Milestone

[drdoros]

Dennis, 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?

If you don't mind, I'll write it with a little more explanation of our meeting with William Klein.

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

[hearthesilence]

Thanks Dennis! Sorry you had to go through that. I will say "I just want you to know, I am not offended by your office" is a perfect line for a Wes Anderson movie, as is the response "you grew up two blocks from here."

[pistolwink]

There's a certain species of American expat who needs to let it be known (to themselves among others) that they aren't like the rest by continuously and gratuitously putting down "Americans." See also Eugène Green (who even added the accent mark to make his name look more French).

[What A Disgrace]

Sessue Hayakawa's The Dragon Painter is being upgraded to Blu-ray, coming in September.

[drdoros]

The Dragon Painter is actually a new restoration by the San Francisco Silent Film Festival that adds about 7 more minutes of storyline. When the Eye Filmmuseum identified their fragment, their archivist realized that it had a lot more footage of Tsuro Aoki as Yumiko than our version did. In fact, it really fills in her story that was missing from the George Eastman Museum/Cinematheque Francaise restoration. It's a much better film now.

[andyli]

Special Features and Technical Specs:
NEW RESTORATION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF THE FILM
Two scores for The Dragon Painter – by Mas Koga and Makia Matsumura
Reconstructing The Dragon Painter (2024, 66 min.)
His Birthright (1918, 47 min., starring Sessue Hayakawa)
The Man Beneath (1919, 66 min., starring Sessue Hayakawa)
Illustrated booklet
Optional Dutch, French, German and Spanish subtitles

[Saturnome]

An hour long documentary on reconstructing the film? I'm in

[drdoros]

https://www.theguardian.com/film/articl ... mpowerment

Alma’s Rainbow review – early 90s coming-of-ager is gem of black female empowerment
Pioneering director Ayoka Chenzira gives voice to the inner lives of women at a time when they were mostly ignored, making this film a rare gift to treasure

Cath Clarke
Tue 30 Jul 2024 02.00 EDT
Ayoka Chenzira is a pioneering black director whose films have been finding a new audience with younger generations as she enters her 70s. Her 1994 feature debut Alma’s Rainbow has now been restored and rereleased; it is a coming-of-age movie that is funny and warm, if a little scrappy. It’s set in a Brooklyn townhouse owned by prim and proper Alma (Kim Weston-Moran), who runs a beauty parlour on the ground floor. In this all-women space, Chenzira luxuriates in her female characters. The fact that historically so few films have been made about the inner lives of black women gives Alma’s Rainbow a precious quality, and the feeling that it’s a gem to treasure.
Alma lives in the house with her teenage daughter Rainbow (played with charisma and spark by Victoria Gabrielle Platt). Rainbow has been skipping school to perform with a hip-hop street dance crew. In the neighbourhood, she’s known as a tomboy, but Rainbow is starting to think about boys. Her mum, Alma, is not impressed; she’s worked to the bone to make a success of the beauty parlour, to be an independent woman and build a better life for Rainbow. It makes her strict: “Keep your pants up and your dress down,” she instructs her daughter.

Then into their lives swans Alma’s sister Ruby (Mizan Kirby), a nightclub singer who’s been living in Paris. Ruby has the air of a superstar diva, though the truth is she can’t afford a taxi fare to the city. What follows is struggle for teenage Rainbow’s soul, all three women living under one roof.

And what a roof. The gorgeous set design, with a wood panelled bathroom and high ceilings, makes the house feel like a palace. (These days, actual royalty are among the few who can afford a place like this in Brooklyn.) The other glory of the film is the gorgeous costumes that add to the sense of putting these women on a pedestal, at a time the rest of the industry was mostly ignoring them.

Alma’s Rainbow is in UK cinemas from 3 August.

[drdoros]

VARIETY
Arrive on Disc in September
By Clayton Davis, Todd Gilchrist
The Dragon Painter

This 1919 drama, which was added to the National Film Registry in 2014, marks one of the earliest (and more than 100 years later, only remaining) films made in Hollywood featuring an all-Asian cast. Restored in 4K for the 2023 San Francisco Film Festival, this star vehicle for actor Sessue Hayakawa (who later appeared in “The Bridge on the River Kwai”) looks better than ever, and features two bonus features, “The Man Beneath” and “His Birthright.” It’s a must for fans of silent cinema and those seeking complex portraits of Asian characters in U.S. entertainment in that era.
https://variety.com/lists/best-4k-blura ... ases-2024/