On Remember My Name:yoloswegmaster wrote: ↑Wed Nov 20, 2024 5:24 amAlan Rudolph revealed that Choose Me will be getting a Criterion release in this interview:
Criterion picked up "Choose Me"—40 years later, but I'll take it. That is my first film with them, and they do really good work. We have retimed that, and man is that good. They told me they wanted "Remember My Name" but that there is some kind of legal thing involving the music. Now, everyone involved with the music is dead, and the music wasn't pop music—it was Alberta Hunter and her blues tunes. It is probably just some lawyer who got lazy and didn't do something, but that has stopped it from anybody who has tried to pursue it. Nobody will tell me what the issue is—they just say it is a legal thing.
"1978 legal documents I have read—the contract for Alberta Hunter’s music for the film, from the Robert Altman papers in the Special Collections at the University of Michigan—suggest that the owners of the film had the rights to her music as far as theatrical exhibition and television broadcast went. But the royalties due to Hunter for exhibiting her music in the film in what are in the contract called “Video Records”—i.e., physical home video formats (which in 1978 were not yet standardized)—would have to be renegotiated at a later date, as the language in the contract makes clear. There is no document in these archives to indicate those rights to exhibiting Hunter’s music on home video editions of the film were ever worked out."
"according to Rudolph, only one known 35mm print still exists"
https://www.perisphere.org/2024/06/21/i ... name-1978/
"the contractual woes worsened with the death of Alberta Hunter, who did not leave behind a will, causing her publishing rights to go in limbo for a long time. Even today, despite both the studio and the record company being under the same corporate parent, Sony Pictures has not been able to come to terms with Sony Music for re-clearing Hunter’s tracks, and while the individual songs can be found for licensed streaming on YouTube, the soundtrack album has never been reissued on LP or CD. "
https://thenewbev.com/blog/2022/06/remember-my-name/
