We never gave up hunting for film rights and very soon signed a contract with Enterprise, who I’m sure had offices on the top floor of the same building as 20th Century Fox, where we picked up ‘Kingdom of the Spiders’, ‘The Comeback’, ‘The Magic of Lassie’, ‘Bruce Lee: The Man and the Myth’ and ‘The Redeemer’, while from GTO we acquired ‘Phantasm’ and ‘Elvis: The Movie’, and added them to our ever growing roster of titles. Avco Embassy, who had their U.K. headquarters in the old Hammer Offices in Wardour Street proved to be a difficult nut to crack, but finally a contact was signed which added some exclusive releases to our 16mm library, ‘Frankenstein & the Monster From Hell’, ‘Village of The Giants’, ‘Billy The Kid Vs Dracula’, ‘Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter’, not forgetting that giant of a Christmas movie ‘Santa Claus Conquers The Martians’ a nice selection 60’s exploitation movies, as well as Hammer’s final outing as the infamous Baron Frankenstein, I was in seventh heaven. However we could never get them to release any rights for 8mm. Avco is a good example of how a UK office wasn’t able to do anything without first consulting their parent office in the states, I felt so sorry for Chris, the young head of their UK Office, who said to us ‘Can’t even go for a pee, without phoning them first’. Back in Dudley, this was a hectic period, we moved to much larger premises, with Barbara Windsor doing the honours and opening the Shop. But as frantic as this time was Derek and I never gave up looking for that major deal, but we never dreamed that after a dozen of so visits to United Artists we would eventually be rewarded with two contracts. The first included such modern movies as ‘Carrie’, ‘The Great Escape’, ‘Rollerball’, ‘New York New York’, ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World’ along with a wealth of Warner Brother classics such as ‘Treasure of Sierra Madre’, ‘Gold Diggers of 1933’, ‘The Maltese Falcon’, ‘Dames’, ’42nd Street’, ‘The Sea Hawk’, ‘Key Largo’ and ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’! It was at this point that we decided that we needed better packaging and started using the moulded plastic cases and we also improved our artwork, which was designed by Marianne Frost for the labels for all our future releases. We kept quiet about the short series of talks we had with American International Pictures, which all came to nothing when AIP decided to close their offices in the U.K. As I have mentioned I was now ‘living’ at the shop, my landlord having decided he preferred the house to himself, so Derek had given over his office for my use, I lived there until 1981. Derann was by now attending the prestigious Photokina film market in Cologne, Germany. It was here we made some excellent sales of our own product, while at the same time starting a long series of meetings with Universal 8, Marketing Film and UFA. 1981 was also the year I first saw ‘Godzilla’ (1954), viewed on a hotel TV at the Cartwright Hotel in San Francisco while on a holiday over there. It was one of the highlights of my first vacation in the States.
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