David Grant (producer)

David Hamilton Grant (born Willis Andrew Holt; 1939–1991) was an English porn producer, and suspected child pornographer during the late 1960s and 1970s.

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.

Originally a photographer, Grant 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, distributed foreign sex films through his "Oppidan" company, and produced his own featurette length British sex comedies (Girls Come First, The Office Party, Under the Bed) that were also filmed in hardcore versions for overseas release.

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 the Grant produced ‘Just One More Time’ was released as the support feature to a 1977 re-issue of Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (1974), and the Grant directed ‘Sensations’ starring Cosey Fanni Tutti and Genesis P-Orridge was the support feature to Pussy Talk (1975). 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 Porn’, or the ‘King of Sexploitation’, people who worked with him however would come to nickname the bearded, diminutive Grant ‘The Poison Dwarf’ or 'The Gnome'. Grant enjoyed giving himself Hitchcock cameos in his own films, as well as personally supervising the hardcore scenes for his films.

During the making of The Office Party, Grant got into a furious 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. As well as his sex films Grant also produced X-rated cartoons like Sinderella (1972) which ends with the ugly sisters being gang raped by the three bears, 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 1978 it was announced Grant’s company would produce Love is Beautiful, a British sex film that was to have been directed by Gerard Damiano and was to star Harry Reems, Mary Millington and Annette Poussin. The film was never made.

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