I shall not repeat my mistake. This time my creation shall have no will of his own, no fiendish intellect to oppose his master.

My dear Baron, the brain I have chosen for you is perfect. He shall obey like a trained dog. And he shall be my servant.

Scarecrow, you sum up Hammer not too wisely, though you hit all the points. Jimmy Carreras never looked at the company as anything but a cash cow, so there's your cynicism-- at the top. He invariably glad-handed and bartered along the path of least resistance. He didn't give a crap whether the company was making horror films or rubber bands, he just wanted it to support his lifestyle. "If you want Strauss waltzes, we'll make 'em," Christopher Lee quotes JC in an address to distributors.

When Tony Hinds left the company-- circa 1968-- there was no one there who really gave a flip about Gothic horror or suspense per se, certainly not the head of the company. If horror films were the only thing people wanted, he'd sell them to death. Assorted other indie producers came along on one-time bases to pitch what they felt were "Hammer" ideas, with varying results: the Carmilla stories, Vampire Circus, Countess Dracula, Kronos-- and Jimmy Carreras sold 'em to keep the company afloat until he could unload it.

Meantime Michael returned and, as he had before in the 50s and early 60s, tried to steer the company product into diversity-- but was continually stymied by the general perception of Hammer as a company that ONLY produced Gothic horror movies. Unlike Tony Hinds, he had no great love for Gothic horror; his tastes and goals were ecclectic: crime movies, musicals, jazz (he played the trumpet).

In retrospect, he was absolutely right and saw what was happening. "By that time our horror stories were passe, with chainsaw massacres and what not, we were doing fairy stories."

Jimmy Carreras got his wish and sold out the company-- from under his son's nose. He had an offer from the group that owned Tigon, which was in the same building. Tony Tenser and Michael Carreras happened to be taking a whizz in the bathroom at the same time and that's how Michael learned the old man was selling everything out. He quickly put together a consortium to offer a higher bid to keep the company in the family. When the old man returned from a pleasure cruise, Michael met him at the dock and told him he'd bought the company. The old man said, "I didn't even know you were interested." So much for father-son communications. The old man's only question was, "Can I keep the company limo?" Michael had not been aware there even WAS a company limo.

So Michael inherited the shell of a company which was cash-broke; essentially, all through its heydey, the profits flew south with his father. It owned very little of the successful films they'd made. Jimmy Carreras had gone back to the distributors and sold off most of Hammer's percentage of the profits.

He scrambled, talked writers into doing stuff on spec, attempted to do deals-- which were often scotched by old friends of his father, like financier Bernard Delfont, who reneged on his standing agreement to fund films (because his old pal Jimmy Carreras was no longer with the company.)

Never the entreprenuer his father was, more of a film fan and not an untalented writer/director himself, Michael at least kept the company doing SOMEthing in the 70s... at a time when American finance for foreign films had dried up completely.