Post on 19-Jan-2023
Chapter 1 – Introduction: An Independent Producer
It’s very fortunate for the British film industry to have
such a dynamic independent producer. Klinger, despite all
the problems, is a man who goes out and does things. He
overcomes the obstacles, more often than not with a smile and
a quip, and he believes passionately that the British
film, well-made, has an excellent chance on the
international market. Michael thinks ‘positive’, and that
alone is a factor that has brought him to the top.
Klinger is an impresario on the lines of the late
Alexander Korda on whom the mantle appears to have
fallen.1
If the British film industry is indeed in its death
throes, they appear not to have brought the news to Michael
Klinger, a 55 year-old cigar-chewing independent producer who
resembles nothing so much as a flamboyant character actor
doing impressions of Louis B. Mayer. Mr Klinger, like many
of his movie mogul predecessors, is the son of an immigrant
Polish tailor; by some accident of birth or geography he was 12
however set down in postwar Wardour Street rather than prewar
Hollywood.2
These two appreciations were written when Michael Klinger was
at the height of his success having just completed Shout at the
Devil (1976), the most expensive British film ever made by an
independent producer. They capture several of Klinger’s most
important qualities – his ambition, dynamism and charisma –
and his passion for making films despite the severe
difficulties created by working within a British film industry
in apparently terminal decline. Both Noble and Morley see him
as continuing an important tradition of showmanship, invoking
Korda or the Hollywood moguls; Morley emphasizes that he
looked the part: flamboyant, cigar-chomping and also Jewish.
Klinger’s rise to prominence had been rapid. Starting out in
Soho as the maker of sexploitation films – his first film was
Naked as Nature Intended (1961) – Klinger became the executive
producer of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) which gave him the
aspiration (and the cultural capital) to make more ambitious
films, including Get Carter (1971) directed by Mike Hodges,
becoming Britain’s most successful independent producer in the13
1970s before his career faltered towards the end of the
decade.
It is a fascinating career and one that illuminates key
aspects of the British film industry over a 20-year period.
However, despite his importance, Klinger has been forgotten,
absent from the standard accounts and meriting only one
sentence in Alexander Walker’s National Heroes, which is unusual
in the space and attention it gives to producers.3 This neglect
stems, in part, from an over-privileging of the director’s
role, a deleterious legacy of auteurism, which has had, as its
concomitance, the relegation of the producer’s role to the
shadowy, venal world of commerce and the ‘bottom line’.4 The
consequence of this is that Klinger’s most famous films –
Repulsion and Get Carter – are celebrated as evidence of their
directors’ genius, with Klinger’s role caricatured or
marginalized. Therefore this revisionist study, based on
hitherto unexploited archival material, seeks not only to
restore Klinger to his rightful place in British film history,
but in the process to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of
14
Film Studies and to make a compelling case for the
significance of the producer’s role.
Klinger’s restless intelligence, and most importantly, his
Jewishness, predisposed him to an entrepreneurial career that
made producing films more attractive than directing them. He
wanted to be, in his son’s words, ‘the guy who signed the
cheques’.5 As Noble and Morley recognized, Klinger was a
showman, a role he played up to in numerous carefully
calculated ‘cultural self-performances’, to invoke John
Thornton Caldwell’s term from his important study of the ways
in which film and television workers attempt to construct
their own interpretative frameworks.6 In a period (circa 1960-80)
of extensive change in the British film industry, when
cinemagoing shifted from being an essential social habit to an
occasional affair, such showmanship was vital, Klinger
believed, in wooing an audience:
One thing that’s missing in this town [London] today is
showmanship. The oldtimers knew about showmanship – how
to bang the drum – and a lot of that’s gone now and
15
more’s the pity. We have to find something that triggers
the public into wanting to see the film.7
Klinger was also acutely conscious that the role of the
individual producer was being eroded during a period in which
the British film industry was becoming increasingly corporate:
‘Even the title has become diluted … where not denigrated. And
the producer’s “personal touch” is largely missing in films of
late.’8 Klinger endeared himself to commentators by presenting
an image of bullish confidence and an optimistic faith in the
future of the British film industry: ‘I feel in some small way
I am contributing to a new spirit of adventure, but I just
wish there was a bit more of it about … Wardour Street seems
to have accepted defeat and given up even before the battle’s
really begun.’9
Although this study emphasizes the importance of showmanship
to a producer’s role, it also explores Klinger’s belief –
stimulated by his encounter with Polanski – in film as an art
form as well as entertainment, which meant he was eager to
champion talented young directors and give them the support
16
and creative space to make innovative films. It was part of
Klinger’s diasporic Jewish cosmopolitanism that made him
always think beyond a parochial Britishness. Hodges recalled
that he was ‘very European … He had some instinct to actually
move towards art cinema in many ways, but still concentrate on
good storytelling.’10 Klinger was thus prepared to make
‘unusual films’ that he knew would be a ‘difficult sell’:
Polanski’s Cul-de-Sac (1966), Peter Collinson’s The Penthouse
(1967), Alastair Reid’s Something to Hide (1972), Hodges’ Pulp
(1972) or the Biblical love story Rachel’s Man (1976), directed
by Israel’s leading auteur, Moshé Mizrahi.
