If you don't mind, I'll write it with a little more explanation of our meeting with William Klein.hearthesilence wrote: ↑Sun May 26, 2024 1:19 amDennis, I saw you post a brief but hilarious story about your meeting with William Klein back when Milestone was hoping to license his films. Is it okay to repost here?
When Amy and I first started what was to become Milestone, we were working out of our one-room apartment on Amsterdam and West 77th Street. Just after we married in 1990, Amy's sister moved out of her 28th-floor apartment at the Columbia on 96th and Broadway, and we moved in. It was a small one-bedroom apartment in a great building with doormen, a swimming pool, a laundry room, and racketball courts. For a young married couple living in the city, this was a very lucky circumstance. As we couldn't afford an office for Milestone, we moved our office into our apartment -- my desk and the file cabinets in the living room and Amy's in the bedroom. Along with the Milestone films we restored (stored at a depot), we had some 16mm prints given to us by friends over the years. One was William Klein's Mister Freedom -- I believe Grove Press had distributed it. It turned out to be a very rare subtitled print and everybody wanted to rent it on a William Klein tour that year. (They borrowed our print for a small fee and they paid him rental.) So after a while, we wrote a letter to Mr. Klein (he was living in France) asking if he would be interested in Milestone restoring and distributing all of his works. (Where I was going to get that kind of money, I have no idea.) He responded by saying he was going to be in the US and would meet us.
Came the day, the doorman let Mr. Klein and his wife in, they took the elevator up, and rang our bell. We were very excited to meet the famous photographer and filmmaker. The first words out of Mr. Klein's mouth were, "I just want you to know, I am not offended by your office." Taken aback, I replied, "Well, I'm not sure what would offend you. You grew up two blocks from here." Clearly peeved by my response, he went on to explain that all the distributors he visited had fancy offices. Strangely enough, we took them out to lunch and all he and his wife could do was rail against the American capitalist system (fair enough) and how horrible all Americans were. (I didn't feel Amy and I were that horrible. And besides, he was still an American citizen who did okay by himself financially.) Anyway, it was still ironic that he felt our office was not fancy enough and the one thing they never talked about was distributing his films.
Needless to say, Amy and I were not elite enough for him to bother with. Meanwhile, Amy and I had already decided that he (and his wife) was too impossible and boorish for us to distribute his work. Since then, Criterion has done a very good job bringing out his feature films.
A caveat -- this was our one impression of them. We've learned since then that you shouldn't judge someone by their reputation or on one meeting. People have bad days. It certainly was a bad day!
Dennis
Milestone Films
