The Man Who Got Carter

Michael Klinger, Independent Production and the British Film Industry, 1960-1980

Andrew Spicer, A.T. McKenna, A. T. McKenna

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857734532
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Michael Klinger was the most successful indpendent producer in the British film industry over a 20 year period from 1960 to 1980, responsible for 32 films, including classics such as Repulsion (1965) and Get Carter (1971). Despite working with many famous figures- including actors Michael Caine, Peter Finch, Lee Marvin, Roger Moore, Mickey Rooney and Susannah York; directors Claude Chabrol, Mike Hodges and Roman Polanski and author Wilbur Smith- Klinger's contribution to British cinema has been almost largely ignored. This definitive book on Micheal Klinger, largely based on his previously unseen personal papers, examines his origins in Sixties Soho 'sexploitation' cinema and 'shockumentaries' through to major international productions including Gold (1974) and Shout at the Devil (1976). It reveals how Klinger deftly combined commercial product-the hugely popular 'Confessions' series (1974-78)- with artistic, experimental cinema that nurtured young talent, including Polanski and Hodges, Peter Colinson, Alastair Reid, Linda Hayden and Moshe Mizrahi, the Israeli director of Rachel's Man (1975).
Klinger's career is contextualised through a reassessment of the British film industry during a period of unprecedented change and volatility as well as highlighting the importance of his Jewishness. The Man Who Got Carter offers a detailed analysis of the essential but often misunderstood role played by the producer.

APPENDIX 1

EARNINGS OF THE CONFESSIONS SERIES

	UK/Overseas Earnings (£)	Net Proceeds	Swiftdown Share
Window Cleaner	779,118.74/637,446.46	1,265,954.20	632,977.10
Pop Performer	378,848.54/198,388.78	293,753.26	146,877.13
Driving Instructor	462,087.44/400,949.63	486,220.21	249,187.86
Holiday Camp	281,774.65/223,600.58	53,381.23	27, 357.88

Figures taken from Columbia Pictures distribution summaries, 16 August 1986 (MKP).

NOTES

CHAPTER 1

1.Peter Noble, ‘A Tribute to Michael Klinger’, Screen International, 10 April 1976.

2.Sheridan Morley, ‘Klinger the Independent’, The Times, 20 December 1975, p. 9.

3.Walker refers to Klinger in his account of Get Carter as a ‘most capable and unsqueamish film-maker, well-equipped to emulate the realism that American films were now flaunting with the disappearance of the old “Morality Code”’, but does not extend this insight; National Heroes: British Cinema in the Seventies and Eighties, London: Harrap, 1985, p. 25. A partial exception is John Hamilton, Beasts in the Cellar: The Exploitation Career of Tony Tenser, Godalming: FAB Press, 2005, which is highly informative about Klinger during his early partnership with Tony Tenser from 1960–66.

4.See David Thomson’s polemic, ‘The Missing Auteur’, Film Comment, July–August 1982, pp. 34–39. For critical overviews see Andrew Spicer, ‘The Production Line: Reflections on the Role of the Film Producer in British Cinema’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, vol. 1, no. 1 (2004), pp. 33–50; Matthew Bernstein, ‘The Producer as Auteur’, in Barry Keith Grant (ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, pp. 180–89. See also: Andrew Spicer, A.T. McKenna and Christopher Meir (eds), Beyond the Bottom Line: The Producer in Filmand Television (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

5.Interview with Tony Klinger by the authors, 17 January 2012.

6.John Thornton Caldwell, Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Filmand Television Studies, Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2008.

7.Quoted in Ron Pennington, ‘Michael Klinger sees new life in British production’, Hollywood Reporter, 23 November 1971. [Where specific page references are not provided it is because our source was either microfiches in the British Film Institute Library, or scrapbooks in the Klinger archive.]

8.Quoted in Variety, 17 May 1972.

9.Quoted in Peter Noble, ‘The Potential in this Country Is Enormous: Michael Klinger’, Cinema TVToday, 9 August 1975, p. 17.

10.Interview with Mike Hodges by authors, 4 July 2010.

11.Quoted in Alejandro Pardo, ‘The film producer as creative force’, Wide Screen, vol. 2, no. 2 (2010), p. 7.

12.For an interesting overview see ibid., pp. 1–23.

13.A.T. McKenna, ‘Independent Production and Industrial Tactics in Britain: Michael Klinger and Baby Love’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 32, no. 4 (2012), pp. 611–31.

14.Tony Klinger recalled that the offer from Columbia was verbal and occu...