Michmutters

There was a time when being sent straight to video was about the most ignoble fate a would-be movie blockbuster could suffer: the vision of its makers confined to the dimensions of a television screen, never to be enjoyed by more than a sofa-full of people in one sitting. In the modern age, that fate became less tangible still: demoted to streaming, many good films even now float in a strange digital purgatory, sometimes connecting with sizeable audiences, yet rarely acquiring the tangible cultural currency of a hit in cinemas.

Still, such films-like Preyfor example, a surprisingly good predator prequel that skipped cinemas to premiere last week on Disney Plus – can at least be seen, and widely so, by those inclined. Right about now, the creative team behind Warner Bros’ addled comic-book film batgirl would gladly accept that outcome, after being dealt a far rarer and more egregious humiliation. Last week, it was announced that the near-complete film, having already racked up a budget of $90m, would not be released at all – not even on the Warner-owned streaming service HBO Max.

Also scrapped in the same announcement was the streaming-oriented animated Scooby-Doo prequel Scooby!: Holiday Haunting, though that unsurprisingly generated fewer headlines: in this age of superhero saturation, the industry was immediately abuzz with questions about how Batgirl’s wings could have been so brutally clipped. “Just how bad is it?” people asked, as reports of chilly test-screening reactions were dredged up. trade rag the wrapping reported that Warner’s new management team, led by CEO David Zaslav, felt the film “simply didn’t work”: once conceived for HBO Max, then lined up for theatrical distribution, it was allegedly felt that the Batman spin-off didn’t have the event-movie heft the studio required of its DC Comics properties.

Others suggested the issue wasn’t one of quality but cold hard numbers, which weren’t tracking well enough to justify the expense of marketing and releasing the film at any level: taking a tax write-down on batgirl and Scoob!: Holiday Haunting was, reported Variety, seen as the safest way to recover their costs. “We are incredibly grateful to the film-makers and their respective casts and hope to collaborate with everyone again in the near future,” read the studio’s bland statement, though you have to wonder why the talent involved would follow up on that tentative invitation.

Batgirl’s directors, Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah – a flashy Belgian-Moroccan duo who had a 2020 smash with bad boys for Lifeand whose far smaller-scale arthouse provocation Rebel premiered at Cannes in the spring – have been vocal in their blindsided dismay; the film’s Latina star, Leslie Grace, has limited herself to thanking her fans and collaborators. Industry watchdogs, meanwhile, wonder whether the studio’s accounting gambit is worth the ugly optics of junking a superhero film made and headed by people of color. El Arbi, Fallah and Grace can’t even count themselves in especially distinguished or plentiful company: the list of major films produced but never released in any capacity is not a long one.

It is not the first superhero property, however, to be barred from release. In 1993, Hollywood B-movie master Roger Corman helped produce a bargain-basement adaptation of another Marvel comic, Fantastic Four – a world apart from the vast, corporate Marvel machines filling multiplexes today. Made on a budget of $1m with a no-name cast, it was scheduled to premiere in 1994 and even had a trailer go out – before the studio abruptly canceled all plans to screen it publicly and confiscated the negatives. The late Marvel chief Stan Lee fed rumors that a release was never planned, and the film was made solely for the purposes of retaining the rights to the property; Corman has insisted otherwise. Albeit at a very different price point from batgirlit seems the film was also ultimately scuppered in the name of bookkeeping, but bootleg leaks readily available on YouTube indicate that no great art was lost in the process.

Sometimes, a perfectly seaworthy film is simply sunk by the individuals involved. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, many have had to change course because of toxic talent; some have given up entirely. gore, a Gore Vidal biopic shot in 2017 with Kevin Spacey in the lead, was in post-production when Netflix pulled the plug on the entire project. (Spacey’s role in the expensive Ridley Scott drama All the Money in the Worldon the other hand, was small enough to make a reshoot with a recast Christopher Plummer viable.)

Very occasionally, a film can be scotched even after it’s out in the world: Louis CK’s I Love You, Daddy, a dark comedy hinging on a teenage girl’s seduction by a sixtysomething film-maker, had premiered, to some warm reviews at the 2017 Toronto film festival, when the indie distributor the Orchard dropped it a week before its scheduled cinema release, as sexual misconduct allegations against its director-star emerged. Louis CK bought back the distribution rights. Rose Byrne, one of its stars, stated, “It’ll be a while before the film can be seen, and I think that’s right” – though such sentiments didn’t stop the film popping up on torrent sites.

