David Grant (producer)

Willis Andrew Holt was born in Uxbridge in 1939. He changed his name by deed poll on the 22 January 1982 to David Hamilton Grant.

Grant's first film was Love Variations (1969), a sex education film that was based on a 'marriage manual' Grant had photographed/published a year earlier. Grant's sex film empire grew in the 1970s; he opened up a number of adult cinemas, the first being The Pigalle in 1974,[1] distributed foreign sex films through his Oppidan company, and produced his own featurette length British sex comedies (Girls Come First, The Office Party, and Under the Bed). He also produced Snow White and the Seven Perverts (1973), a pornographic animated short parodying "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".[2][3]

Grant's featurettes were often released on the lower half of cinema double-bills with popular European sex films in order to capitalise on the Eady Levy tax situation. For example, Girls Come First was paired on a 1975 double bill with Enter The 7 Virgins, the Grant produced The Over-Amorous Artist was retitled Just One More Time and re-released as the support feature to a 1975 release of Just Jaeckin's Emmanuelle (1974),[4] The Office Party was paired on a 1976 double bill with Linda Lovelace for President, and the Grant directed Sensations starring Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge was the support feature to Pussy Talk (1975).[4] Described in a 1978 profile in Punch magazine as "a chubby, boyish forty-year-old, with a youthful, uncorrupted face enfolded in two glossy skull-caps of hair and beard", Grant liked to refer to himself as the "King of Sexploitation", and enjoyed giving himself Hitchcock cameos in his own films.

During the making of The Office Party (1976), Grant got into a row with actor Johnny Briggs, after Briggs refused to bare all for the film. Briggs feared such exposure could damage his reputation, and a furious Grant threatened to fire him. After the intervention of Briggs' agent, a compromise was reached and Briggs performed the offending scene with his underpants on. Briggs later recalled this story in his autobiography, noting that after the film he vowed never to work with Grant again.[5] As well as his sex films, Grant also produced X-rated cartoons like Sinderella (1972), and comedy shorts like Escape to Entebbe' (1976), a parody of Idi Amin featuring a browned up John Bluthal as a Pakistani TV reporter.

In the early eighties, Grant turned to video, forming the World of Video 2000 label with fellow 1970s sex film mogul Malcolm Fancey. Grant held the position of company secretary, while Fancey was head of marketing. The company launched onto the video market with several soft porn titles in December 1981. In 1983 Grant noted that Steven Spielberg's film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial had yet to be released on home video in the UK, and responded by releasing an old sixties B movie called Night Fright (1968) on video under the title E.T.N - The Extra Terrestrial Nastie, with video artwork that parodied the E.T. poster. Universal International Pictures threatened legal action, and the tape was withdrawn then later re-released with different artwork.

On 3 February 1984, Grant was imprisoned for distributing "video nasty" Nightmares in a Damaged Brain (1981) on video. Grant was sentenced to 6 months in prison for being in "possession of over 200 copies of an obscene article for publication for gain", he was found guilty under section two of the obscene publications act. Grant's defense lawyer during the trial was Geoffrey Robertson. After Grant's imprisonment, World of Video 2000 (and its parent company April Electronics) were placed into liquidation.

The Slough Observer alleged that Grant had been a drug dealer, and had "corrupted thousands of children"[6] during his time in Northern Cyprus.

An article in The Independent claims that grant is "thought to have been the victim of a contract killing in 1991," though no evidence is provided to substantiate this rumor.[2] Damaged, a 2023 documentary about Grant, floats the theory that he is still alive.

Titles marked "rejected" were refused classification by the British censor and therefore banned. Dates refer to the year of distribution, rather than the film's actual production dates.

• David Grant at IMDb