Anthony Hinds, Who Scared British Moviegoers, Dies at 91
Hammer Film, via Photofest
Anthony Hinds with Tallulah Bankhead on the set of "Die! Die! My Darling!" which was released in 1965.
By MARGALIT FOX
Anthony Hinds, the producer who put the horror in “Hammer horror,” in the process turning a puny British film studio into a Goliath of cinematic gore, died in Oxford, England on Sept. 30. He was 91.
Anthony Hinds, the producer who put the horror in “Hammer horror,” in the process turning a puny British film studio into a Goliath of cinematic gore, died in Oxford, England on Sept. 30. He was 91.
Hammer Film, via Photofest
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Robert Urquhart, left to right, in a scene from the 1957 Hammer film "The Curse of Frankenstein."
Hammer Films confirmed his death.
When Mr. Hinds, the son of one of Hammer’s founders, joined the studio in 1946, it was known for forgettable, unsanguinary B pictures like “The Public Life of Henry the Ninth” (1935) and “Polly’s Two Fathers” (1936), many starring a music hall performer named George Mozart.
Mr. Hinds, who seemed to have his finger squarely on the pulse of postwar Britain, gave audiences bankable stars; more sex, please; and more blood — all, before long, in color. He also gave them monsters, mummies, reptiles and a blob or two.
The pictures he produced in his quarter-century with the studio include “Terror Street”(1953), “The Curse of the Werewolf” (1961) and “Die! Die! My Darling!” (1965), which starred Tallulah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers.
Under the pen name John Elder, Mr. Hinds also wrote the screenplays for many Hammer films, among them “Night Creatures” (1962) and “Frankenstein Created Woman” (1967). Moviegoers came in droves. “They go,” Mr. Hinds told The New York Times in 1958, “because horror, the search for it, the experience of it, the enjoyment of it, is an even more fundamental human quality than the profit motive.”
The films were profitable in any case, and some, like “The Phantom of the Opera” (1962), starring Herbert Lom, came to be considered exemplars of the genre.
On Mr. Hinds’s watch, Hammer attained international renown, especially after he paired Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), their first significant joint appearance.
The two actors went on to make a string of Hammer films together, including “Horror of Dracula” (1958), “The Mummy” (1959) and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1959), with Mr. Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville.
Anthony Frank Hinds was born in London on Sept. 19, 1922. His father, William, was a jewelry store owner who had performed on the music hall circuit as Will Hammer — the root of the studio’s name.
In 1934 the elder Mr. Hinds and a partner, Enrique Carreras, started the company that would become Hammer Films.
Hammer was dormant during World War II; after wartime service in the Royal Air Force, Anthony Hinds joined the studio to help revive it. On his father’s death in 1957, he assumed his share of the business.
Mr. Hinds’s first pronounced success came when he acquired the film rights to “The Quatermass Experiment,” a one-season television series broadcast on the BBC in 1953. The plot centered on an astronaut, mysteriously infected in space, who undergoes a horrifying transformation on returning to Earth.
Mr. Hinds planned to show that transformation in such graphic detail that he successfully — and with all due marketing savvy — petitioned the British Board of Film Classification to award the picture an X rating.
The public flocked to the theaters, assuming that the rating guaranteed a racier product than anything they might encounter on TV.
The film, directed by Val Guest and starring Brian Donlevy, was released in 1955, provocatively retitled “The Quatermass Xperiment.”
After leaving Hammer at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Hinds traveled, sailed and wrote material for amateur dramatic societies.
Mr. Hinds’s survivors include his wife, the former Jean Knowles; two daughters, Sally and Lucy; a sister, Satvikananda (formerly Susan); and five grandchildren.
Hammer made its last feature film in the late 1970s, but in 2007 the studio rose from the dead. Under new ownership, it has since released ghoulish pictures like “The Woman in Black” (2012), starring Daniel Radcliffe.
