The Heartbreak Kid, Elaine May’s classic anti-rom-com, turns 50 this year. But unlike The Godfather, also celebrating its golden anniversary, there are limited opportunities to see it. The Heartbreak Kid hasn’t been afforded a restoration, nor was it rereleased in theaters. It is not available to stream. Your best bet is to find a now out-of-print VHS or DVD edition of the film—currently going for $57 and $170, respectively, on Amazon.
For all practical purposes, The Heartbreak Kid is missing. It is one of many contemporary films that, to the surprise and distress of their makers, have fallen into distribution limbos. “All of us involved in The Heartbreak Kid have been hoping it would be rereleased,” Jeannie Berlin, Oscar nominated for her hilarious and heartbreaking performance as Lila—the newlywed dumped by her husband on their honeymoon—tells Vanity Fair in an email. “There are many practices, theories, and ways of making decisions in this business that make no sense to me.”
For The Heartbreak Kid, as well as films like I Shot Andy Warhol, the documentary The Weavers: Wasn’t That a Time, Laurie Anderson’s concert film Home of the Brave, and many more, a happy ending may be on the horizon. Missing Movies, a consortium of film artists and professionals, has set itself up as an advocacy group on behalf of directors looking to regain the rights to their films. It also hopes to educate the public about the vagaries of film distribution.
“So many people say, ‘You can get anything with the internet,” notes Amy Heller, a founding board member of Missing Movies along with her husband, Dennis Doros. “We’re talking about an industry that’s owned by a few extraordinarily large organizations. That also makes for less diversity and flexibility [in what is available].”
Adds Doros, “The subscription model depends on new product. That’s where the money is. They focus on creating new content.”
Officially launched last February, Missing Movies began in large part about four years ago. That’s when Ira Deutchman asked director Nancy Savoca to screen her 1993 independent film, Household Saints, at Columbia University, where Deutchman has taught for 35 years.
“The university put together a retrospective to my career,” he says. “One of the films I advocated for was Household Saints, which I was involved with as an executive producer and co-financier when I was running Fine Line Features. I started calling around to find out whether it was available to screen. Low and behold, not only was it not available, but it was a mystery who controlled the rights and where the materials were. It was a mess.”
No one was more surprised than Savoca and her husband and producing partner, Richard Guay. Household Saints was one of 1993’s best-reviewed films and earned an Independent Spirit Award for best supporting female actor (Lili Taylor). “The 1990s was a wonderful era,” Savoca says. “All these companies wanted content to put out on home video. A lot of wonderful filmmakers had opportunities to do really interesting work. So, we were thinking, Get to the next film.” Little thought was given to previously released works.
Deutchman’s request was a wake-up call. Household Saints, as well as the Emmy-nominated anthology *If These Walls Could Talk—*which Savoca cowrote and directed two segments of—are unavailable for streaming. “I turned to Richard and said, ‘I’m going to disappear,’” she says.
There are many reasons why a film may go missing, ranging from clearing prohibitively expensive music rights to the producing entities and rights holders going out of business and studio indifference. The issue with Household Saints, says Deutchman, was that New Line’s rights and Columbia TriStar Home Video’s rights had expired. “Nancy, Richard, myself, and Sue Bodine, their lawyer, started investigating to whom the rights had reverted. We came up with a television production company that no longer existed, nor was there any successor company. That added further to the mystery.”
But it’s all good, according to Deutchman: The rights to Household Saints have been cleared, and the film is going to be restored and rereleased. “But that whole adventure got all of us thinking that there are numerous films that fall into this trap, and the filmmakers are not even aware of the fact that this trap exists,” Deutchman says. Other artists have emerged with similar tales.
In 2020, Savoca and Guay put together a Zoom panel for the Directors Guild of America called “The Unstreamables.” Deutchman participated, as did Heller. She and Doros are the founders of Milestone Films, a distribution company that specializes in facilitating the release of overlooked films, specifically those created by and about marginalized communities. (The company motto: “We like to fuck with the canon.”)
“One of the things that came up was that people didn’t really know that much about archives, and had never had a distributor help them,” Doros says. “I thought, This is part of what we do; clearing rights, getting the material to archives, making sure they are properly preserved. After the DGA panel, the feeling was, Let’s not stop; let’s see what we can do with it.”
“We’re not a rescue squad,” Heller says. “We are more interested in empowering artists and helping them to rescue their own projects. We’re hoping to act as pro bono legal and how-to advisers: If your film is not available, how do you begin? Who should you talk to? How do you find out what’s happening? Are your film elements properly preserved?”
In some cases, of course, the necessity of preservation is in the eye of the beholder. What of cultural curiosities that barely made a dent on the populace when first released? A recent episode on director Joe Dante’s Trailers From Hell website featured screenwriter and Emmy-winning producer Larry Karaszewski’s commentary on Last Foxtrot in Burbank, an actual 1973 sex comedy that spoofs Last Tango in Paris. The film, Karaszewski reports, has vanished; the trailer is thought to be the only one in existence. No big loss, right?
Maybe not. Except, as he points out, the film was a launching pad for some significant talent. John Carpenter, who five years later would direct Halloween, was one of the editors. Co-screenwriter Louis Garfinkle was a future Oscar nominee as a cowriter on The Deer Hunter. That, says Karaszewski, is why “I shed a tear any time a movie disappears from the planet.”
“Every movie is important,” Savoca agrees. “If you judge a movie by the awards it won or how much money it made at the box office, you might be missing out on some great films. When you watch a movie, it usually has a lot of meaning for you if you saw it at a certain part of your life. That’s a part of you. We make those movies so they can become a part of your experience.”
Mira Nair’s story points to what is possible. A few years ago, the celebrated director of Monsoon Wedding realized she couldn’t find a copy of one of her earliest films, Mississippi Masala, as its 30th anniversary approached. The 1991 interracial love story starring Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury—Washington’s only film as a romantic-drama lead—received rapturous reviews and was a winner on the film festival circuit.
“This film festival in England wanted it for their festival [in summer 2020],” Nair says. “There was no print I could find anywhere. I tracked it down to SESAC, a music company in Nashville. By some trick of legal history, it inherited this one film. They very kindly lent me the print to send to the festival. It turned out that SESAC’s president, John Josephson, was a fan of my films. He was completely passionate. Whatever the reason, they said they would be happy to return the rights back to my company. We made this process happen in over a year.”
This opened the door for Mississippi Masala to be restored and released on DVD as part of the Criterion Collection. Nair—who pursued those rights prior to and independent of her association with Missing Movies—is now a Missing Movies advocate. “I became part of that group and am doing whatever I can to share my story, however fairy-tale it might sound,” she says. “There was a lot of perspiration, but I was lucky to find cinema angels on the other side.”
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Cinematic Treasures Are Disappearing. That’s Where Missing Movies Comes In - Vanity Fair
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