Lights, camera, anecdotes

The Corpse Grinders. Deathdream. Blood Orgy of the SheDevils. These are just some of the films co-produced by Peter James prior to his international success as a crime-fiction writer. The bestselling author spoke to JOE MOFFATT and TOM OGG about his former career in the movie industry

PETER James is world-famous for his best-selling crime novels – 21 million sales and counting – and for the hugely popular Roy Grace series.
Lesser-known is his time spent as a producer on a series of feature-length films, primarily made in the 1970s prior to his international success in the literary world.
From low-budget exploitation horror (Blood Orgy of the She-Devils, 1973) to fringe cult classics (Deathdream, 1974) and saucy British romps (Spanish Fly, 1976), Peter worked behind-the-scenes on dozens of films – and frequently found himself at the mercy of some of the most eccentric actors in film history.
It all began in 1970 when Peter, then in his early twenties, graduated from film school and struggled to find a job in the industry.
“At the time, there were only two TV channels,” says the Jersey-based author, chatting via Zoom while on a promotional visit to the UK.
“You had to join a six-year graduate scheme to work at the BBC and, with ITV, you basically had to be born into a union family. Luckily, I had an uncle out in Toronto, Canada, and he said ‘Come out here’. So I went over and got a job as a gopher on a daily program for pre-school children called Polka Dot Door.”
After three months spent running back and forth making teas and coffees, Peter’s lucky break arrived in the form of a panicked producer who asked Peter – then aged 22 – to write an episode of the show after the regular writer fell sick.
“It wasn’t exactly rocket science, but they liked what I wrote and they took me on as a writer for three days a week for the next year,” he says. “At the same time my mother had a friend whose son was in the movie business. He was working for Buena Vista, which is Disney’s distribution arm in New York, and so I went to visit him. He told me he had a script he’d co-written called Foreign Bodies. It was interesting in that it was an ecological horror film about nature getting back at man. This was 1971 and so it was very ahead of its time.
“Anyway, he said: ‘We’d like to get William Shatner in this – if you can get Shatner’s name attached then you can become our partner’. I went back to Toronto where I was living in a cheap little bedsit. There was a shared communal payphone and this crazy Moroccan chef living next door and, every time the phone rang, it was a race to see who could get to it first.”
Having co-founded Jason Productions with Diane Judson, a Polka Dot Door colleague who likewise had aspirations to enter the film business, Peter printed out some Jason Productions business cards with the phone number and address of his cheap bedsit written on the back.
“I found out where Shatner was filming and then rang the production office from the payphone,” he says. “I said: ‘It’s Peter James here, President of Jason Productions Corporation. Could I speak to Mr Shatner please?’ They told me he was on set and he would call me back.’
For the next five hours Peter waited in his bedsit, door open, ready to race the ‘crazy Moroccan chef’ to the payphone.
“The phone finally rings and I get to it first, and I hear: ‘I have a collect-call for a Peter James from a Mr William Shatner’. Bloody cheapskate. So I’m halfway through speaking to Shatner and the payphone warning starts, and so I’m sticking in more and more coins and you can hear the noise over the phone. I don’t think he was very impressed. Nothing ever came of it, sadly, but that was my first foray into the movie business.”
A more advantageous encounter occurred shortly thereafter when Peter met aspiring director Bob Clark at a party. The Canadian filmmaker would later achieve major success with cult horror classic Black Christmas (1974) and hit comedies such as Porky’s (1981) and A Christmas Story (1983); at the time, however, Clark was struggling to finance a low-key comedy-horror titled Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things. Peter, acting as co-producer, decided to help raise some much-needed funds.
“Back then, I would have dinner with my uncle every Friday, and he was very well-connected,” says Peter. “He was one of the first computer pioneers in Canada: a Jewish refugee, wealthy himself, and someone who knew all the other successful guys who’d arrived in Toronto and made their fortune. He also knew about this tax scheme which the Canadian government had introduced. It was attractive for investors to put money into high-risk ventures, like movies, because, if the film tanked, they could claim back their investments in tax relief.
“My uncle basically handed me his address book and I went around knocking on doors,” he continues. “We raised about $60,000, which in today’s money is around half a million, and the film got made. It got some really great reactions and it was then that Bob told me about his script for Deathdream, which was initially called The Veteran. I read it and I really liked it.”
Released in 1974, Deathdream tells the story of Andy Brooks, an American sniper shot and killed in Vietnam, but who seemingly comes back from the dead and returns to live with his all-American family.
Recalling the making of the film, Peter says: “I found myself producing Deathdream in the middle of nowhere in Brooksville in Florida. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. I’d been to film school and I knew roughly how to put something together, but here I was working with a cast and crew of 85. I didn’t even know what the production accountant did – I just sort of blagged it. We filmed for about four months and then we edited it in Miami.
