Tony Tenser: RIP?

[tali122]

Hopefully he'll get some belated press obituaries

[jamespp]

One of my friends is Tony's eldest son who I work with and can confirm this. Our thoughts are with the family who had been expecting this for some time but it's always harder when it actually happens. Rest in Peace.

[sandfromaol]

I've known Tony for a number of years, just in passing really, though the business my company did with him. His son Josh, once worked his summer break for us, some years ago.

I found him to be tough in business, but always a gentleman. I'd only managed to have the odd brief conversation with him about his films and the people he'd worked with. Most enjoyable and informative, but always regretted that we'd never had more time for me to ask the many questions I'd wanted.

When he died there was a small report in the Deaths Column of the Southport Visiter, with no reference to his filmwork. It was so brief I nearly missed it and appeared the day of his funeral, which I'd seen too late to attend.

He was so kind to me when I lost my son, I would have loved to have paid my respects.

[julian_craster]

Tony (R) with Vincent Price

From The Times
December 17, 2007

Obituary: Tony Tenser
Colourful British film producer and distributor renowned for the brazen ingenuity of his titillating promotional stunts

Tony Tenser was one of the British film industry's most colourful characters. It was Tenser who came up with the term “sex kitten” to promote Brigitte Bardot to the British public. He opened London's first private cinema club to evade censorship restrictions and as a producer he made a wide range of films, including “nudie” documentaries, comedies and horror.

He was driven primarily by commercial considerations, but he and his production partner then, Michael Klinger, also backed Roman Polanski's first English-language films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), through their Compton Films company. After splitting with Klinger, Tenser formed another company, Tigon, which was a substantial force in British cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, as a producer and a distributor.

It was with horror that Tigon made its most lasting impression, briefly challenging Hammer's supremacy in the genre. Witchfinder General (1968), in which Vincent Price played the 17th-century witch-hunter Matthew Hopkins, is widely acknowledged now as a masterpiece, though it was cut by the censors and savaged by critics at the time of release.

Born in 1920 in the East End of London, Samuel Anthony Tenser was one of seven children of Lithuanian- Jewish immigrants. His parents worked in the garment industry, and the family lived in a cramped tenement flat in Shoreditch. After grammar school Tenser applied to become an RAF pilot during the war but he failed the eyesight test, and served as a technician instead.

He joined the ABC cinema chain as a trainee manager and, according to Matthew Sweet's book Shepperton Babylon (2005), was promoted when he reported his boss for claiming wages for non-existent staff. He established a reputation for publicity stunts and joined the distributor Miracle Films as a publicist.
He also established a reputation for being able to coin eye-catching titles. Miracle bought the UK rights to the Brigitte Bardot comedy En effeuillant la marguerite (1956), which literally means “while plucking the daisy”. Tenser retitled it Mam'selle Striptease and then contrived a stunt in which a bunch of strippers demonstrated outside a cinema on the basis that the film was taking their customers away.

It was that stunt that brought him into contact with Michael Klinger, a stripclub owner, who wanted to branch out into films. They opened the Compton Cinema Club together in the basement of a Soho office block and quickly expanded into distribution and production. One of their first films was Naked as Nature Intended (1961). It masqueraded as a documentary about naturism while filling the screen with naked female flesh and it helped to create a new sub-genre.

Sometimes Tenser came up with not only the title of films, but also the storyline. The Yellow Teddybears (1963) was inspired by a newspaper story about a school where the girls advertised loss of virginity by wearing a small golliwog. After consulting the censors, Tenser substituted teddies for gollies. It was released in the US as Gutter Girls.

Tenser and Klinger bought the Windmill Theatre, London, which was famous for its nude girls, and it served as the principal setting in their film Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966).

But it was not all nudity and sleaze. Tenser was familiar with Polanski's work when the Polish director and his regular producer Gene Gutowski came to see him with a synopsis for a film that eventually emerged as Repulsion, with Catherine Deneuve playing a character who is going mad. Tenser later recalled: “I guessed that if they were coming to me then they had already gone to everybody else, but Polanski was a name, so I said yes.