However, one should be wary of treating creativity and
commerce as polar opposites. They become intimately
intertwined in the work of many producers, the best of which
demonstrate what Eric Fellner has identified as the necessary
combination of a keen sense of a film’s financial viability
and likely box-office success with artistic understanding: the
‘creative insight to make the right choices’ and the ‘business
acumen to set out the whole [project] properly’.11 In an
industry such as filmmaking, creativity itself is a commodity,
17
central to a film producer’s self-promotion, the key marker
distinguishing a genuine producer from a mere business
administrator.12 Thus, proclaiming a film’s ‘artistry’ and
‘creativity’ became ways in which Klinger tried to promote his
own, as well as his directors’, cultural credibility and
symbolic capital. Klinger was adept at building a ‘reputation
network’, creating ‘highly visible associations which gave
stature and publicity potential by providing opportunities for
features and stories in the trade and popular press including
announcing new “discoveries”, highlighting awards and
accolades and capitalizing on established or strongly emerging
reputations’. In this way the promotion of the film becomes
integral to the process of its production, with the producer
operating as an ‘industrial tactician’.13
The Independent
Throughout his career Klinger wanted to be independent, to be
his own boss, another characteristic of the Jewish
entrepreneur. Indeed, he turned down the possibility of
becoming the production manager for British Lion in 1972 (see
18
chapter 3), MGM’s European head of production (see chapter 4)
or even taking control of Columbia in 1975, in order to
preserve his independence.14 This afforded Klinger close
control over the whole progress of a film: ‘I believe in
following my pictures from start to finish, from inception to
the final sale. I think that’s a producer’s proper role.’15 He
was involved extensively in pre-production, not only in
securing a film’s finance, but in choice of subject matter or
property, often working closely with the writer (or writer-
director) on the screenplay. Klinger recalled, apropos the
screenplay for Green Beach, a war film with a Jewish hero he
never succeeded in making: ‘It was the first draft and we sat
for two days kicking it about. It was beautiful, creative and
fruitful work. That’s what I feel I should really be doing.’16
Once production had started, Klinger was a very hands-on, ‘on-
the-floor’ presence during filmmaking, be it in the studio or
on location, though he was usually considerate and supportive,
careful to respect his director’s creative freedom – provided
they stayed within budget.17 Klinger was also very active
during post-production – not in editing, which he left to
others, only intervening if the rough cut was badly out-of-
19
shape – but, as noted, in the promotion and marketing of his
films. He battled frequently with distributors’ publicity
departments if he felt that they were unable, or unwilling, to
give his films the care and attention, the sensitive handling,
he believed they deserved. As Klinger emphasized in an
interview, ‘If you do a film independently, you are the master
of your fate. You can fight for the things you believe in. You
do the best deals you can with independent or major
distributors, territory by territory.’18 Although it took up a
huge amount of his time, from Gold (Peter Hunt, 1974) onwards
Klinger, working with his agent Paul Kijzer, attempted to
control the distribution as well as the production of his
films, putting together an elaborate network of individual
distributors in various countries to whom he would try to pre-
sell his film as a way of securing production finance. Klinger
was also very active at film festivals, notably Cannes and
Milan (Mifed).