“The problem with Deathdream was that it came out right as America was involved in Vietnam, and a lot of people saw it as an anti-war film, although it later became a kind of cult campus film.”
It was at this time that Peter also met a distributor by the name of Bob Kilgore (“a lovely Southern guy, a real gent”), who in turn introduced Peter to independent American filmmaker Ted V Mikels.
“Ted was a good guy but he was often short of money,” recalls Peter. “We financed a whole bunch of his low-budget horror films, such as The Corpse Grinders and Blood Orgy of the She-Devils. They weren’t making massive money, but there was a big market in the US drive-in circuit at that time for low-budget horror. Guys just wanted to take their girls to a horror movie so that they could put their arms around them in the darkness of the car when they got frightened. It was pretty much as crass as that.”
Soon enough, Peter and his partners found themselves having money thrown at them, but it wasn’t always easy to find quality films to finance. The result was “a whole bunch of not-very-good movies”, including It Seemed Like A Good Idea At the Time (1975) and Find the Lady (1976), both of which starred a young John Candy.
“We also financed Under Milk Wood with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and then a really fascinating film came to us called The Blockhouse. It was filmed in the underground war hospital in Guernsey, and it starred Peter Sellers and Charles Aznavour. That was my first time in the Channel Islands. I loved Guernsey – I thought it was an amazing place. I wouldn’t waste two hours of your life watching the film, though, although the concept was phenomenal. It was based on one of the greatest true stories ever told.”
The story is as follows: As the Germans were advancing eastwards during the Second World War, they were secretly building underground supply dumps, which they filled with ammunition, clothing, tinned food, beer and wine. When the Germans then began retreating in 1944, they decided to dynamite the entrances to prevent the allies from getting to their supplies.
Peter continues the story: “There was a supply dump outside Warsaw, and seven Polish labourers – who had literally eaten nothing but bread and drippings since 1938 – knew the Germans were going to dynamite it the next day, and so they decided to go down and loot it. They head down, about 30 metres underground, and they find they’re in heaven – there are tins of ham and all this food, all this booze, and so they just party and get absolutely trolleyed. They all pass out, and then they’re woken the next morning by an enormous explosion. The place fills with dust and they realise they’ve been entombed, and their first reaction is ‘this is bloody great! We’ll just party until we’re rescued’.”
Cut to 1953, and a Polish construction company is building a block of flats. As a bulldozer drills down for the foundations, it plunges through a hole in the ground.
“Two guys stagger out with beards down to the ground, one of them raving mad,” says Peter. “They’ve been down there since 1944, with the other men having all slowly died. It’s an extraordinary but absolutely horrific story of survival.”
The Blockhouse caught the attention of film star Peter Sellers, who at the time was looking to cement his legacy as a serious actor with non-comedic roles, and who bought the rights to the book on which the film was adapted. Sadly, the resultant film was not a success.
“Oh, we knew it was a disaster before it was even finished,” says Peter. “It needed a lot of re-shooting. We made a bad decision to bring in a first-time director, Clive Rees, who was one of the top TV commercial directors in the 1970s, but who wanted the whole film lit as if by candle-light. The result was just unremittingly bleak.
“Sellers was every bit as eccentric as you would expect,” continues Peter. “After we had finished The Blockhouse, one of the gigs we got was to make a TV commercial in Cyprus with Sellers, Spike Milligan and James Villiers. Sellers was being paid a ridiculous amount of money – I think it was a hundred grand. We only had him for one day: he was being flown into Cyprus at 7am and then he was off to Australia at 7pm to make another movie.
“The plot for the commercial centred on a warehouse by the water that was filled with gold bars, except they weren’t gold bars, they were packets of Benson and Hedge’s Gold cigarettes. Sellers’ character was going to stand on guard outside, Villiers is waiting in the getaway boat, and Milligan would go into the warehouse wearing a coat lined with pouches and then stuff the gold bars inside them. The alarm then goes off, Milligan runs out, jumps into the boat wearing this heavy coat – and he goes right through the bottom of it.
“So, we were all set up on location in Cyprus when Sellers arrives, and the director, Peter Medak, says: ‘Okay Peter, first set-up: you stand outside the warehouse and you’re looking nervous, you light a cigarette…’ and Sellers interrupts: ‘I’ve decided that I’m against smoking.’ Seriously. We tried talking to him but he wouldn’t budge, so we phone his agent and the agent says: ‘Hmm, yes, I’m afraid Peter can be a bit difficult sometimes’. It’s now 11am and we haven’t shot a frame. The advertising agency then says: ‘Well, why don’t we swap roles and have Spike smoking the fag while Peter does the raid?’, so we tell this to Spike and he replies: ‘Sorry, director, but I’m with my friend Peter. I’m not smoking. It’s bad for you’. In the end James Villiers said: ‘F*** it, I’ll smoke the bloody thing’.”
