At a time when Hollywood studios are run by teams of faceless accountants whose idea of a bright idea is to drag bloated multi-millionaires in front of the cameras for Lethal Weapon 15 - This Time They're Hairdressers!, it's hard to imagine a studio head who backed his own judgement and made films that were more than just cheap excuses to sell popcorn. Meet Kenneth Hyman.

Hman was the man who gave Sam Peckinpah the money to make The Wild Bunch at a time when the rest of Hollywood considered him an incorrigible drunk and wouldn't have trusted him to direct traffic. On location in Mexico, Peckinpah used up his entire ration of blank ammunition during the first day's shoot. He wired to LA asking for more. The money men were unwilling to help but Hyman, the studio head, backed him all the way: Sam got his bullets.

Gothic horror

Hyman's family ran Seven Arts: he came over to England in the late 1950s when the company helped finance Hammer's superlative run of gothic horror films, such as The Curse of Frankenstein and Dracula. Ken bought the rights to Conan Doyle's The Hound of The Baskervilles and took it to Hammer in 1958 where he produced it with Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee playing a good guy for a change.

Hyman's ability to turn a book into a box-office smash was confirmed four years later when he read Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? The initial response of Seven Arts' New York office was "Who wants to make a movie about two old broads?" Ken did. When he ran into director Robert Aldrich who was touting a script based on the book, he offered to resign if Seven Arts refused to make the picture. It went into production, became a worldwide smash and gave Joan Crawford and Bette Davis whole new careers.

Dr Yes

Casting well-known faces against type worked well for Hyman's next production, The Hill, made in 1965. The search was on for the key actor and the studio was pushing for all kinds of unlikely names: "Believe it or not," says Hyman, "they had a list that included Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, Kirk Douglas - to play a British sergeant-major. It was lunacy." Luckily, Ken went to see Dr No and thought Sean Connery would be perfect for the role. He told the LA people he'd already signed Connery up - at the time, he didn't even have the actor's agent's address - and then shot the entire film in black-and-white and without a music soundtrack, having assured the studio that the whole thing would be in glorious Technicolor and dripping with strings. By the time the Hollywood office saw the finished picture, it was too late to argue: the film stands as one of the best depictions of the gritty side of army life ever put onto celluloid.

Hyman made his next picture (The Dirty Dozen) as an independent, drawing on the army background he shared with its stars. There's a short making-of documentary filmed which features the cast swanning up and down the Kings Road at the height of Swinging London and includes the commentary: "Six months ago, producer Kenneth Hyman gave instructions to his staff: build a large chateau with boathouse and bomb shelters, include a river, landscapes and sentry posts. We'll use it for 25 nights and then blow it up."

Golden age

After te success of The Dirty Dozen, Seven Arts bought Warner Brothers: Hyman went to California as studio head. With hindsight, his time there begins to look like a golden age: Steve McQueen's Bullitt, George Lucas' first film THX1138, not to mention Girl On A Motorcycle, Marianne Faithfull's bizarre homage to leather and chrome.

One of Hyman's first acts on arriving was to ask for Peckinpah's number. The two bonded over beers and Sam told Ken he had a two-page treatment called The Wild Bunch. Hyman found the money and a producer and Sam's career was back on track. Peckinpah acknowledged Hyman's role in a 1969 interview: "[The Wild Bunch] came about through the courage and wisdom of one man: Kenny Hyman. He's that sort of person, if he digs you, the studio's yours."

You won't find Hyman's name on many of these films, but he was never too bothered about that - "As the old saying goes, you take screen credit, I'll take bank credit..."