Captain W. E. Fairbairn

Rick Owens lives and practices martial arts in Canberra, Australia. In the early 1970s, Owens started judo at age 13. In his 20s he became interested in military combatives, and the legacy of W.E. Fairbairn and E.A. Sykes in particular, which was still present in the close-combat methods taught in the Australian Army at that time. Around 2008 a reference in an article by United Kingdom researcher Phil Mathews to Fairbairn's Gutter Fighting films prompted him to search for these invaluable historical artifacts. Wanting to find the films, Owens emailed Mathews, who provided some help and background on the failed efforts of others to find copies of the films. It sounded like everyone who was after the films was like Owens: interested in combatives and related history. Owens thought the problem might be that none of the searchers had the research skills required for the task, so he did some digging and hired a U.S.-based specialist researcher to continue the hunt. Eventually in 2011, the researcher came up with a contact who found the two films, The Fighting Knife and Unarmed, in a government archive.

The text for the subtitles used on the Gutter Fighting DVD comes from the printed scripts for The Fighting Knife and Unarmed. These scripts are on file at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The script for The Fighting Knife is dated 11 February 1944; the script used for Unarmed is the second revision dated 25 March 1944. (The script for the third film in the Gutter Fighting series, titled Shooting to Live and dated 9 May 1944, is also on file at NARA; however, the process that uncovered the two films reproduced on the Gutter Fighting DVD failed to locate the Shooting to Live footage.)