As if Sellers and Milligan hadn’t been enough of a handful, Peter later found himself working with another temperamental actor – Michael J Pollard – on the set of gritty revenge-thriller Sunday in the Country.
“Pollard was in Bonnie and Clyde, which had turned him from a two-bit nobody to probably the star with the biggest ego on the planet,” says Peter with a laugh. “We were filming in Toronto and I’ve never known an actor so instantly hated by an entire film crew. He had this complete ego, and he was also constantly stoned. I remember it was the third day and we were filming outside in the street when he fell down an open manhole – and none of the crew went forward to help lift him out. But Sunday in the Country had a really good cast. It’s a film I’m really proud we made.”
Having thus far worked behind-the-scenes primarily on thrillers, horrors and downbeat dramas, Peter decided he wanted to try his hand at something altogether more light-hearted.
“We had a distributor in Canada, Len Herberman, who invited me to lunch one day and said: ‘We’ve just done a low-budget saucy comedy with Leslie Phillips called Not Now Darling, and it’s taken a fortune. Would you consider trying to make something else like that with Leslie?'”
Peter and his then-partner promptly holed themselves up in a flat in Toronto over a weekend and wrote a screenplay for a raunchy comedy set in Hamburg.
“We sent it out to Leslie Phillips, and he said: ‘I do quite like it but I don’t really want to go to Hamburg. Could you not set it in the Balearics instead because I’ve got a house in Ibiza?’ So we re-wrote it as Spanish Fly.”
Released in 1976, Spanish Fly tells the story of Sir Percy de Courcy (Terry-Thomas), a suave cad who makes a living doctoring cheap Spanish wine by putting it into French Châteaux bottles and selling it at ten times the price. A mishap occurs when Sir Percy’s butler, Perkins (Graham Armitage), accidentally grinds a Spanish fly beetle – an aphrodisiac – into the wine just days before top fashion designer Mike Scott (Leslie Phillips) arrives to model for an underwear shoot.
“Terry-Thomas was an utterly delightful man,” says Peter. “We kept in touch for a long time. He had early Parkinson’s while we were filming, and every other day he struggled to remember his lines. I didn’t realise that he’d already been diagnosed.”
Peter then recounts his favourite anecdote about Terry-Thomas. It was early 1974 and the actor had yet to agree to make Spanish Fly, with Peter being told by Thomas’s agent that Thomas – who by this time was living in Ibiza – would only ever read a script if he liked the person who wrote it. It was with this in mind that Peter travelled to Ibiza with the aim of winning over the eccentric star.
“I asked the agent for a phone number and he said: ‘No, Terry doesn’t have a phone, but I can give you a number for Sandy’s Bar in Santa Eulalia, which is the nearest town to his house, and Sandy will get a message to him.’ So I fly out the following Thursday and I stay overnight in Ibiza – and it occurs to me that Ibiza in winter is bloody cold. I was staying in a hotel that had no heating.”
As instructed by the agent, Peter then made his way to Sandy’s Bar, which was filled with drunken Brits, and which is where Terry-Thomas had agreed to meet him at 11pm. By 12.30am, the actor was still nowhere to be seen.
“All of a sudden I hear this rumble, like thunder, coming from outside, and this psychedelic four-seater convertible Merc appears. Terry-Thomas gets out wearing a dressing gown and carpet slippers. He walks into the bar, very affable, and says: ‘Ah, follow me in your car and I’ll drive on ahead.’ So off we go and he is driving like a lunatic and I’m trying to hang onto his tail. We then turn into this driveway, and it’s just a dirt track that goes on and on and on. Eventually we turn a corner and suddenly it’s brand-spanking-new tarmac with a white line down the middle. This goes on for about 100 yards and then it goes back to kart track, until we arrive at this stunning promontory and this big pink house with a tower. I say to him: ‘Are you having your driveway done?’, and he replies: ‘Yes, but they only laid 100 yards and then I ran out of money’.
“The house itself was like being in Alice in Wonderland – an old Tudor mansion with all wooden panelling but with doors that were three-foot high and others that were eight-foot high. It was all fake perspective. There were five kitchens, and he told me: ‘My wife Belinda doesn’t like washing up, and my cleaning lady only comes twice a week, so with five kitchens we can just move around and avoid the mess’.
“Anyway, we have lunch and a chat, and we spend a nice afternoon by the pool. I remember that my brief is to get him to like me and so I’m trying to talk him through this classy script I’ve written. Then he says: ‘You don’t want to stay in that horrible hotel, Peter – stay the night with us here and we’ll go out to dinner’. I took that as a positive sign.”
It was 10pm by the time Terry drove Peter and Belinda to the restaurant, and 11.30pm before the food was ordered, by which point Peter was “hungry and paralytic”.
