With new bosses about to sign a contract, the Americans are over here once again.

PAUL WELSH looks at the impact U.S. ownership has had on the studios in the past.

It looks like the Yanks are coming back to Elstree Studios, so lock up your daughters. The public presentation by Pacifica Ventures of its plans for the facility, if it signs on the dotted line, sound very exciting and could be the start of a new era.

In fact, our colonial cousins are no strangers to the studios, as it has been in American hands on four previous occasions to a lesser or greater degree.

In the 1920s it was an American, JD Williams, who helped finance the building of the studios.

In the 1940s and for the next 20-plus years, Warner Brothers had a sizeable stake in Elstree, and for a couple of years in the 1970s MGM contributed to the running costs after it had closed its own facility.

Then, of course, Cannon bought the studios in 1986, and that two-year saga would be a chapter in itself.

Sadly, the facility is 12 acres smaller than in its heyday, so it is very unlikely that the sheer volume of production once achieved can be matched.

Let's turn the clock back 50 years, to Elstree Studios in 1957, when the dream factory turned out 18 feature films, three television pilots and 38 episodes of the television series Martin Kane.

It was fully-staffed with several hundred permanent jobs and apprenticeship schemes in the trade departments.

Such staffing levels would be impossible today and, in fact, died out in the early 1970s when studios went four fall' and people were employed on a freelance basis.

Are you wondering what those 18 films were and whether you would remember any of them?

Well I guess the only two most readers might recall are Indiscreet, which brought Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman to Borehamwood, and Ice Cold In Alex, with John Mills.

Frankie Vaughan represented the teenage idol market with Wonderful Things and Those Dangerous Years.

Hollywood was represented by a young Sidney Poiter in The Hawk, John Derek, later married to Bo Derek, in High Hell, and The Key brought Sophia Loren and William Holden.

I was always a fan of Bill Holden, but unfortunately he was an alcoholic and died a sad death alone in his apartment. While drunk he tripped over a carpet and hit his head on a table. The coroner decided he must have bled heavily from the wound for quite a few minutes but was too confused to phone for help and his body was discovered several days later.

Elstree's own star, Richard Todd, clocked up two films with the Doug Fairbanks-produced Chase a Crooked Shadow and The Naked Earth.

There were three cheap comedies to make up the bottom half of a double bill in The Lady Mislaid, with Phyllis Calvert, Small Hotel, with Gordon Harker and a young Billie Whitelaw, and She Didn't Say No, which was about a woman with six children.

Law and Disorder brought Michael Redgrave and John Le Mesurier, who later became a household name as Sergeant Wilson in Dad's Army.

John later commented: "I never liked Elstree. It reminded me of a prison with all those security guards and even the actors having to clock in."

World War Two gave the plots to The Traitor, with that old barnstormer Donald Wolfit, and The Silent Enemy, starring Laurence Harvey as Buster Crabb, the real-life navy diver who later went missing amongst headlines of the day.

George Baker took to a horse for The Moonraker, and youngsters Andrew Ray and Janet Munro starred in The Young and The Guilty.

The most honoured Elstree movie of the year was Woman In a Dressing Gown, which screenwriter Ted Willis, later famous for Dixon of Dock Green, told me held mixed memories for him.

He said: "They made the film for about £95,000 and I was on a share of the profits. It went on to win 13 awards around the world and take about £1million at the box office.

"However, the accountants at Elstree took several years to pay me my percentage which they somehow worked out to be £1,000."

Well, those were the days, and it was the end of an era. We now wait to see what the future holds, especially as Pacifica Ventures seems keen to bring back more film work to Elstree to add to its fantastic history.