Mr. Hinds was — in a word — sanguine about his line of work. As The Times reported in 1958, he was “undismayed by being called (to quote his own words) ‘a monster, a ghoul who exploits the basest, most degraded tastes in human nature for personal profit.’ ”
But he was also aware that his line was not to everyone’s taste. As was widely reported in the British press on Mr. Hinds’s death, he had told his next-door neighbor for 20 years that he was a hairdresser.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/movies/anthony-hinds-who-scared-british-moviegoers-dies-at-91.html
Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, and Robert Urquhart, left to right, in a scene from the 1957 Hammer film "The Curse of Frankenstein."
Hammer Films confirmed his death.
When Mr. Hinds, the son of one of Hammer’s founders, joined the studio in 1946, it was known for forgettable, unsanguinary B pictures like “The Public Life of Henry the Ninth” (1935) and “Polly’s Two Fathers” (1936), many starring a music hall performer named George Mozart.
Mr. Hinds, who seemed to have his finger squarely on the pulse of postwar Britain, gave audiences bankable stars; more sex, please; and more blood — all, before long, in color. He also gave them monsters, mummies, reptiles and a blob or two.
The pictures he produced in his quarter-century with the studio include “Terror Street”(1953), “The Curse of the Werewolf” (1961) and “Die! Die! My Darling!” (1965), which starred Tallulah Bankhead and Stefanie Powers.
Under the pen name John Elder, Mr. Hinds also wrote the screenplays for many Hammer films, among them “Night Creatures” (1962) and “Frankenstein Created Woman” (1967). Moviegoers came in droves. “They go,” Mr. Hinds told The New York Times in 1958, “because horror, the search for it, the experience of it, the enjoyment of it, is an even more fundamental human quality than the profit motive.”
The films were profitable in any case, and some, like “The Phantom of the Opera” (1962), starring Herbert Lom, came to be considered exemplars of the genre.
On Mr. Hinds’s watch, Hammer attained international renown, especially after he paired Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee in “The Curse of Frankenstein” (1957), their first significant joint appearance.
The two actors went on to make a string of Hammer films together, including “Horror of Dracula” (1958), “The Mummy” (1959) and “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1959), with Mr. Cushing as Sherlock Holmes and Mr. Lee as Sir Henry Baskerville.
Anthony Frank Hinds was born in London on Sept. 19, 1922. His father, William, was a jewelry store owner who had performed on the music hall circuit as Will Hammer — the root of the studio’s name.
In 1934 the elder Mr. Hinds and a partner, Enrique Carreras, started the company that would become Hammer Films.
Hammer was dormant during World War II; after wartime service in the Royal Air Force, Anthony Hinds joined the studio to help revive it. On his father’s death in 1957, he assumed his share of the business.
Mr. Hinds’s first pronounced success came when he acquired the film rights to “The Quatermass Experiment,” a one-season television series broadcast on the BBC in 1953. The plot centered on an astronaut, mysteriously infected in space, who undergoes a horrifying transformation on returning to Earth.
Mr. Hinds planned to show that transformation in such graphic detail that he successfully — and with all due marketing savvy — petitioned the British Board of Film Classification to award the picture an X rating.
The public flocked to the theaters, assuming that the rating guaranteed a racier product than anything they might encounter on TV.
The film, directed by Val Guest and starring Brian Donlevy, was released in 1955, provocatively retitled “The Quatermass Xperiment.”
After leaving Hammer at the end of the 1960s, Mr. Hinds traveled, sailed and wrote material for amateur dramatic societies.
Mr. Hinds’s survivors include his wife, the former Jean Knowles; two daughters, Sally and Lucy; a sister, Satvikananda (formerly Susan); and five grandchildren.
Hammer made its last feature film in the late 1970s, but in 2007 the studio rose from the dead. Under new ownership, it has since released ghoulish pictures like “The Woman in Black” (2012), starring Daniel Radcliffe.