[Illustration 2: Masthead of Klinger News; Michael Klinger
Papers]
20
Klinger’s independence was thus central to his status and
identity as a producer, recognized by commentators – Morley’s
article is entitled ‘Klinger the Independent’ – and promoted
assiduously by Klinger himself. The production notes released
with Gold emphasized that Klinger’s ‘personal touch’ as an
independent ‘transcends the ability to finance his own
production … It means more of a guarantee of individual
responsibility, an independence of mind and action, a
dedication to quality.’19 The masthead for Klinger News, which
ran to four editions in the mid-1970s (all ‘specials’),
features Klinger in a relaxed yet purposeful pose, staring
straight out at the audience, cigar in hand but with
production files behind him. Its strapline runs: ‘I am an
Independent. I make the pictures I like and which I feel will
entertain the international audience.’ The capitalized
‘Independent’ and the whole image announce his freedom from
interference, the commitment to be his own man who has faith
in his own judgements and the confidence that his taste
mirrored that of the public at large. Like all great showmen,
Klinger’s approach to assessing a property or a script was
instinctive: ‘It’s a gut reaction … Knowing what makes people
21
cry and what makes them laugh, and what makes them excited.
You are not always right, but being right nearly all the time
is what makes for success.’20 For the most part, Klinger’s
estimation of public taste was usually sure-footed.
Although Klinger’s independence meant that he was able to
control many aspects of the filmmaking process, like all
independents he had to secure adequate production finance and
a worldwide distribution deal. For reasons that will be
discussed in detail, Klinger never succeeded in obtaining UK
investment: ‘I try – and fail – to get British money every
time … It is the hardest place in the world to raise money for
films.’21 Klinger often attacked the timidity of the City in
considering films to be a risky investment, which had the
effect of allowing foreign investors to make money from using
British studios and technical expertise and so squeeze the
resources available for indigenous production.22 In a lengthy
letter written in January 1970 in the trade press, he
criticized the short-sightedness of an industry dependent on
American finance whose major profits went abroad.23 Without
stable sources of production finance, Klinger had to piece
22
together an intricate financial jigsaw, raising money through
tax breaks, favourable exchange rates, various forms of
subsidy and numerous co-production deals. However, his
conviction that, in a contracting domestic marketplace, the
way forward for a British cinema was to make films with an
international appeal necessitated making a deal with a
Hollywood studio that would guarantee distribution in the all-
important American market. It was here that Klinger
experienced the frustrations and the severe limitations that
all European independents come up against. As Anne Jäckel
notes, individual producers, however talented, are unable to
alter patterns of distribution that are structured at an
international level controlled by American corporations.24 They
drove hard bargains and Klinger was often powerless to
influence what he judged to be misguided and poorly executed
promotional campaigns and ill-conceived exhibition practices.
Sources and Structure and of this Study
Although theoretically informed, this study is above all else
a detailed demonstration of what a producer actually does. This
23
is necessary in order to justify any claims made about
Klinger’s importance but also because a producer’s work,
unlike the director’s that can be discussed using textual
sources, is elusive because it is, for the most part,
invisible. The critical challenge is to render that art
visible by a detailed examination of the intricacies of a
film’s genesis, production and promotion. We have the
confidence to undertake such an analysis because it is based
on an extensive collection of primary material that provides
significant insights into the filmmaking process. The Michael
Klinger Papers (MKP), loaned to the University of the West of
England in 2007 by his son Tony, consist of approximately 200
files and over 40 scripts concerning 21 projects on which
Klinger worked as producer or executive producer from the late
1960s to the late 1980s. They are a very rich source of
material that has not been consulted before, including
itemized breakdowns of production costs; details of film
grosses; distribution sales and territorial rights; company
accounts; extensive correspondence with a wide range of
industry figures; and promotion and publicity material. The
scripts are often extensively annotated by Klinger, revealing
24
his expertise as a script editor. This archive is not
comprehensive, but nevertheless provides a major resource.25
This material has been catalogued and some of the contents
placed online at www.michaelklinger.uwe.ac.uk. In addition we
have completed a number of interviews with those who worked
with Klinger or who could cast light on the contexts within
which he was working. These have been complemented by a
comprehensive scrutiny of the trade press, and extensive use
of other archives, including the files on several of Klinger’s
films kept by the British Board of Film Classifiers (BBFC).
