A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers, or obtain 16mm for our library.
Contracts & Rights Chapter 9
Our adverts in Movie Maker show that the number of new titles we were producing was now enough to fill an entire page and show that our next deal must have been concluded within weeks of our first contract with Rank Film Distributors.
Walton Films had already released a number of Tigon titles, ‘Witchfinder General’, 1968; ‘Curse of the Crimson Altar’, 1968; ‘Black Beauty’, 1971; ‘Hannie Caulder’, 1971 and ‘Doomwatch’, 1970, but that still left a number of their horror titles we thought would make good additions to our sales catalogue. A phone call from Derek quickly secured an appointment. If I remember correctly Tigon had their offices on one of the upper floors in Hammer House in Wardour Street and we arrived early, as always. We never met Tony Tenser and all I can recall is that our contacts office was filled with the scent of an expensive cologne and at regular periods during our visit, he would take out a small spray and apply a short shot to each wrist. There wasn’t the usual checking of titles he knew what was available and It didn’t take long to conclude the deal and there was only one follow up meeting, which was for Derek to sign the contract. Our choices for this deal were, ‘The Sorcerers’, 1967; ‘The Blood Beast Terror’, 1968; The Blood on Satan’s Claw’, 1971; The Creeping Flesh’, 1973; ‘What’s Good for the Goose’, 1969; ‘Virgin Witch’ 1972 and the featurette ‘Simon Simon’, 1970. All four of the horrors sold very steadily and prompted us to issue a 200′ from each of them. However the Norman Wisdom film ‘What’s Good for the Goose’ was a great disappointment, Derek had firmly believed that it would sell well, but as we all know this wasn’t Norman as we knew him! ‘Virgin Witch’ had a lot of female nudity and although sales never set the world on fire, it ticked along for many years. ‘Simon Simon’ was reasonably successful, and the co-producers premises, Simon Engineering, were situated just 3 minutes from 171 Stourbridge Road and they often hired the 16mm print to show at company meetings. I’ve included some scans of an artical that appeared in a local rag, from just a few years ago that looks at the shooting of the short. As I’ve already mentioned we were offered their entire output, less the Walton releases, here’s the Tigon productions titles they had on offer… ‘The Body Stealers’, ‘The Haunted House of Horror’, ‘Zeta One’, ‘The Beast in the Cellar’, ‘Monique’ and ‘The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, While a second list was of films they had picked up for theatrical distribution, which I only recall two titles, ‘Castle of the Living Dead’ and ‘Double Agent 73’.
…. to be continued.
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