ITC Entertainment - Productions

Productions

ITC is best known for being the company behind many successful British cult TV programmes during the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Saint, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Danger Man, The Baron, The Champions, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Man in a Suitcase, Strange Report, Department S, The Persuaders!, Jason King, The Adventurer, The Protectors, and Return of the Saint. It was also the production company for The Muppet Show and Julie on Sesame Street which were both made at ATV's Elstree Studios and distributed in the UK by ATV and in the US by ITC.

ITC got its start as a production company when former American producer Hannah Weinstein approached Lew Grade. Weinstein wanted to make a programme called The Adventures of Robin Hood. Weinstein proposed making the series for ITV and simultaneously marketing it in the United States through an American TV distribution company, Official Films. The series was a big success in both countries, running from 1955 until 1959 on CBS and ATV London.

Grade realised the potential in overseas sales and colour television (the last 14 episodes of The Adventures of Sir Lancelot were filmed in colour a decade before colour television existed in the UK), and ITC combined high production values with exotic locations and uses of variations on the same successful formula for the majority of its television output.

Although most of the ITC series were produced in Britain, ITC often worked with Television Programs of America (TPA) and several series were filmed in America. Possibly the earliest ITC series produced in the US was Fury, a Saturday morning live-action series starring Peter Graves about a beloved ranch horse which ran on NBC in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In 1964 Gerry Anderson's AP Films became part of ACC and produced Fireball XL-5, the hugely successful children's series Thunderbirds and, under its successor company Century 21 Productions, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. ITC also funded Anderson-created programs aimed at the adult market, including UFO and Space: 1999. It was at ITC's request that Fanderson, "the Gerry Anderson Appreciation Society," was founded. Another ITC children's series was The Adventures of Rupert Bear, the first television outing for the Daily Express cartoon character. ITC was also behind Franco Zeffirelli's Biblical mini-series Jesus of Nazareth and the Gregory Peck television film The Scarlet and the Black.

In addition to television programming, ITC also produced several films – including Capricorn One, The Eagle Has Landed, The Boys from Brazil, The Return of the Pink Panther, The Last Unicorn, and a number of Jim Henson Company productions: The Dark Crystal and the first two Muppet films, The Muppet Movie and The Great Muppet Caper. Initially, ITC productions were licensed out to other U.S. studios for release until 1979, when ITC partnered with another UK-based production company, Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment, to create Associated Film Distribution, which would release films produced by each company, as well as pickups from other production companies. In 1979, the subsidiary Black Lion Films was founded in the manner of Thames Euston Films, but its best remembered production, The Long Good Friday, was sold on to HandMade Films.

Then, in the summer of 1980, two films were released by AFD within six weeks of each other, that would cause AFD to cease being an actual distribution company altogether.

The first of these two films was Can't Stop The Music released on June 20, 1980. Originally designed to be a showcase for the Village People at the height of disco music, the popularity of Disco had somewhat diminished between the shooting of the film and its release date, and was experiencing a backlash from music listeners. The backlash towards Disco, and the scathing reviews from reviewers kept audiences away. The film ultimately recovered only $2 million out of its $20 million dollar budget, making it a box office failure.

But on August 1, 1980, the company's most notorious production was released: Raise the Titanic which along with the aforementioned Can't Stop the Music sunk the production company. Lew Grade's experience with the making of Raise the Titanic was not a happy one. Costs escalated, principally around the extensive Titanic scale model. The film drew harsh criticism (not least from Clive Cussler, author of the source novel, and Richard Jordan, who starred as its main character, Dirk Pitt) and recouped only a fraction of its costs, and ITC's profile never recovered. Grade himself retired from active film production, commenting that it would have been cheaper to "lower the Atlantic."

After the film's failure, ITC and EMI agreed to sell AFD and the distribution rights to its library to Universal Studios (AFD films in post production at the time were still released by AFD), to handle the release of the remaining pictures still in production at the time of the sale, beginning with The Legend of the Lone Ranger, and including On Golden Pond, Sophie's Choice, The Dark Crystal, and The Great Muppet Caper. Today, while the copyrights have reverted to the respective owners, Universal still maintains theatrical rights to most ITC and EMI films initially released by AFD.

As a distribution company, ITC was also the world-wide distributor for ATV's The Benny Hill Show.