“By now, I’ve noticed that Belinda keeps chatting to this one particular waiter, but I try to stay focussed on Terry. The starters arrive and Belinda disappears to the loo but, still, I’m zeroed in on Terry: talking, talking, talking. I then realise in a drunk state that about 45 minutes has gone by and Belinda hasn’t come back from the loo, and I can see I’m starting to lose Terry.
“Suddenly, Terry looks at me and says: ‘F***ing wh*re, she’s gone off with that waiter’. And he stands up and storms out of the restaurant. I still want my main course but then another waiter runs after Terry shouting: ‘Sir, sir, the bill’, and Terry says: ‘Get lost, your waiter’s f***ing my wife’.
“So we get in the Merc and we drive around the island three times with the roof wound down. It’s now 4am and I’m numb with cold. I ask Terry if we can put the roof up but he’s not speaking to me. He’s just hunched over the wheel. He stops, puts the roof up and carries on driving. We’re then on the fourth lap around the island when we finally pass Belinda, who is walking back along the road. Terry pulls up alongside her, winds down the window, says ‘f***ing wh*re’, winds the window back up again and then carries on driving.
“We finally get back to the house at 5am and I’m offered more brandy before I go to bed. Fast forward to 10.30am and I wake up with one of the worst hangovers of my life. I stagger downstairs, and everybody is all sweetness and light. The two kids are sitting there, Belinda asks: ‘What would you like for breakfast?’, and Terry says: ‘Read your script – love it. Let’s do it’. It was just another typical night in the Terry-Thomas household.”
Regarding Spanish Fly, Peter says: “It was not a classy movie, I have to say”, which is a milder critique than that of film critic Barry Norman, who said: “Spanish Fly is the least-funny British funny film ever made. Probably the worst British film since the Second World War.”
“I met Barry about 20 years later at the Harrogate Crime Festival – his wife wrote crime novels – and I said: ‘You sod. You really trashed that film’. He replied: ‘I’m sorry, but it was a bit s**t, wasn’t it?'”
Having branched out into different genres, Peter made a welcome return to horror in 1975 when he acted as executive producer on Shivers, which was directed by Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, who would later find mainstream success with such sci-fi-horror hits as Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983) and The Fly (1986).
“Cronenberg wasn’t really well-known at that point,” recalls Peter. “We all thought the film was pretty gross.
“At that time horror films were the easiest to make,” he adds. “You didn’t need star actors, you didn’t need great sets – all you needed were a few convincing actors, a good-looking girl and a graveyard. You could make a horror movie very cheaply.”
It wasn’t purely for economical reasons that Peter focussed on horror movies, however.
“Oh, I’ve always had a love of horror,” he says with a smile. “In terms of the crime novels that I write today, every book has murder in it, and murderers fascinate me – the darker, the better. I’ve met quite a few over the years.”
Of course, this long stint in Peter’s career as a producer predates his work as a writer, for which he is now famed. We ask Peter if his time spent in the film industry influenced his writing in any way.
“That’s a really good question, and the answer is yes, a lot. I think one of the big differences between movies and novels is that part of the energy of a film comes from the cutting, and often quick cutting, and so I’ve always tried to write fairly short chapters, with the focus changing from character to character with each new chapter. I find that gives my books the kind of energy that I like. I learned a lot from working in film and television.”
As Peter explains, the reason for his switch from producing to writing was because of the difficulties he faced in getting across his vision.
“Look, unless you’ve got the kind of power that someone like Steven Spielberg has, then most of the time you’re just part of a committee. On every film on which I’ve worked, you’ve got two or three producers who think it’s their film, and then the director says it’s his film, and then the cinematographer says: ‘Actually, the director’s an idiot – I saved this film’. And then the editor says: ‘It’s a complete disaster. I’m the one who bailed it out’. And the distributor says: ‘We don’t like the ending. Can you re-shoot it?’ You’re constantly fighting all the way. With writing, though, I don’t have to change a word if I don’t want to, and I love that.”
As Peter pursued his passion for literature from 1981 onwards, the number of film productions in which he involved himself declined. Nevertheless, he ran a film and television development company in the 1990s called Ministry of Vision, which later morphed into Movision Ltd, and which produced, among others, A Different Loyalty (2004) starring Sharon Stone and Rupert Everett and The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004) featuring Robert De Niro.
Recently, Peter has found success producing the adaptation of his popular Roy Grace novels for the ITV series Grace.
“I’ve had three previous books made into television – and I honestly wondered when they came out if the people who made them had actually read the books,” he laughs. “But with Grace, I’ve been really well consulted on every cast member, and I work very closely with the team – they’re really respectful. I think it helps that the books are successful and so they know they’ve got a built-in audience.
“It’s the happiest experience I’ve ever had with an adaptation of my work.”