The film originally premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 28th, 1997, but wasn't given complete American distribution until January 15th 1999. Did Schrader have so much re-editing to do that he had to wait almost 18 months to show it to the public?
The theater's too deep for me. I prefer bicycling.
It takes a while to sell a film to a distributor. The deal making process can take quite a while and, it may be, that this film was hard to sell to a distributor. I'd have to say that a fair majority of viewers don't *get* the film and it wouldn't surprise me if potential buyers did not want to take a chance on this type of film making.
shareNone of the studios wanted the movie, Schrader had to seriously wheel and deal just to get it made in the first place, for next to nothing. And then getting a distribution deal was like a whole secondary project. I had no idea about any of that until years later, I was fortunate that I happened to work at a big studio in those days and a co-worker loaned me a tape saying it was the best movie they'd seen in years. That had to be 1997 because I remember that person was gone before the end of that year. I had no idea it wasn't in theaters yet at the time. People I worked with were constantly passing around Academy screener copies, I assumed it was one of those. I remember it had the typical annoying "THIS FILM IS THE PROPERTY OF [studio name]" notification that popped up every couple of minutes.
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