Although our primary object is not textual analysis, we agree
with Thomas Schatz’s observation that a film industry study
begins and ends with the films themselves.26 In what follows we
give Klinger’s films careful attention, but interpret them
within the particular production contexts and historical
conjunctures from which they arise. Our focus on the films is
not only because they form, of course, an essential component
in understanding and assessing Klinger’s career, but also
because, with the exception of Polanski’s films and Get Carter,
they have received very little, if any, critical attention. In
25
addition, we also focus on several of Klinger’s unrealized
projects. As Dan North has argued, ‘the lack of a finished
film throws … non-filmic elements into even sharper relief,
shifting attention to the intricacies of the creative process
and to the context in which that creativity began’.27 Aborted
productions also have much to say about the difficulties
producers faced at particular moments and why these proved
insurmountable.
The organization of this volume is broadly sequential though,
as the narrative unfolds, it proceeds by overlapping, in some
cases parallel, chronologies as we wish each chapter to
explore a distinct facet of Klinger’s role as a producer
rather than simply chronicle the next stage in his career.
Chapter 2 describes Klinger’s origins as the British-born son
of Polish-Jewish immigrant parents who settled in London’s
Soho in 1912, but its main focus is on Klinger’s emergence and
development as a filmmaker. It was his ability to exploit the
opportunities afforded by this particular milieu – his
ownership of a Soho strip club, the Gargoyle – which enabled
him to make the transition, in partnership with another Jewish
26
entrepreneur, Tony Tenser, into film exhibition, distribution
and production as Compton Films. It also determined their
initial fare: sexploitation films and ‘shockumentaries’. The
break with Tenser came through the encounter with Polanski,
which encouraged Klinger to harbour cultural aspirations to
make more ambitious and challenging films. Polanski was
Klinger’s passport to the rarefied world of festival awards,
international critical acclaim and ‘café society’.
Chapter 3 analyses in detail three films that mark Klinger’s
transition to full independence. The Penthouse, an absurdist
thriller, was made before Klinger was ousted from Compton and
showed his willingness to take risks both on subject matter
and on a first-time director, Peter Collinson. Baby Love (1968)
and Something to Hide (1972), directed by Alastair Reid, another
talented recruit from television, were further attempts to
establish Klinger as an important figure within the British
film industry whilst also forging an international presence.
The chapter focuses on Klinger’s efforts to combine
showmanship with art, using cerebral but also exploitable
subject matter with varying degrees of success. Chapter 4
27
extends this analysis through an in-depth consideration of
Klinger’s two films with Mike Hodges, Get Carter and Pulp (1972),
the latter made specifically to exploit the combined talents
of the ‘Three Michaels’: Klinger, Hodges and Michael Caine.
The chapter explores the consequences for a British producer
having to deal with major American studios, MGM and United
Artists respectively. Although Klinger experienced complete
freedom, within the agreed budget, in their production, he was
powerless to influence what he saw as their crass and short-
sighted distribution and exhibition in the USA.
