Gerry O'Hara is a true original and, if he never really got the chance to definitively climb out of the ranks of assistant directors into the realm of full-fledged feature directors, he nevertheless managed to carve out a solid career in the cinema working with such luminaries as Sir Laurence Olivier, Ronald Neame, Michael Powell, Sir Carol Reed, Anatole Litvak, Ken Annakin, Terence Fisher, Sidney Box, Otto Preminger and many more in his early years, before striking out on his own with several low-budget sixties British films — the most memorable of which is The Pleasure Girls (UK, 1963), recently rereleased as part of the BFI's “Flipside” series of lesser-known films that nevertheless deserve attention. Despite its unfortunate title, The Pleasure Girls is, in reality, a deeply moving feminist document of ‘60s London, shot in a real apartment building as four young women come to London to make their way in the world.

Throughout his career, O'Hara has had to do a number of projects he didn't really want to do, but he also got a chance to work with some of the greatest talents in the history of the cinema and is frank about his past, including the biggest mistake of his career: walking off Lawrence of Arabia (dir. David Lean, UK, 1962) as first assistant director during early preproduction, after which he alleges that Columbia Pictures effectively blacklisted O'Hara within the industry as “unreliable.”