Seth Holt began as an assistant editor at Ealing in 1944, graduating to editor (1949), producer (1955) and director (1958).He returned to editing for Charles Crichton's The Battle of the Sexes (1960) and for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Probably his best known film is The Nanny (1965), with Bette Davis. He was working on Blood from ...
[on the music for "Nowhere To Go"]: It was a very early jazz score, and I think it must have been the first English one. It's my favorite score and I love it. I was given a free hand on that, thank goodness. We didn't have the usual composer in, with the lengths of film. I just sat the musicians down to play a piece and I gave them a brief that I wanted it to be cool yet dirty, and that it should have a kind of mocking quality about it. They did it beautifully. The musicians weren't bothered with where it had to go. I used it as a piece of editing and this seems to me a more satisfactory way of working than the traditional way of getting the composer to write stretches of music for specific scenes. I don't think you get the ironies right that way.
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Fact
1
A few days before the end of filming "Blood From the Mummy's Tomb" Seth held a dinner party after which he collapsed and died of a heart attack.
2
Sister actress Joan Holt.
3
He was described by Kenneth Tynan as "the best conversationalist in London".
4
Among the film projects Holt announced at various times were: "A Piece Of The Action", an original screenplay set in Las Vegas by David T. Chantler, which was to have been produced by Robert Aldrich; "Lady Into Fox", a version of the celebrated novel by David Garnett; "Gratz", an original screenplay by the novelist J.P. Donleavy; "The Anarchist", a biopic about Bakunin written by the literary critic Alfred Alvarez; a modern-dress version of Thomas Middleton's seventeenth-century play "Women, Beware Women"; and a thriller written by John Howlett to be called "The Velvet Well". None of these projects came to fruition.
5
In the early 1960s, Holt and actor Zero Mostel prepared a screenplay based on Agatha Christie's "The ABC Murders", planning a film in which Holt would direct Mostel in the role of Hercule Poirot. However, this was postponed, and when the film was eventually made (as "The Alphabet Murders", 1966), Frank Tashlin directed Tony Randall as Poirot, using a new script.
6
Began directing a farcical detective thriller, "Monsieur Lecoq", in 1967 and filmed for several weeks in mostly bad weather which caused considerable delays. Eventually, Columbia Pictures decided it would be cheaper to abandon the uncompleted film. John Le Mesurier, who had a small role, suggested in his autobiography that Holt had never recovered from this career blow.
7
Was slated to direct If.... (1968), but his physical and mental conditions had deteriorated to the point where Lindsay Anderson took over the picture.
$15 Million
