Search Results for: Brian Taylor

Made films for the Civic Trust and Wimpey. Brian Finch the sponsoring officer, Riverside 2000 the corporate epic. Paul Jennings wrote the commentary.

…recambe and Wise, Yes Minister, Antony Jay, Top of the Pops, Josephine Douglas, Brian Epstein, David Frost, The Two Ronnies, Parkinson.SIDE FIVEThe Montreux Festival, George Inns [sic] and The Black &…

…hen went up to 35 shillings; work started at 8:30am but the day was open ended; Brian Langley worked there at the same time; JH lived in Richmond at this time; someone from Cook’s lenses would be sent…

Alvin Bailey was a film editor. Born in Hackney in 1924 and died in 2004. In 1939 he was an extra in the movie  "Goodbye Mr Chips" . He visited Pinewood Studios a lot as an extra at 15.  In 1942 he went into the forces. He took part in the D Day landings  as fuel deliverer after first wave landed. At Rochester Art School he was employed as a  film extra. He joined Gainsborough Studios as a 3rd Assistant. Worked at Shepperton Studios with Darryl Zanuck on sound effects. Editor with Anglo Scottish.1951. Group 3 at Southall. Later he joined Norman Macqueen as Director. Born London Highgate School. 1939 extra in Goodbye Mr Chips Film. Visited Pinewood Studios a lot as an extra at 15. 1942 into forces. Took part in D Day landings  as fuel deliverer after first wave landed. Rochester Art School employed as Film Extra. Joined Gainsborough Studios as 3rd Assistant. Worked at Shepperton Studios with Darryl Zanuck on sound effects. Editor with Anglo Scottish.1951. Group 3 at Southall. many anecdotes about the industry. Joined Norman Macqueen as Director.

