When Are You Coming to DVD?!

Not all of us can just up and buy a whole hundred-dollar box set just to see a documentary that follows the life and career of film director Elia Kazan and how he influenced you, Marty!

Oooohhh, socialism…So dangerous we can’t even hear the guy talk.

Nominated for Best Film at the Berlin Film Festival, nominated for 2 Independent Spirit Awards, but I can’t see it, because it’s not even on DVD.

Maybe in a time when anti-union, a movie about a martyred union activist is not in high demand. Even though it won 2 Emmys, 3 Golden Globes and a SAG award.

A documentary on the director’s cousin doesn’t exactly jump at distributors, granted, but when that director is Jonathan Demme, not releasing a DVD is letting a great modern filmmaker’s flexography fade away.

Almodovar’s early work has been released on DVD in region 2, but is not available on DVD in America.

What a shock, branded with an NC-17 rating for its sexual content. The MPAA and theater chains also refused to release posters or advertise a film called "Whore", so for this purpose the film was re-titled "If You Can't Say It, Just See It". Russell protested his film being given such a rating when Pretty Woman got an R, on the grounds that his film showed the real hardships of being a prostitute, and the other glorified it. Needless to say Pretty Woman totally eclipsed it, permanently it seems.

Due in some measure to an uncompromising European optic and a refusal to entertain for its own sake, maestro Fellini’s last film became his first never to find a North American distributor.

On VHS in the 1990s, there was both the original version and the heavily cut R-rated version. On DVD there’s NOTHING.

Duvall spent five years on the film and many of the cast, including Angelo, did not read English. San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles commercial screenings were documented, with a Cinemax cable presentation in 1985. That’s about it.

Played for a short time in several American cities to practically unanimous negative reviews, where it was reviewed at all, then suddenly yanked from distribution by Universal. One of them commented unofficially that while it couldn’t be confirmed that the film was eradicated due to political pressure, distributors got that it was intolerable to supporters of Israel. Costa-Gavras himself personally promoted the film in the New York Times at a cost of $50,000 after Universal declined to. They even banned him the use of advertisements.

A re-edited version of the film called Sword of the Ninja was created for television, probably making it terrible, but no DVD!

Like Almodovar’s High Heels, it’s available in Region 2 but not here.

"It hurts to strike out on your last picture," said Billy Wilder about this forgotten Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau vehicle.

LAPD Chief Daryl Gates wrote a letter demanding the film not be shown again in L.A. Spheeris herself claimed to have shoplifted a VHS copy of her film from a Walmart as a paean to the spirit of it.

This ensemble comedy was made by Lion’s Gate, which was actually Robert Altman's company. It was his last film for 20th Century Fox, which, being Fox, shelved it for over two years. Still, it showed at festivals and ran in L.A. briefly. It was broadcast on TV over the years…but has never been issued on DVD…or even home video.

Again, Almodovar available in Region 2. The U.K even issued it as part of a collection. But the film has not been released on DVD in America.

Region 2, no Region 1.

The final film the great Otto Preminger helmed in his 50-year career, finance was such a plague on the project the editor even held the print hostage.

"Saint Jack and They All Laughed were two of my best films,” said Peter Bogdanovich, “but never received the kind of distribution they should have," the film having been banned in the place where it was shot in the first place.

It had its world premiere at Cannes in 1978 as part of a retrospective of Wilder's work. After that, it was released in only a handful of select American and European theaters with little flourish, inducing an offended Wilder to declare that the studio spent about six hundred bucks on marketing.

After allegedly a single showings of the original 232-minute version on European television, Dylan withdrew the film from distribution. Copies, made from recordings of that very TV broadcast, circulate among collectors, but the only parts of the movie to be released for consumers are the excerpts found on the bonus DVD of one of Dylan’s live albums.

Oddly, the first film made by John G. Avildsen after he won Best Director for Rocky is unavailable and nobody’s ever even heard of it.

Opened commercially in only one cinema at the time. You would think the debut film of the director of some of the most seen action thrillers of the past twenty years would get at least a bare-bones DVD release.

Kramer’s first stab at a thriller opened to negative reviews and lasted only two to three weeks in theaters.