Tony Tenser

TONY TENSER d2007. English-born film producer of Lithuanian-Jewish descent. In 1960 (with business partner Michael Klinger) he opened the Compton Cinema Club, a private members club. Initially the distributors of foreign films, they diversified into production in partnership with the owners of the Cameo chain of cinema and founded Compton Cameo Films. The first film of the new company was Naked as Nature Intended (1961), a nudist film. He and Klinger established the Compton Group as a vehicle for their film-making ambitious and amongst their early productions were Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), the first two films in English made by the Polish director Roman Polanski. He left the Group in 1966 and founded his own production company Tigon British Film Productions in 1966 which made other mainstream films such as Michael Reeves' two features The Sorcerers (1966) and Witchfinder General (1967) as well as other horror films. After production of The Creeping Flesh (1973) concluded, he resigned from Tigon. Following his last film as executive producer Frightmare (1974) he retired from the film industry