and costing a lot of money. I was with Klinger, and one of us, I don't know which, said to him "Look, why so many hands?" And he wouldn't answer. We suggested we could lose four or five pairs of hands here and there. He wouldn't answer. He said nothing. So we spoke to Gutowski and he said, "That's what he wants. Can't argue about it." That is the sort of arguments that mostly Klinger had with Polanski but generally I kept out of it. He is the director, at the end of the day, but it was costing a lot of money. I think that that gives you an idea of the sort of problems we had, but when the film was finished how could you say maybe you should have had less hands there? Who was to tell? It was his film, his baby and that's the way he made it and you have got to say that he was right and we were right.

DS: While Repulsion was shooting you started on the Sherlock Holmes movie, A Study In Terror. Herman Cohen takes all the credit for that one. What's the definitive story on how the film came about?

TT: Herman Cohen was a co-partner in the film. He had the western hemisphere, the same deal as we had later with AIP. We had the eastern hemisphere, which gave us just enough money to make a bigger film next time. He shouldn't take all the credit, he should take his due credit; he did a lot in the film and was a lot of help to us. I had a wonderful relationship with him and he is a great guy, I like him very much.
During the making of Repulsion, Gene Gutowksi brought in another mid-European-American type, a fellow called Henry Lester, who had the responsibility of the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate. He said he wanted to make another Sherlock Holmes film, and would I like to do it? So I said "Great." I called in the Ford brothers and told them we had got the okay to make a Sherlock Holmes film. The fictitious Sherlock Holmes was set in the same period as the genuine Jack the Ripper, and in the same area, the East End, so my idea was that we should have Sherlock Holmes discovering who Jack the Ripper was. The Fords did an outline, which we we liked, and then they did the script. Now, to make it sound like a Sherlock Holmes film, I took a little bit of poetic license with one of the books, which is called A Study In Scarlet, and we called it A Study In Terror. All these titles, with the exception of a couple, were really my own. They come too me quite easily.
We wanted it directed by someone who was accustomed to making big money films, and Jimmy Hill was available at the time. His agent had come into the office and said "Jimmy's looking for a project," and I showed him the script and he said he thought Jimmy would do this. I phoned up Herman Cohen, who was spending a lot of time in London then, and he agreed to come in for half the budget, which to his standards was reasonable but to our standards was a little bit more than we wanted to pay. I think it was £160,000, a bit more than Repulsion! We were getting into the big league by then. The film was very well made, excellently well made. Some of the press slated it but they slated it because of the company that made it.

DS: Richard Gordon told us there were problems on the set of The Projected Man and he had to fire the director, and John Croydon took over for the last week of shooting. Was Compton's involvement purely financial?

TT: Purely financial. Richard Gordon, who is an agent in America, asked us to put a little bit of money in and we would handle the distribution and I would have a credit on it. I wanted a credit on it to make sure that it had the ingredients that would sell all right. So that's it, mainly distribution, we weren't really involved.

DS: You then went on to a second film with Polanski. Cul De Sac is a very different movie from Repulsion were you comfortable with such a bleak story?

TT: We were all impressed with Polanski, especially Michael Klinger. Even though they had rows, they formed a very good relationship. Polanski and Gene Gutowski were hawking this film Cul De Sac, which at the time was called Katelbach Is Coming. Katelbach is the name of a gangster in the story. It looks like a funny name, you laugh at it. The whole film is supposed to have a sort of a comic feel about it but really it hasn't, it isn't very comic at all. So we changed the title to Cul De Sac. Again Polanski did a very good job. We shot the whole of that on Holy Island and Polanski, a very tough director, really made his actors work. But he gets the results and that is his way of getting results. The story itself wasn't much, but it relied on the direction to put some pep into it and it came out all right. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival.

DS: After Cul De Sac were you offered Polanski's next one, Dance Of The Vampires, or was it a clean split?
TT: It wasn't a split. He didn't come up with any more films and we didn't have any more subjects that were suitable for him. If we had, I would have approached either him or Gene Gutowski. Dance of the Vampires? No. He had sold Klinger on Cul De Sac and I went along with that because I thought it was okay, but I don't know whether he offered us Dance of the Vampires.I think I was given a synopsis of it, and in my own opinion the subject matter wouldn't sell many seats. If Polanski directed, it would be a good film, but it didn't seem to me to be a great premise. Probably his least appealing movie, from my perspective anyway.

DS: The Compton partnership was on the crest of a wave at this point why did it come to such an abrupt end?

