Harry Alan Towers: A hand in a bawdy romp is yours for £2,000

Jason Nissé meets a film maker who's going public to raise £10m

Most film producers would not dream of asking Ken Livingstone and Michael Bloomberg – the Mayors of London and New York respectively – to appear in their films. Or getting Ken Russell to write an "erotic" treatment of the already bawdy story of Moll Flanders. Or shooting two movies, featuring West Wing star Martin Sheen as Ernest Hemingway, back to back in Cuba to save on production costs.

But then there aren't many film makers like Harry Alan Towers, Britain's octogenarian answer to Roger Corman and Ed Wood. Towers is the brains, if that is the word, behind such classics as Eugenie: The Story of Her Journey into Perversion (described by one reviewer as "a trip into sexual discovery you won't forget in a hurry"); Venus in Furs ("this acid-soaked Euro-sex time capsule is even weirder than it sounds"); and the Fu Manchu series, beloved of daytime TV during the school holidays. In fact, Towers has been involved in scores of film, TV and radio productions starring such luminaries as Orson Welles, Klaus Kinski and Oliver Reed.

And he is hungry for more. That is why he is attempting to raise £10m through an Enterprise Investment Scheme offering investors the chance to put their money into the seven or eight new projects Towers has on the go.

These include Hemingway, a film based on the later life of the author, who Towers claims Martin Sheen has agreed to play. To minimise the cost of shooting on location in Cuba, Towers wants to film another movie at the same time, an adventure caper called Weekend in Havana, in which Sheen might just be persuaded to make a cameo appearance as, well, Hemingway.

Another idea for the future Towers canon is West End Central, a cops drama about a New York policewoman brought over on secondment to the Metropolitan Police, in which he hopes Mayors Bloomberg and Livingstone will appear ("they don't seem averse to publicity"). Then there is The Baker Street Irregulars, a story of the little-known (according to Towers) connection between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Charlie Chaplin. And then there is a fresh version of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, even more bawdy than the original, with a script by Ken Russell, music by Handel and sets based on the art of William Hogarth.

All in all, Towers' production company, Towers of London, has more than 20 different projects on the go. Not all will be made, but Towers reckons the money raised from the EIS scheme will help finance seven or eight of them.

"Investors will never be in for more than 25 per cent of the money," says Towers. The rest will come from his tried-and-tested ways of raising finance, mainly pre-sales of rights and government subsidies. The EIS money will be what the film industry calls "gap finance", which is usually provided by banks or specialist financiers.

As Towers explains it, a small amount of the EIS money will be used for development work on the project, but if he cannot raise enough cash to cover at least 70 per cent of the costs from other sources, he will not put investors' money into it. "There are a lot of projects on the go," he says. "We'll see if this one is going to fly, and if it doesn't, we'll move on to the next one."

Investors are being asked for £2,000 each, with the offering sponsored by the accountants AGN Shipleys. And as a lure, Towers promises that, if they want, he will give them parts as extras in the films (though it is more likely you will get to appear in West End Central than in the orgy scenes in Moll Flanders). "We're looking for extras with that 'criminal' look," he jokes.

Anyone thinking of putting their money into the movies might reflect that opportunities to back a Towers venture do not come around that often. The last time was in the mid 1950s, when Towers and a chap called Lew Grade raised finance for a little venture called ATV. "I typed up the prospectus and took it round to Warburgs myself," Towers reminisces. The rest, of course, is history.