I sure am glad that this film is now finally available on DVD but it had disappeard from public view for nearly 30 years prior to its 2001 DVD release. Can anyone shed some light on why Metro withdrew it from circulation for so many years?
shareI think it had to do with a disagreement over who held the rights. I remember reading that Irving Berlin's estate was tangled up in it somehow.
shareAccording to David Shipman's The Story of Cinema (1982), Berlin held the rights but was smarting from the cancellation of another one of his projects. Supposedly that is why there is no scene from the movie in That's Entertainment, though Berlin relented and allowed a scene to be used in That's Entertainment Part 2.
shareBerlin could be notoriously difficult to deal with - I believe his song catalog is now controlled by The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization. A similar rights issue kept Berlin's CALL ME MADAM unseen for many years as well, until its DVD release in 2004.
"I don't use a pen: I write with a goose quill dipped in venom!"---W. Lydecker
MGM cancelled the Irving Berlin/Arthur Freed project "Say It With Music" around this time (very late 60's to early 70's); they treated both Freed and Berlin very poorly. See the last chapter of Hugh Fordin's book on the Freed unit at MGM.
shareMost likely Berlin had in his original contract that ownership of the film would revert to him after x number of years, seemingly 23 years in this case. This sort of a deal was quite common in contracts for major authors/playwrights when studios signed them for the film rights, the studios obviously believing there wouldn't be much of a market for the films anyway after that length of time. Then television came along and they found out they were mistaken and this type of contract seems to have disappeared by the early 1950's. A number of great movies of the 1930's, 1940's, and very early 1950's are now in "limbo" due to that type of contract, owned by author estates that may not know what to do with them.
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