Gavrik Losey and British Film Production from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s

The 'Gavrik Losey and British Film Production in the 1970s' research project (2006-2008) was funded by an AHRC grant. Professor Steve Neale was the principal applicant. Dr Paul Newland was employed as a post-doctoral research associate on the project for two years. Dr Newland catalogued Losey’s extensive archive on the CALM system for the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

Gavrik Losey was born in New York. He moved to England in 1956, and entered the British film industry in 1959. He trained first as a film editor, then as a cameraman, and finally as an assistant director. By the late 1960s Gavrik had moved into production management. He was to work on more than twenty films in Britain in this capacity. In 1968 he became in-house production supervisor for Woodfall Films. During the early 1970s Gavrik joined David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson at Goodtimes Films as an associate producer, and has also worked as a freelance producer.

Dr Newland interviewed Gavrik Losey, Harold Pinter, Lord Puttnam, Waris Hussein and Franco Rosso. These interviews were transcribed, and are held by the Bill Douglas Cinema Museum.

As part of this project, a conference on British cinema in the 1970s was held at the Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter in July 2007. Papers from this conference were published in a collection edited by Dr Newland: Don’t Look Now? British Cinema in the 1970s (Intellect, 2010). He also published other research pertaining to the project as a series of articles. His monograph, British Films of the 1970s, was published by Manchester University Press in 2013.