“I asked about the budget, and he [Gutowski] said £90,000. Well, we had never made a film for more than £60,000 and we didn't want to go broke, because it was a lot of money in those days. So they trimmed here and there and they got it down to £60,000.” They even argued over the number of hands that should be coming through the wall to torment Deneuve in the film's most famous scene. Tenser added: “In the end it came to more than £90,000, but it was such a brilliant film.”

He produced a wide variety of films at Tigon, including a version of Black Beauty (1971), the thriller Doomwatch (1972) and the comedies The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins (1971), For the Love of Ada (1972) and Not Now Darling (1973).
There was a dismal and misguided attempt to reinvent Norman Wisdom as a star of sex comedy in What's Good for the Goose (1969). But Tigon was a sufficiently large player to join forces with Paramount on the western Hannie Caulder (1971), which was shot in Spain and starred Raquel Welch.
Tigon championed the career of the ill-fated Michael Reeves, who directed only three features, including Witchfinder General, before dying at 25 of a drugs overdose. Tigon's other horror films include Reeves's The Sorcerers (1967), Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Creeping Flesh (1973), with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee.

After leaving Tigon, Tenser was executive producer on Pete Walker's Frightmare (1974). Eventually he left the movie business, moved to the Lancashire town of Southport with his third wife Diane, who was 27 years his junior, and began a new business selling wicker chairs.

Tenser was reputedly the template for Roy Kinnear's character in the 1975 comedy Eskimo Nell, an executive who runs BUM Films. In his book Sweet wrote: “Of all these wild men of Wardour Street, it was Tony Tenser... who wielded the most influence and exhibited the most brazen ingenuity.” The film historian David McGillivray called him “the Irving Thalberg of the exploitation movie”. He was the subject of the book Beasts in the Cellar (2005) by John Hamilton.

He is survived by his third wife, Diane, and by the four children of his first two marriages.

[Windthrop]

I'm glad to see the broadsheets are beginning to report his death. Often people who have been out of the business for a long time go un-obited. It is independent producers like TT who helped to give british cinema its variety and piquant quirky flavour.

[julian_craster]

Tony Tenser: Film producer and distributor who dubbed Bardot a 'sex kitten'

Samuel Anthony Tenser, film producer: born London 10 August 1920; three times married (four children); died 5 December 2007

