Hammer

As I joined Derann, Derek was about to sign a contract for ‘The Adventures of Captain Marvel’ a 12 part serial,  ‘Gullivers Travels’, ‘Hoppity Goes To Town’, ‘Wake of the Red Witch’, ‘Copacabana’ and ‘Kronos’, with Ivy Film of New York. Upon their release they proved to be popular and sold very well, especially the Captain Marvel serial. Derek and Sidney Tagar, head of Ivy Films, started to put together a second contract which began with another 12 part Republic serial ‘Radar Men From The Moon’, but Derek felt that Sidney was getting just a little too greedy and never went ahead with a second batch of features. Derann’s sales catalogue had a fine selection of  titles, but unlike most distributors in the U.K. we had no titles from a major film distribution company. After some leg-work and a number of meetings we managed to get a deal with Rank, which included ‘Trouble in Store’, ‘The History of Mr. Polly’, ‘The Chiltern Hundreds’, ‘We Dive at Dawn’ (this was to be the first feature I was given to edit down to a 4 x 400′), ‘Dangerous Exile’ and ‘Countess Dracula’, a second contract followed and that included ‘The Ghoul’,  ‘Night Hair Child’ and ‘I Don’t Want to be Born’ and ‘Above us The Waves’. However before that deal we signed a contract with EMI. We would have a number of contracts from EMI  that rewarded us with a range of quality titles including the Elvis Presley musical ‘Tickle Me’, TV’s ‘The Avengers’ and Ealing classics, ‘No Limit’, ‘Sing As We Go’, ‘The Cruel Sea’, ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’, ‘Ghost of St. Michaels’, ‘The Lady Killers’, ‘Spare a Copper’, ‘The Lavender Hill Mob’ and ‘Dead Of Night’ to name but a few. But what pleased Derek most of all was the Hammer Movies ‘Dracula, Prince of Darkness’, ‘Plague Of the Zombies’, ‘The Devil Rides Out’, ‘Lust for a Vampire’, ‘Quatermass and the Pit’, ‘The Mummy’s Shroud’, ‘The Horror of Frankenstein’ and ‘The Scars of Dracula’ among them. Scars was a particular favourite of Derek’s as he’d had actually been at Elstree Studios, in Borehamwood, and had witnessed some of the filming during his visit. We had further deals with Rank, which would include the “Carry On” movies Abroad, Camping, Jungle, Matron and the Leslie Phillips comedy ‘The Fast Lady’. The “Carry on’s” proved to be some of the most popular and best selling movies we would ever issue. A deal with Tigon added ‘The Sorcerers’, ‘Virgin Witch’, ‘The Creeping Flesh’, ‘Blood Beast Terror’, ‘The Blood on Satan’s Claw’ and ‘What’s Good for the Goose’, one of Norman Wisdoms final film appearances, but in all honesty a dreadful film and just a little embarrassing, the deal also included the comedy featurette ‘Simon, Simon’. One lead led us to Pinewood Studios, and to the offices of producer George Davis who after some lengthy negotiations sold us the rights to ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’, ‘Dark Star’, ‘Treasure Island’ and ‘Call of the Wild’ for 8mm, as 400′ cutdowns (he kept the feature rights for himself) we also picked up the 16mm rental rights for all four. Steve Wellings the 16mm manager was over the moon and the bookings for ‘Dark Star’ and ‘Texas Chainsaw’ were among the best he ever received, University and student film societies just couldn’t watch them often enough. But even with all the major titles, we never abandoned the independent distributor, there was always room for the smaller film and Supreme Films supplied a package of Eros oldies: ‘Inn for Trouble’, ‘The Giant Behemoth’, ‘The Trollenberg Terror’, ‘Blood of the Vampire’, ‘Woman Eater’ and ‘Hercules’. The same Old Compton Street distributor was also the supplier of many of our adult titles including ‘When Girls Undress’ and ‘Is There Sex After Death?’. That final title was the feature which supplied the footage for the 200′ ‘Sex-i-Pops’, an amusing Sex Super Bowl/ Olympics romp, which was already on sale when I joined Derann and was available almost, until we closed our doors!