#181
Post
by MichaelB » Thu Sep 01, 2016 7:08 pm
That's not actually true - in the vast majority of cases you license the film first and foremost. Most of the time that contract will also include delivery of a master, but it's not unknown for the master to be licensed separately - for instance, Arrow has licensed more than one Criterion restoration (as part of a separate agreement with Criterion), and indeed vice versa (in the case of Time Bandits). But unless they had the underlying territorial rights to the film tied up as well, they'd be taking an expensive and pretty pointless gamble.
Things get trickier if the film's copyright status is in a grey area - which applies to a great many films produced by the old Soviet Union, pre-1945 Germany and elsewhere. The Man with a Movie Camera is genuinely in the public domain, so anybody can put out their own release - and of course this is why the BFI and Eureka versions were sourced from different masters, since Eureka had the exclusive UK rights to the Lobster restoration. As for more recent Soviet titles like the Tarkovsky films, I don't know the precise contractual ins and outs, but they may be in a very similar situation, in which case Criterion would be able to put out their own rival versions perfectly legally.
This is one of the reasons why handling films from former Communist countries can be such a royal pain - not least because different organisations sometimes lay claim to the same title. I'd better not name the titles and labels concerned, but there was a rather amusing situation a few years ago whereby one UK label was offered a highly sought-after title by a sales agent that they regularly dealt with. They were very keen, but slightly concerned that the title was already in print in the UK on another label. Don't worry, said the sales agent, they 100% definitely don't have the rights, and can't touch you legally. But the first label was still unsure, because assurances like that sometimes aren't worth the paper they're written on (or the email they're transmitted in) - but in the end they went ahead and had a gratifying success with the film in question.
A few months later, entirely coincidentally, I chatted to someone from the other label, and discovered that as soon as they heard that the first label had acquired this title, their immediate reaction was to immediately take their edition OOP, because they knew full well that they'd lost the rights ages ago and that even though the film was from a country notorious for complicated copyright tangles they'd never be able to successfully claim ownership. In other words, both labels were afraid that they might be sued by the other - which of course was wildly unlikely as neither of them could afford to go to court.