Last days of disco

I like the comedies of Whit Stillman, a sort-of trilogy of witty, talky movies: Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and Last Days of Disco (1998) (Metacritic reviews here).

I am fairly new to Netflix, and thought I would re-watch these. The first two - no problem. But Last Days is not there; it doesn't just come up as having unknown availability, it's just a movie that does not exist. I had wondered why.

Last night (home from a long night at the disco) I stumbled on this interview from August 2008 by Karina Longworth with Stillman, and the mystery is solved, as well as giving a lesson in ownership of cultural properties:

Karina: I was reading the diary that you wrote for Slate when Last Days of Disco came out…

Whit: [laughs] That is some real digging.

Karina: Well, there is a lot of interesting stuff in it. But, you said something about how you were getting kicked out of your apartment and that the only things that you owned were the films’ negatives and copyrights, except you weren’t so sure that Warner Bros agreed with you on that.

Whit: Yeah.

Karina: Does that have anything to do with why there is no Last Days of Disco DVD in print?

Whit: Yes. Last Days of Disco - there should be a Criterion edition. But, that contract has not been - I think Criterion is negotiating with one of the studios to bring it out. But, those negotiations are taking a very long time.

It is available in a cheap edition if people can play Region Two. It’s great what you can find on the Internet––here is a DVD review out of England of the French edition of Last Days of Disco. But, you can only find it if you go to Amazon.fr and put in the French title, which is Les Derniers Jours du Disco. If you put in “The Last Days of Disco” at Amazon.fr, they just give you the US edition with the US price, which is astronomical.

If you get the French edition, it essentially is the film. You can just turn off the French subtitles––unless you want to watch the French dubbed version. I think, it is $20 or something.

Karina: Well, that is good news. Are the music rights one of the issues there?

Whit: No, there are no rights at all. It is just that the film was owned. Castle Rock was then having the film financed by PolyGram and Warner and either PolyGram would take international or North America. Warner would take the other one.

In our case, Warner took international and PolyGram took domestic. So, it went out through Gramercy. Then, when PolyGram went down, the rights… It was issued by PolyGram video right away. Then, they had some problem with their licenses. It was going from laserdisc to DVD.

It came out on DVD, I guess in a small edition in ‘99 I believe, through PolyGram Video. A studio has the rights now, I think it is Universal. But, maybe it has been shifted over to MGM or something or Sony.

So, it has been in an enormous film library, where they have tons of films to exploit. It has not been a priority perhaps because it’s a split rights thing, where it is not all their money. So, now theoretically Criterion is trying to license it and it will come out on a good Criterion edition.

I hope it works out - the film has a nice performance by Chloë Sevigny, and Robert Sean Leonard (of the TV show House) makes a truly awe-inspiring jerk.

UPDATE: There are Whit Stillman fans at the Indianapolis Museum of Art...thanks for reading.