Mr. Hinds was — in a word — sanguine about his line of work. As The Times reported in 1958, he was “undismayed by being called (to quote his own words) ‘a monster, a ghoul who exploits the basest, most degraded tastes in human nature for personal profit.’ ”
But he was also aware that his line was not to everyone’s taste. As was widely reported in the British press on Mr. Hinds’s death, he had told his next-door neighbor for 20 years that he was a hairdresser.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/movies/anthony-hinds-who-scared-british-moviegoers-dies-at-91.html
Anthony Hinds obituary
Hammer film producer who oversaw popular gothic horror movies such as The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula
In 1964, Anthony Hinds was lauded by the industry as the most successful film producer in Britain. Six years later he retired
Anthony Hinds, who has died aged 91, became a producer with one of the most famous British film brands almost by default. He joined Hammer Film Productions in 1946 after serving with an RAF Photographic Unit in India. Hammer had been the brainchild of his father, William, and his business partner, Enrique Carreras, but had ceased active production in the late 30s. With the ending of the second world war, the company was fired up anew to capitalise on the need to fill the nation's cinema screens with "quota quickies"; to do so, it required a producer of its own and, by virtue of his family connection, Tony was delegated to the task.
Over the next 20 years, he was responsible for the bulk of Hammer's prodigious output, in particular the grandiose gothic horror films for which it would become famous. In 1964, he was lauded by the industry as the most successful film producer in Britain. But only six years later, nearly a quarter-century of success came to a premature end when he decided to retire.
Tony was born in Ruislip, north-west London, the second of four children of William and Theresa Hinds, and went to St Paul's school in Hammersmith. The family started out as watchmakers in 1825 and this had developed into a jewellery business in west London until William and his brother Frank parted company in 1924.
By then, Will Hinds had other interests, in areas as diverse as cycling shops and theatres; he also trod the boards himself as one half of a comedy double-act, Hammer and Smith. From there, it had been a short leap to Hammer Films, formed in 1934. Will's interest in films was negligible, however, and Tony soon discovered that he was to be his father's appointee at Hammer, with a life in the entertainment industry mapped out for him.
When it was decided to restart Hammer film production after the war, it fell to Tony to find a location from which to operate. He settled on a rundown manor house, Down Place, on the banks of the Thames near the village of Bray, Berkshire; in 1952, Hammer purchased the building and reshaped it as Bray Studios. Under Tony's aegis, the company moved rapidly from quota quickies to A features when he persuaded BBC television to part with the screen rights to its sensational science-fiction serial of 1953, The Quatermass Experiment. The success of this 1955 production – retitled The Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the censor's new X certificate – convinced him that the future for Hammer was the horror film.
In 1956, Tony married Jean Knowles. That year, too, he asked an unknown writer named Jimmy Sangster to adapt a well-known gothic novel for a new, younger audience by spicing it up with sex and stage blood. The result was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and widespread critical dismay, but a worldwide box-office hit: with it, "Hammer Horror" was born.
The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957, a worldwide box-office hit for Hammer. Photograph: Rex/Snap
Will Hinds died in a cycling accident in June that year, and Tony inherited his father's shares in Hammer, making him co-owner with Carreras's son James. As the boss of Bray Studios, he gathered around him the talents who would make Hammer Horror a force to be reckoned with. In the following years, he produced 13 of Hammer's best-known features, from Dracula (1958) to The Evil of Frankenstein (1964). In the same period, he began writing scripts under the pseudonym John Elder.
But despite his achievements for Hammer, Tony was ill-suited to the role that he was required to play; he was reserved and fastidious by nature, and he had little sympathy for the wheeling and dealing of the film business. Run-ins with directors, the technicians' union or even his own partner were not to his taste. When he found himself asked to work under Joan Harrison on the Hammer TV series Journey to the Unknown in 1969, he decided that enough was enough. He resigned from the Hammer board and retired from the industry.
Tony continued to freelance as a scriptwriter, but the remainder of his life was spent in gentler pursuits: travel, sailing, photography and writing for the amateur dramatic societies with which he felt more comfortable. Hammer was not the same without him, and it struggled on for only a decade more before going into liquidation in 1979.