Chapter 5 discusses how Klinger managed to produce two
international blockbusters – Gold (1974) and Shout at the Devil –
independently without relying on American finance. They were
marketable packages consisting of a bestselling novel (by
Wilbur Smith), international stars (Roger Moore, Lee Marvin),
an experienced director who had worked on the Bond films
(Peter Hunt), an exploitable genre (action-adventure) and an
exotic African location. By filming in South Africa using
funds from South African businessmen, Klinger exploited the
favourable international exchange rates that significantly
28
lowered costs. In addition he extended the nascent practice of
pre-selling, securing advance monies from distributors in
various territories in return for distribution rights. These
films were triumphs of commercial acumen; sandwiched between
them was Rachel’s Man, the subject of chapter 6. Rachel’s Man was
never intended as a commercial proposition: it was an art
house film through which Klinger wished to champion another
cosmopolitan director he admired (Mizrahi), and to support the
nascent Israeli film industry as his contribution to the
reclamation of the homeland. The chapter thus explores another
facet of Klinger’s Jewishness.
As he was pursuing these international projects, Klinger
became involved with the Confessions films (1974-77), four low-
budget, cheerfully vulgar sex-comedies designed primarily for
the domestic market. This was not something Klinger initiated
– they were the ‘baby’ of producer Gregg Smith – but having
failed to get funding, Smith turned to Klinger who, as
executive producer, helped to negotiate a distribution deal
with Columbia and who became, when time allowed, active in
their promotion. In contradistinction to existing accounts of
29
these films, chapter 7 explores the complex processes of their
production, distribution and marketing, including the struggle
between Smith and Klinger about the direction the series
should take, the difficulties with Columbia over international
sales and why the series finished after the fourth film.
Producers tend to search for packages of films that can offer
a degree of stability in a volatile marketplace, retaining a
core element that can continue to be mined in each successive
version. The Smith adaptations were a case in point, as were
the Confessions films. In 1976-77 Klinger tried to negotiate
another type of package, a four-picture deal with the Rank
Organization part-financed by the National Film Finance
Corporation, the government’s funding body that had so far
failed to support any of Klinger’s films. The package
consisted of four rather different films each of which Klinger
had tried to develop over a number of years. Focusing on a
critical deal rather than the production of films, Chapter 8
discusses the reasons why it collapsed, using archival
material and oral testimony to reveal the power of internal
organizational politics and the shifting priorities of
30
government institutions. Had it been successful, this deal
would have secured Klinger’s status as Britain’s leading
independent producer and consolidated his reputation as an
important force in British cinema. Chapter 9 explores the
consequences of its failure. The first was a co-production
deal with a Canadian company which led to the making of two
films in 1978: Blood Relatives (Claude Chabrol) and Tomorrow Never
Comes (Peter Collinson). However, Klinger did not have his
usual control over the material and they failed to re-
establish him as a major force. The chapter goes on to discuss
Klinger’s work in the 1980s, his ill-judged effort to cash in
on the popularity of motorcycle stunt rider Eddie Kidd with
Riding High (1981) and his various attempts to put together ever
more elaborate packages, notably a late-aborted deal for eight
Wilbur Smith adaptations.
Overall, this study is offered as a contribution to a
revisionist history of British cinema and, in particular, to
an understanding of the 1970s, currently being reclaimed from
its conventional designation as the nadir of indigenous
production: tasteless, formulaic and derivative.28 It is also a
31
contribution to the rapidly developing field of media
production studies which, in its current incarnation,
emphasizes the importance of detailed empirical enquiries that
focus on the vexed issue of agency and the struggle for
creative control situated within wider economic, social and
cultural frameworks.29 A focus on the producer affords, in our
view, the best means through which to apprehend and understand
these processes and offers a profitable redirection of film
scholarship, one that opens out into a wider cultural history
of creativity in an industrial/commercial context.
32
1Endnotes
Peter Noble, ‘A Tribute to Michael Klinger’, Screen International, 10
April 1976.
2 Sheridan Morley, ‘Klinger the Independent’, The Times, 20 December
1975, p. 9.
3 Walker refers to Klinger in his account of Get Carter as a ‘most
capable and unsqueamish film-maker, well-equipped to emulate the
realism that American films were now flaunting with the disappearance
of the old “Morality Code”’, but does not extend this insight;
National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties, London: Harrap, 1985,
p. 25. A partial exception is John Hamilton, Beasts in the Cellar: The
Exploitation Career of Tony Tenser, Surrey: FAB Press, 2005, which is highly
informative about Klinger during his early partnership with Tony
Tenser from 1960-66.