Worked for Danizigers at their studios at Elstree and then set up the Mayfair Theatre In the army.Habit of a chequered education.  in Liverpool when the war started andI went to Quarry Bank where  John Lennon went -then moved to Southport  and shortly afterwards, through father being with Columbia, he joined Columbia Pictures joined the Manchester office of Columbia Pictures as office boy ;  promoted to being shorts booking clerk.Shorts were quite important part of the programme  then we had cinemas like the Tatler,  We sold both to the independents and the circuits but we had a special circuits department who dealt with them  over.Was at Columbia until 1943 when  volunteered to go into the Royal Armoured Corps and was based for six months or so in the UK and went to France two weeks after D Day. part of the 79th Armoured Division - they were called Hobart's Funnies  d change them. In - the Westminster Dragoons -demobbed in 1947 because it was a question of age and service and the younger of us were kept on as the army of occupation.  didn't want to go back into film distribution. a salesman for more than a month - After a little while, again through father  Sydney Shurman  ran a screen advertising company called Progressive Publicity from Manchester  I did that for about a year and had some success.  1947  my father joined British Lion  I then went to my boss, Sydney Shurman,  "Look, I think it’s probably time I changed my career and its an opportune time because we're going down to London and I don't think my future lies in selling space on local cinemas.It was mainly for filmlets, or what we call slide on film - we had this very old library of 15-second filmlets. Progressive Publicity of which I was then a member - it was sold to Pearl, Dean and Younger  there was the Screen Advertising Association. The  period with Langford and Company, with Sydney Shurman, came to an end after four years l. So what happened then was that Sydney and Jo Caverson and myself left at the end of his contract or rather I think they released him from the last year. formed a new company called CinemaScreen Services -we were taking the business from the Rank Organisation. Remained with Cinema Screen Services as general manager for the company. Got a good additional experience because we ran a couple of bingo halls - one of which was the Chequers St. Albans which I acquired for the company, which actually we ran as a cinema for a while and it was a very good cinema and I was a bit sorry that we actually turned it into bingo because there was no other cinema in St. Albans, This was when ITV started 1955 sudden drop in attendances. getting a good allround experience because apart from screen advertising, Sydney Shurman started a film distribution company called Panton Film Distributors - it was Panton Films because it was in Panton Street - and he had good contacts, Sydney, both in film distribution and in the exhibition side. One of his very close friends in the businessit was interesting because as well as buying. did keep films going a little later on when I acquired the Regal Highams Park. That had belonged to Southan Morris. Now the Southan Morris circuit after the war was a major player - there weren't just the Odeons and ABCs.  about that time I acquired the lease at the Priory Royston and this was a cinema that was open but that was doing very poor business. No, I think it closed just before we took it over, if I remember rightly. The intention was to get a bingo licence but I took it over, that's right, it was running as a cinema and it was doing nothing, I think we were taking about £100 a week on a good week. And I discovered they had stopped advertising in the local paper because it was costing £5 a week for the insertion,and they had no programmes out, so really, unless people were passing the cinema, they had no way of knowing what was going on. So we got behind it and we started advertising in the paper and we certainly managed to improve the business quite considerably but I think this was 1957 when we had that very hot summer - round about there - and what happened was the week before the heatwave started we were showing Death Race 2000 and which was about car racing, it was the first of the Clockwork Orange type of film, and we got behind this film, we got the actual car in the High Street in Royston with the driver on a Saturday morning. Well, the crowds were looking at it and it was wonderful. Of course, it was on the following week and I couldn't believe it, we took nearly £700 - my word! And then of course the heatwave started and we dropped the following week - I think it was the film about the musicals, There's No Business Like Show Business - and we dropped to 80 quid, so that rather shattered my confidence and eventually I passed the lease over to a man called Peter Lindsay who was really only interested in bingo and concentrated on building up because at that time I had left CinemaScreen Services and started what became known as FAS in the business - Faber Advertising Services. And I started that from Germain Street where I moved in with my father - he wasn’t there very often,he used to come in and look at the runners and riders and then go to11his club for lunch with the boys, then he'd come in in the afternoon to say goodbye - but it suited me because it was a good base and I was able to get around from there and acquire contracts from exhibitors that I had goodwill with from CinemaScreen Services. It didn't endear me to Sydney Shurman - but that was his fault, not mine. Had been perhaps a little more generous in giving me a bigger interest in the business, then I might have stayed there, who knows. But I started this business and I developed this quite quickly until we became probably the fourth - there was Pearl and Dean at this time, there was Rank (which subsequently became Rank Screen Advertising which subsequently became Carlton) and there was Presburys and myself, Faber Advertising. We worked closely with Presburys because we weren't big enough to go, our holdings weren't big enough to go to the advertising agencies - advertising agents don't like dealing with minnows, they like to deal with the big people and know that they've placed their contracts, whatever - and consequently unless you were in that sort of league, you couldn't get national business and we had to get national business. I had quite close ties with Rank, having been there originally, and I was quite friendly with the managing director who was Douglas Thomas. I arranged for them to sell my screens to national advertisers and we got a commission on it which obviously helped to keep us in the field. That went quite well. INTIt was at this stage that the cinema