Tony is survived by Jean and their daughters, Sally and Lucy.
• Anthony Frank Hinds, film producer and company director, born 19 September 1922; died 30 September 2013
Hammer film producer who oversaw popular gothic horror movies such as The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula
In 1964, Anthony Hinds was lauded by the industry as the most successful film producer in Britain. Six years later he retired
Anthony Hinds, who has died aged 91, became a producer with one of the most famous British film brands almost by default. He joined Hammer Film Productions in 1946 after serving with an RAF Photographic Unit in India. Hammer had been the brainchild of his father, William, and his business partner, Enrique Carreras, but had ceased active production in the late 30s. With the ending of the second world war, the company was fired up anew to capitalise on the need to fill the nation's cinema screens with "quota quickies"; to do so, it required a producer of its own and, by virtue of his family connection, Tony was delegated to the task.
Over the next 20 years, he was responsible for the bulk of Hammer's prodigious output, in particular the grandiose gothic horror films for which it would become famous. In 1964, he was lauded by the industry as the most successful film producer in Britain. But only six years later, nearly a quarter-century of success came to a premature end when he decided to retire.
Tony was born in Ruislip, north-west London, the second of four children of William and Theresa Hinds, and went to St Paul's school in Hammersmith. The family started out as watchmakers in 1825 and this had developed into a jewellery business in west London until William and his brother Frank parted company in 1924.
By then, Will Hinds had other interests, in areas as diverse as cycling shops and theatres; he also trod the boards himself as one half of a comedy double-act, Hammer and Smith. From there, it had been a short leap to Hammer Films, formed in 1934. Will's interest in films was negligible, however, and Tony soon discovered that he was to be his father's appointee at Hammer, with a life in the entertainment industry mapped out for him.
When it was decided to restart Hammer film production after the war, it fell to Tony to find a location from which to operate. He settled on a rundown manor house, Down Place, on the banks of the Thames near the village of Bray, Berkshire; in 1952, Hammer purchased the building and reshaped it as Bray Studios. Under Tony's aegis, the company moved rapidly from quota quickies to A features when he persuaded BBC television to part with the screen rights to its sensational science-fiction serial of 1953, The Quatermass Experiment. The success of this 1955 production – retitled The Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the censor's new X certificate – convinced him that the future for Hammer was the horror film.
In 1956, Tony married Jean Knowles. That year, too, he asked an unknown writer named Jimmy Sangster to adapt a well-known gothic novel for a new, younger audience by spicing it up with sex and stage blood. The result was The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and widespread critical dismay, but a worldwide box-office hit: with it, "Hammer Horror" was born.
The Curse of Frankenstein, 1957, a worldwide box-office hit for Hammer. Photograph: Rex/Snap
Will Hinds died in a cycling accident in June that year, and Tony inherited his father's shares in Hammer, making him co-owner with Carreras's son James. As the boss of Bray Studios, he gathered around him the talents who would make Hammer Horror a force to be reckoned with. In the following years, he produced 13 of Hammer's best-known features, from Dracula (1958) to The Evil of Frankenstein (1964). In the same period, he began writing scripts under the pseudonym John Elder.
But despite his achievements for Hammer, Tony was ill-suited to the role that he was required to play; he was reserved and fastidious by nature, and he had little sympathy for the wheeling and dealing of the film business. Run-ins with directors, the technicians' union or even his own partner were not to his taste. When he found himself asked to work under Joan Harrison on the Hammer TV series Journey to the Unknown in 1969, he decided that enough was enough. He resigned from the Hammer board and retired from the industry.
Tony continued to freelance as a scriptwriter, but the remainder of his life was spent in gentler pursuits: travel, sailing, photography and writing for the amateur dramatic societies with which he felt more comfortable. Hammer was not the same without him, and it struggled on for only a decade more before going into liquidation in 1979.
Tony is survived by Jean and their daughters, Sally and Lucy.
• Anthony Frank Hinds, film producer and company director, born 19 September 1922; died 30 September 2013
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento