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,

2009, especially ‘Introduction – Production Studies: Roots and

Routes’, pp. 1-12.