Bryant Haliday, one of the founders of Janus Films, stars as the ill-fated Dr. Paul Steiner in THE PROJECTED MAN.


only one thing to do: fire Ian Curteis and replace him for the completion of the film. As Croydon had hired him for us, it fell on him to fire Curteis and step in personally as a replacement to finish the last week’s shooting. I don’t remember any big drama at the studio [when Curteis was noti- fied] and I think Curteis was relieved to step out because he simply didn’t know any longer what to do. Croydon, one of England’s most experienced production supervisors, was capable of doing any- thing: he could write, he could produce, he could direct, and it became his responsibility to direct the balance of the picture. I would say that Ian Curteis directed 90% of THE PROJECTED MAN and Croydon finished it. Croydon’s work as di- rector was not reflected in the onscreen credits, which list only Curteis as director. One tries not to publicize such incidents.


Now the time was coming for me to take over the responsibility of selling both films in America. In those days, all the major companies had dis- tribution headquarters in New York. I had a pretty good relationship with most of them, having sold them films that I represented over the years. Uni- versal, which occupied a building on the corner of 57th Street and Park Avenue, was my first choice because I was on very good terms with “Hi” Martin, who was their executive in charge. He had bought several films from me previously


which had been quite successful for them and he seemed to like me. THE PROJECTED MAN was not yet ready because they were still finish- ing the special effects in London, so I ran IS- LAND OF TERROR for him in Universal’s screening room. He liked it and expressed an interest in acquiring the rights for Universal. I decided to stall for time because, as I mentioned earlier, if it went out alone, it would end up as a second feature with one of Universal’s own pro- ductions and we would end up being the bot- tom half of the bill which would be no good for us financially. I told Hi about THE PROJECTED MAN and that it was nearly ready to be shown and I wanted to withhold from making a deci- sion until I could show him the first print of THE PROJECTED MAN for a possible two-picture deal. He went along with that.


To speed up matters, I brought over a work


print of THE PROJECTED MAN and ran it for him so that he would know what was happening (and I did not want him to go cold on us!). I don’t remember now which scenes were unfin- ished but the end of this story is that he liked it well enough to say yes, and we made a deal for Universal to release the double bill. The price that Universal paid us for the Western Hemi- sphere rights covered our production costs for the two films; ISLAND OF TERROR was budgeted at


21


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