business was beginning to change because you got us all these new multiplexes arriving and they were smaller cinemas with different programmes in the same building and it changed the face of the industry, didn't it, for a very considerable time that reflected in the attendancesWe had to consolidate because of that, obviously. Ideally we should have merged with Presburys and we tried - I pulled my father in on this, thought it would be helpful in negotiations - but they were the oldest established company, they were going in 1880 or whatever in the cinema advertising field and they were very sort of hidebound in their ways. Both the principals died and after the death of Guy Presbury, who was one of the two founders, it was a fire sale and Rank took it over. There was no one else to go to. We've discussed Highams Park, haven’t we? Yes, I think I’ve covered that. INT We were talking about cinema audiences dropping and saying at that time too, had it not been for the advent of television, had it not been for screen advertising and the sales, they would have really been in trouble and far more would have gone. INT But was it also that the age group of the people who ran independent houses at the time got to the stage where they were thinking of retiring and there wasn't people with the urge to take over their cinema?Well, yes, there’s always been an interest in people acquiring cinemas. Funnily enough, yes, you would have thought when these went they would have gone and the interest would die down but people were always interested, thinking perhaps they could do better with the product or get better product or whatever, and there were many cases where circuits had released cinemas or leased them out to Somebody and the independent had made a success of it, you know, because his overheads are probably less and he was on the job. One of the problems that always with circuits was that head office booked films irrespective of the requirements of the local areas - instead of saying to the managers, what would you like us to show, they booked it and probably.... that has changed now to a great extent, totally different anyway because you've gotten films to choose from in the multiplex, but this was the thing that you got these independents who would take over not a derelict but a cinema that the circuits had released and make quitea, success out of it. Still happening today.. Also, obviously because of the TV market. There's so much more money now put into the production of advertising and you know, you’ve got the Putnams who started in advertising and went on to big things but it is very important part of the revenue and the circuits particularly can command a really big slice of whatever the revenue is. Because of the intense competition today between Pearl & Dean and Carlton, the contractors are being squeezed and are having to pay more and more because they want to retain that level so that they're both.... I hadn't come to that but actually I sold my business, Cinema Screen Services, to Rank Screen Advertising after about ten years, so I still had the bingo interests. What was happening, the reason I sold it, was two fold. One was that we were a very small operation in that it was all done from this small office and I used to wake up at night and think Oh my God, I don’t have to die but if I went into hospital for a fortnight or Something, who's going to sign the cheques, who's going to give the reps their business - I mean, I had a secretary but it either meant I had to expand, which meant new premises, new expense, etc. or to get out. It coincided actually with the time the Rank Organisation decided to retract and it was the worst PR operation in the history of the industry, I think - they announced in the press that they were closing thirty cinemas - now why they just didn't quietly close them, I don't know - whether they thought they were going to get sympathy, I don't know - and this affected, down the line, their various companies. Rank Screen Services were losing quite a proportion of the cinemas they were offering to their salesmen and Douglas Thomas would have been in the position “No, I'm sorry we haven't got the...” and I suggested to him that he bought Faber Advertising Services which of course he was quite interested in doing because he was then able to say to his sales force, Well, we lost these but Faber Advertising Services are bringing in 95 screens - they may not have been in comparison to Odeons and Gaumont but nevertheless they boosted his numbers. As part of the deal, they invited me to join them as a consultant on the space buying side, as a part-time consultant, and I did that for ten years and retired from Rank. I was out for about a year and a half and I got a telephone call from Peter Howard Williams who had been the national sales manager with me when I was with Rank and he had gone to Pearl and Dean and he became managing director of Pearl and Dean, and then he phoned me from out of the blue and he said what are you doing, Mel? I said, well half the time I'm pushing a trolley round Sainsburys. And he said, Oh, you don't want to do that - why don't you come in and see me. And what had happened was that his contract buyer, his space buyer, a lady called Lydia Pohani who was very well known in the industry having been in it for years, had up tracks and gone to Carlton and he was in it deep because he had nobody there who knew the exhibitors. She had an assistant but this young lady was purely on the secretarial side. She spoke to the exhibitors but she didn't know them. And he said, why don't you come and join us and help us out. And I said fine because it would give me something to do and I said I don't want to work full time. He said, no, do three days a week. I said, lovely.Another story I tell which is quite amusing. We discussed terms and I said fine. Well, what about a car? He said, use your own car and we'd pay you mileage. So I said, Oh, well, that's all very well, Pete, we're running one car and I can’t leave13Gloria without a car particularly if I'm going out to Work, so I said haven't you got a car that I could have. And he said, Wait a minute, yes, you can probably have Lydia's car which was the girl that had gone. And I said, what is it? And he said, an Audi. And I said, Oh, what colour? Bloody cheek! I was joking, of course. So I had the use of the car until the end of its contract hire period. And I joined them initially for a three-month period. I did ten years until last September, 2002 Quite honestly, I Would have been happy to carry on for another year but they had a rearrangement and they thought it was possibly time for me to pick up my boots and start playing bowls or whatever. 14+ Add To Bookmarks