send me scripts and story ideas that Nicholson and Arkoff had turned down for one reason or another, in case I could use them in England. One such script was already in my possession, called THE PROJECTED MAN, by a Hollywood writer named Frank Quattrocchi. Of course, it had an American setting—I believe it was Los Angeles, although I don’t remember exactly now—but Gerry and I decided that it could just as well take place in London or anywhere else. I asked John Croydon [Gordon’s collaborator on FIEND, HAUNTED STRAN- GLER et al.] to take a look at it and he agreed. [He] said that he could easily supervise a quick rewrite to change the location and have it ready in time to shoot simultaneously with THE NIGHT THE SILICATES CAME (the title of which I wanted to change to THE NIGHT THE CREATURES CAME, as I felt that no one would know what the word “silicates” meant and there- fore it was meaningless). With Alex’s help, I ac- quired the PROJECTED MAN film rights directly from Quattrocchi, who agreed to accept a story credit. John Croydon, who was also a professional writer for which he used the nom de plume John C. Cooper, then rewrote the script in collaboration with Peter Bryan to give it an English setting.
It would not have been possible for Tom Blakeley to produce two pictures at the same time, and I would not have been keen on that anyway. So I talked about THE PROJECTED MAN with sev- eral other people in London, including Michael Klinger and Tony Tenser of Compton Films, with whom I was on friendly terms. They showed an immediate interest and said yes, provided we kept to a minimum budget, and I made a deal with them very quickly.
The two films were scheduled to go into pro- duction more or less at the same time. Gerry and I agreed to supervise both projects, THE NIGHT THE SILICATES CAME [hereafter called ISLAND OF TERROR] at Pinewood Studios and THE PRO- JECTED MAN at Merton Park Studios. Pinewood, which was about 30 miles outside London, be- longed to the Rank Organisation and was England’s largest studio. Merton Park, much smaller and less expensive than Pinewood, was in a suburb of London. I knew it well because several of my co-productions were shot there. At that time, I was also friendly with Jimmy Carreras, the head of Hammer Films, and he had always been very helpful to me. The industry wasn’t
A collage of scenes from ISLAND OF TERROR.
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