HILE MOURNING the death of his father, Mario Bava was contacted by an old friend from America.
Lawrence Woolner—the younger half of the Woolner Brothers team that successfully distributed Hercules in the Haunted World and Blood and Black Lace in the United States—had relocated to Rome with his wife Betty, and together they were setting up a new independent production com- pany in partnership with Giuseppe “Joe” De Blasio.
As British screenwriter Tudor Gates (1930-
2007) remembered: “Lawrence was quite old at the time, and Betty was much younger and pretty much the boss. Joe De Blasio was an Italian-American who had been a production manager for one of the US ma- jors in the palmy days.” A former Warner Bros. production supervisor, De Blasio came to the Woolners’ new company with more than ten years of Italian film production ex- perience, dating back to Robert Wise’s epic Helen of Troy (1955).