TT: Well we had come to end of our term. We had come to a time, Klinger and I, when we thought we would be better off each going our own way, and he bought my share out. I phoned up the local Midland Bank manager and said, "I am going to start again. Here's £5000, will you match it as a bank overdraft?" And he said "Certainly." So with £10,000 I started a new company.called Tony Tenser Films Ltd. Nobody else could take the credit for it!
I started out buying a French film and a Japanese film. The Japanese film was called Nobi, which means No Sex. It was story about impotence, a black comedy, and quite a funny film. Apart from Kurosawa's and the really big films, there were no Japanese films ever shown, so I thought this would be a good film to buy. Very economical and it did well
Then I got back into film production. Someone named George Robin came to see me with a few lines of a script called Mini Weekend, and I thought this sounded good. So I said, "You shoot it, get a small crew together and we will do it on 16mm and blow it up." It was a lot more economical to shoot that way. I only had £10,000 in the bank to start with, and anyway, I'd already spent about £3000 on the two films I bought. There were no actors to speak of in Mini Weekend. The producers were Arnold Miller and Stanley Long, who used to make shorts for the RAF. Stanley Long was the cameraman and Arnold Miller was the producer. They held their money back so we managed to make the film for a pittance. It was very cheap and you can tell that, but it did alright.

DS: From there you launched Tigon Films?

TT: Once Mini Weekend went out, I got a call from the Hymans, two brothers who were elderly then. They had built the first Trocadero cinema, and were very much the elder statesmen in the British side of the film industry. They said they had backed somebody else, who was very famous in show business and who did extremely, extremely well. They had made a lot of money out of that and they thought that they would now like to back me. I needed money to go on, so I said if they put £50,000 in - and I wouldn't take it out- they would have a half share. Normally when you sell half your business it's your money. But I didn't want it. I wanted it to go into the business, and that is what got us going. Of course now I had partners in I couldn't call it "Tony Tenser Films." I wanted to keep the "T" in, and I wanted to have a mythological figure in it, so I came up with a cross between a tiger and a lion normally. I called it Tigon, and our motif was a lion with stripes.

DS: Was that when you met Laurie Marsh?

TT: No that was a little earlier, when I was with Michael Klinger. I had a phone call from another friend of mine in the film business who was connected to Sheila Van Damme, owner of the Windmill Theatre. The Windmill used to have shows, just dancing shows really but the dancing girls wore brief costumes- very brief! The girls at the back stood still and they showed their breasts but they weren't allowed to move, they had to stand still! All the main comedians and stand up comics got their start there: Harry Secombe, Tony Hancock etc. It was owned and run by a man called Vivian Van Damme who had two daughters one of whom was Sheila, a very well known racing driver, and she took over the business when the father died. They said they were thinking of selling the Windmill, and would I like to buy it? They quoted a figure that sounded reasonable, so I got hold of Klinger and he said "We'll find the money." We hunted round and found a guy in the property business, whose name was Laurie Marsh. We did buy the Windmill, we ran it and we even made a film there. We used the cast from the theatre and called the film Secrets Of A Windmill Girl. Eventually Laurie Marsh came into Tigon and he put some more money in. We split the partnership into three instead of two, and everybody was happy with that.

DS: How did you get involved with Patrick Curtis and The Sorcerers?

TT: I already knew Arnold Miller, and he brought in Patrick Curtis, who was bumming around looking for money to make this film, The Sorcerers. He had got Michael Reeves under his wing. Reeves had already made a film in Italy with Barbara Steele (Revenge Of The Blood Beast) which was quite well made. They had already approached Boris Karloff, who said he would play the lead part. I think by that time Boris was playing only "goody" parts. This is what was told to me by Peter Cushing when we had a meal together. You know the story that Cushing nursed lost his wife through an illness for many years. When she died he felt that he couldn't play the same things; he would only play the 'goodie' parts not the 'baddie' parts, and I think that's what Boris Karloff was doing. He wasn't really the villain in The Sorcerers. His wife was a baddie, played by Catherine Lacey, a wonderful actress. In comes Patrick Curtis. I meet him and look at the script. We knew already that he was a publicity manager, and he later became the husband of Raquel Welch. She was then his partner, and their firm was called Curtwel Productions. We got the script, we got the money, we made the film, and Michael Reeves was brilliant. It was very, very low budget.
We got to the stage where Arnold Miller came to me and said there were three or four scenes in which they needed London taxi. He said if he hired one he needed to have an actor, someone with a union ticket. So he suggested he could buy an old second hand one, clean it up so it looked all right and get it licensed only to use it as we use it on the film, not to run all the time - that way it would be okay with the police. He said he'd be the taxi driver. He said we could also use it to do tracking shots instead of putting rails down, and carry the stars about if they wanted to go anywhere. So we used it throughout the film, and he then sold it for more than he paid for it! That's why I loved Arnold Miller.

DS: Whose idea was it to cast Karloff ?

TT: He came in with the package with Patrick Curtis. So did Raquel Welch. She was involved behind the scenes insofar as she was Patrick Curtis' wife, and she would come and see rushes. She is a very nice, very nice lady, very polite, and I have nothing but good to say about her. At that time she wasn't as good an actress as she became later on. She went to this acting school for some period. I can only say good things about her.

...To Be Continued