G.T.O. Films Ltd

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A look at some of the numerous meetings that we undertook in order to issue 8mm films to our customers.

Contracts & Rights Chapter 35

G.T.O. Films Ltd and Arcade Records had been founded by Laurence Myers in the early 1970s. I have no memory of where their offices were located, but an appointment was made and after some research by our young contact, it seemed that they had only a handful of films on their roster that included 8 or 16mm rights. Two of them were ‘Phantasm’ and ‘Elvis’ both having had successful theatrical releases. There was nothing else on offer and Derek and I could see that they weren’t very interested in doing a deal for just two titles. However their office walls were plastered in ‘Arcade’ record album sleeves and he kept on showing us the soundtrack album from ‘Elvis’ and quite innocently I mentioned that we could put an advert on the reverse of our extract from ‘Elvis’, and the same for ‘Phantasm’…..and the deal was done!    

…. to be continued.  


Comments

2 responses to “G.T.O. Films Ltd”

  1. Andy Croucher

    I have the two Arcade Albums and also the Elvis The Movie Super 8. Didn’t know at the time that they and Derann were so closely linked.

  2. Tom Photiou

    We did have both of these GTO titles from Derann but decades later they did suffer badly with fade. A good title from GTO films that would have made a good 400ft edit was Scum with Ray Winston. The film was made more like a docu-drama so would have been very easy to edit down to the 400ft version but sadly these were the only two titles released via Derann.
    Iver super 8 films did release The Groove Tube on 8mm as a double album, (fits fine onto a 600ft reel) which was a GTO released film.

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