THE INDEPENDENT
Published: 20 December 2007

The producer and distributor Tony Tenser is most associated with British sex and horror films of the Fifties and Sixties. A jovial character who was blatantly commercially driven, he said, "I would rather be ashamed of a film that was making money than proud of a film that was losing it."
He was described with some justification by the writer David McGillivray as "the Irving Thalberg of the exploitation movie", but he also produced two films regarded as classics, Roman Polanski's chilling psychological thriller Repulsion and Michael Reeves's stylish horror movie Witchfinder General. A former publicist, he also was largely responsible for the early success in the UK of Brigitte Bardot, for whom he coined the description "sex kitten".
In an era when strict censorship was slowly being eroded – the Lord Chamberlain's authority to censor or completely ban plays was challenged by the formation of club theatres to stage such works as Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and The Children's Hour, and the book Lady Chatterley's Lover survived a notorious court case – Tenser was the first to open a private club cinema to show uncensored films.
The son of Lithuanian-Jewish immigrants, Tenser was born in 1920 in Shoreditch, east London. He served in the RAF as a repair technician during the Second World War before establishing his flair for publicity while serving as the manager of an ABC cinema.
Joining the small but respected distribution company, Miracle Films, he worked on La lumière d'en face (The Light Across the Street, 1955), starring Brigitte Bardot, and capitalised on the star's considerable appeal with his phrase "sex kitten" and such publicity stunts as having a huge cardboard cut-out of the star outside the cinema. Et Dieu créa la femme (1956) was an even bigger Bardot hit, with Tenser modifying the title to And Woman Was Created ("You can upset people using 'God' in a title"). Miracle's next Bardot film, En Effeuillant la Marguerite (1956) translates as "while stripping the petals off a daisy", which Tenser cannily rendered as Mam'selle Striptease, devising a stunt in which Soho strippers picketed the film. He told his biographer, John Hamilton,
I was introduced to Michael Klinger, who owned the Gargoyle, a strip club. I said, "I want to borrow half a dozen of your girls to do a demonstration, going through the West End on Friday lunchtime and finish up picketing outside the cinema." It was a very good stunt, all the press were there and it worked very well – receipts went up.
When Klinger told Tenser that he wanted to get into the film business, Tenser suggested the idea of a cinema club, and the pair acquired a basement in an office block in Old Compton Street, which they opened as the Compton Cinema Club. "To make it more legitimate, we had a number of well-known founder members, including the censor John Trevelyan, Bryan Forbes, people like that." Klinger and Tenser then moved into distribution, their prime showcase being the prestigious Cameo Poly in Regent Street and, in partnership with Cameo's directors, they produced their own first feature film.
Films about nudist colonies were discreet enough to survive censorship but still attracted audiences, and Compton-Cameo's first production was Naked as Nature Intended (1961), directed by a leading photographer of nudes, Harrison Marks, and starring his wife, a noted pin-up of the time, Pamela Green. It was followed by That Kind of Girl (1963), which dealt with the subject of venereal disease, and The Yellow Teddybears (1963), about the activities of pupils at a girls' school.
In 1964 Compton-Cameo made their first horror film, The Black Torment, an effectively eerie period thriller ("Like sex/nudie films, there is always a good audience for horror movies"), and the following year they were asked by the director Roman Polanski and his regular producer Gene Gutowski to finance their next film, then called Lovelihead. Tenser persuaded Polanski to cut his budget from £90,000 to £60,000 before agreeing that he and Klinger would be executive producers. "In the end it came to more than £90,000, but it was such a brilliant film." Titled Repulsion (1965) and starring Catherine Deneuve as a psychotic young woman whose ambivalent reactions to sex slowly unhinge her mind and make her homicidal, it is an exceptionally disturbing and frightening film that has been favourably compared with Hitchcock's Psycho.
Tenser was also a producer of Polanski's next movie, Cul-de-Sac (1966), a bleakly black, comic gangster film which proved perplexing for audiences but won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Tenser had greater success with a Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Terror (1965). He adapted the title from Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, and asked his writers to come up with a story in which Holmes would discover the identity of Jack the Ripper. Critics pointed out that the result was a lot gorier than the average Holmes yarn, but praised James Hill's fluent direction and the British cast headed by John Neville and Donald Houston, with Judi Dench, Robert Morley and Barbara Windsor also featured.
In 1966 Tenser and Klinger, hearing that Sheila Van Damme was selling the Windmill Theatre, famous for its tableaux vivants nudes and for having kept open throughout the Blitz, succeeded in purchasing it, and they opened it as a cinema with their production Secrets of a Windmill Girl (1966), starring Pauline Collins as a performer who becomes corrupted by success. Intended as an homage to the theatre's bygone past, it ended with a song that stated, "The Windmill girls, they were so gay, but now it's over, they've gone away", but it was a fairly shoddy production that found only limited release.
Tenser and Klinger then dissolved their partnership, and Tenser formed Tigon films, which was to specialise in horror, starting with The Sorcerers (1967), starring Boris Karloff. It was the second of the three films made by the director Michael Reeves before his suicide, and Tigon also produced Reeves's last film and the one on which his cult reputation rests, Witchfinder General (1968), starring Vincent Price as a 17th-century tyrant who uses the pretext of witch-hunting as an excuse for torture and treachery. Based on Edgar Allan Poe's Conqueror Worm, it is a ghoulish and haunting work, and the best of the Tigon horrors. Others included The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968), The Blood Beast Terror (1968), The Beast in the Cellar (1970), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Creeping Flesh (1973), the latter featuring the popular team of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.
Outside the genre, Tigon produced Monique (1969), the first British mainstream movie to feature a lesbian ménage-a-trois, a version of Black Beauty (1971), the comedies What's Good for the Goose (1969) and For the Love of Ada (1972), and, the company's most prestigious production, the Spanish-filmed western Hannie Caulder (1971), made at the height of its star Raquel Welch's popularity.
Tenser retired from the film industry after executive producing Frightmare (1974), and started a business selling wicker chairs in Lancashire. In 2005 John Hamilton's book Beasts in the Cellar: the exploitation career of Tony Tenser, was published, and in the same year Tenser attended the Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester, where he was honoured with a retrospective.

Tom Vallance