4 See David Thomson’s polemic, ‘The Missing Auteur’, Film Comment,
July-August 1982, pp. 34-39. For critical overviews see Andrew
Spicer, ‘The Production Line: Reflections on the Role of the Film
Producer in British Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, vol. 1,
no. 1 (2004), pp. 33-50; Matthew Bernstein, ‘The Producer as Auteur’,
in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Oxford:
Blackwell, 2008, pp. 180-89. See also: Andrew Spicer, A.T. McKenna
and Christopher Meir (eds), Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Film and
Television (Continuum, forthcoming).
5 Interview with Tony Klinger by the authors, 17 January 2012.
6 John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical
Practice in Film and Television Studies, Durham & London: Duke University Press,
2008.
7 Quoted in Ron Pennington, ‘Michael Klinger sees new life in British
production’, Hollywood Reporter, 23 November 1971. [Where specific page
references are not provided it is because our source was either
microfiches in the British Film Institute Library, or scrapbooks in
the Klinger archive.]
8 Quoted in Variety, 17 May 1972.
9 Quoted in Peter Noble, ‘The Potential in this Country Is Enormous:
Michael Klinger’, Cinema TV Today, 9 August 1975, p. 17.
10 Hodges, interview with authors, 4 July 2010.
11 Quoted in Alejandro Pardo, ‘The film producer as creative force’,
Wide Screen vol. 2, no. 2 (2010), p. 7.
12 For an interesting overview see ibid., pp. 1-23.
13 A.T. McKenna, ‘The Producer as Industrial Tactician: Michael
Klinger, Baby Love, and a Reputation Network’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio
and Television (forthcoming, 2013).
14 Tony Klinger recalled that the offer from Columbia was verbal and
occurred at some point during 1975; interview with the authors.
15 ‘Klinger: Why I’m Backing Britain’, Screen International, 16 May 1977,
p. 5.
16 ‘Why Michael Klinger prefers to be master of his own fate...’,
Screen International, 25 October 1975, p. 10. The ‘we’ presumably refers
to Klinger’s close friend Benny Green, whom he knew from his days in
the West Central Jewish Lads Club and who became a prolific writer
and broadcaster. They worked together on this adaptation.
17 Morley, ‘Klinger the Independent’.
18 ‘Why Michael Klinger prefers to be master of his own fate...’
19 Studio Production notes for Gold, included on the BFI microfiche.
20 Quoted in Garth Pearce, ‘Klinger’s crusade – put Britain into its
own picture’, Daily Express, 24 January 1977.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Klinger, ‘Let deal with the patient while he’s alive’, Today’s
Cinema, 16 January 1970, p. 5.
24 Anne Jäckel, European Film Industries, London: BFI Publishing, 2003, p.
12.
25 See A.T. McKenna, ‘Gaps and Gold in the Klinger Archive’, Journal of
British Cinema and Television, vol. 9, no. 1 (2012), pp. 111-21.
26 Thomas Schatz, ‘Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History’, in
Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (eds), Media Industries: History, Theory, and
Method, Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 45-56.
27 Dan North, ‘Introduction: Finishing the Unfinished’, in North
(ed.), Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2008, p. 8.
28 See Robert Shail (ed.), Seventies British Cinema, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007; Paul Newland (ed.), Don’t Look Now: British Cinema in the
1970s, London: Wallflower, 2010; Laurel Forster and Sue Harper (eds),
Culture and Society in 1970s Britain: the Lost Decade, Newcastle: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2010; Sue Harper and Justin Smith. British Film
Culture in the 1970s: the Boundaries of Pleasure, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2012; Paul Newland, British Films of the 1970s,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming, 2012; Sian
Barber, The British Film Industry in the 1970s: Capital, Culture and Creativity,
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming, 2013.
29 See, for instance, Holt and Perren (eds), Media Histories; and also
Vicki Mayer, Miranda J. Banks and John T. Caldwell (eds), Production
Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries, New York and London: Routledge,