The Creative Producer – The Michael Klinger Papers

Andrew Spicer, University of the West of England

Andrew Spicer,

University of the West of England

Michael Klinger (1920-1989)

Klinger’s Importance?

Varied oeuvre:- Sexploitation cinema and sex comedies Art

house/experimental films- Assortment of challenging thrillers- International action-adventure filmsWindow onto important social and cultural issues:- British film industry- Soho sex industry- Impact of Jewish entrepreneurialism

Key issues

• Importance of the producer’s role – challenges to conceptions of creativity

• Importance of context and the production process not texts and interpretation

• Implications of understandings of film and film history

• Pedagogical implications

Structure

• Survey of Klinger’s career through selected film extracts

• Case Study of Green Beach• Conceptual/Methodological

and Pedagogical issues

Klinger on the Set of Gold (1974)

Gold – Distributors

Gold – the Star

Klinger’s Early Career

• 2nd Generation Polish-Jewish Immigrant• Owned Soho strip clubs in 1960s• Partnership with Tony Tenser:

Compton Films: Cinema Ownership Production/Distribution

• Polanski: Repulsion (1965); Cul-de-Sac (1966); Peter Collinson: The Penthouse (1967); Alastair Reid: Baby Love (1967)

• Avton Films – Nov. 1966

Klinger in the 1970s

• Crime thrillers: Get Carter (1971); Pulp (1972); Something to Hide (1972); Tomorrow Never Comes (1978)

• Sexploitation: 4 ‘Confessions Of’ series

• International big-budget action-adventure:

Gold (1974); Shout at the Devil (1976)

• Art House cinema – Chabrol: Les liens de sang (Blood Relatives,1978)

Trade Press Announcement

Key issues

• Importance of the producer’s role – challenges to conceptions of creativity

• Importance of context and the production process not texts and interpretation

• Implications of understandings of film and film history

• Pedagogical implications

The Producer: 1

Irwin Shaw: ‘A portly Jewish gentleman, with a cigar in his mouth, a peculiar vocabulary and a distasteful penchant for starlets.’

Ben Hecht: ‘The producer is a sort of bank guard. His objective is to see that nothing is put on the screen that people are going to dislike. This means practically 99 per cent of literature, thinking, probings of all problems.’

The Producer: 2

Alexander Walker: ‘The tendency to ignore the role of the producers or production chiefs has to be resisted if films are to make sense as an industry that can sometimes create art.’

The Producer: 3

Michael Balcon: The one person who can apprehend ‘a film as an entity and be able to judge its progress and development from the point of view of the audience who will eventually view it’; a mediator between commerce and creativity, having ‘a dual capacity as the creative man and the trustee of the moneybags’.

The Producer: 4

Leo Rosten: ‘The producer should possess the ability to recognize ability, the knack of assigning the right creative persons to the right creative spots. He should have knowledge of audience tastes, a story sense, a businessman’s approach to costs and the mechanics of picture making. He should be able to manage, placate, and drive a variety of gifted, impulsive, and egocentric people.’

The Producer: 5

John Caughie: ‘The importance of the producer-artist seems to be a specific feature of the British cinema, an effect of the need continually to start again in the organization of independence.’

The Producer: 6

Vincent Porter: ‘The producer brings together under his or her unique control an assessment of public taste, the task of obtaining adequate production finance, the decision as to which individuals should be employed in the key creative roles in the films and on what terms, and the overall supervision and management of the production process. It is precisely through the way in which these four factors are interrelated that the producer imposes his or her creative mark upon the film. Although the guiding hand of a producer may be difficult to perceive in an individual film, it is precisely in the longer term that the key role played by the producer become clear.’

The Producer: 7

Sydney Box: ‘A film producer has two responsibilities: to the public and to his backers. If he is an imaginative and courageous producer, the two may coincide. The ideal producer, it seems to me, must always look ahead and try not merely to acquiesce in box-office trends but to lead public opinion and gauge future audience requirements.’

Gold