Here in the UK, the ill-fated hippie hippie shake has become the ultimate cautionary tale for the vagaries of British film financing and production. Intended as a jaunty trip through the radical magazine publishing scene of the swinging 60s, the film was first announced in 1998 by Working Title Films – then in their post-Four Weddings and a Funeral glory days – before cycling through a procession of directors and additional writers; the cameras finally rolled in 2007 under director Beeban Kidron, with Cillian Murphy and Sienna Miller heading the cast. Nearly two years later, Kidron quit during post-production; a scheduled 2010 release date came and went before Working Title announced it would be shelved for ever. Reports vary among the few who have seen it as to how much of a misfire it is. But how the film, which was never going to be a blockbuster, could warrant such veil-drawing treatment remains an industry mystery.

If it’s hard to see on paper how hippie hippie shake could be unreleasable, the same can’t be said for The Day the Clown Cried, for decades regarded with morbid fascination as a kind of white whale of old-guard cinema. The European-produced 1972 Holocaust drama was written and directed by goofball comic Jerry Lewis, who also stars as a German circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp and charged with leading children into the gas chambers. Aghast testimonies from the few who saw a rough cut at the time suggest it was every bit as misguided as it sounds; Lewis himself later admitted to being “embarrassed at [his] poor work”. In a rare case of a film being suspended by its own maker rather than by studio enforcement, it has been kept under lock and key for half a century, though Lewis donated the negative to the Library of Congress in 2015, two years before his death , requesting that it not be shown for at least a decade.

Will we eventually see the wreckage? Films buffs should be careful what they wish for. More often than not, even the most cursed productions eventually find their way to the light, and it is rarely for the best. Directed but disowned by David O Russell, the political satire nailed had a troubled, disrupted shoot that eventually ran aground in 2008, leading to years of financial disputes. In 2014, an independent distributor bought it from its bankrupted studio, cobbled together a final cut and released it as Accidental Love, directed by one “Stephen Greene”; the result was not a film anyone would want their real name attached to.

The glowing exception, meanwhile, is Kenneth Lonergan’s sprawling, knotty, rather magnificent Manhattan morality drama margaret, which sat in legal limbo for six years – with the director and studio Fox Searchlight locked in tortuous disagreement over a lengthy final cut – before it was finally freed in 2011, to critical acclaim that it has only escalated over the years. At present, it seems unlikely that batgirl – or, less likely still, Scoob!: Holiday Haunting – is in line for quite such a redemption. But such fairytales keep hope in a cutthroat industry alive.

LIza Lehmann, Alice Mary Smith and Adela Maddison were British composers of the 19th and early 20th centuries, but few today will know their names, let alone their music. Now they have been singled out by a new classical record label dedicated to raising the profile of female composers, many of whom have never been recorded and whose works have been “lost over time”.

The label, which is called La Boîte à Pépites (the jewel box), will discover and record compositions that have rarely, if ever, been heard before, yet deserve “a good position in the standard musical repertoire”.

Recent research by Donne, a charitable foundation focused on gender inequality within the music industry, found that only 747 out of almost 15,000 works performed by 100 orchestras from 27 countries in 2020-2021 were composed by women – a total of 5%.

Asked why female composers are overlooked, Gabriella Di Laccio, a soprano and founder of the Donne Foundation, told the observer: “There are several reasons. One very important one is ignorance of the repertoire. People in positions to include this music either don’t have time or their focus is not directed to learning what is available.

“Also, there is a fear of audiences not coming and, I’m sorry to say, prejudice. Unfortunately, we’ve been raised to believe that only men were genius composers. The unconscious bias is still present, which is very surprising.”

The new label has been founded by French cellist Héloïse Luzzati, who says that unearthing and studying original manuscripts has enabled researchers to “exhume” some extraordinary compositions. “Too few of them are published and therefore even fewer recorded,” she said.

The label’s first release, to be launched in the UK on 30 September, is devoted to French composer Charlotte Sohy, who died in 1955. Luzzati described her music as “amazing… impressionist… with the colors of Ravel, Debussy or Chausson”.

Asked why it has been ignored, she said: “If she had been a man, her music would have been known.”

A 3CD boxset features world premiere recordings of piano, chamber and orchestral works, performed by the National Orchestra of Avignon-Provence, among others.

In the sleeve notes, Alexis Labat, the orchestra’s executive director, writes: “The classical repertoire for symphonic formations covers over four centuries, and almost all of it is devoted to men … How can we explain this incredible deficit of women composers in our concert seasons and our recordings?”

Luzzati said: “A few years ago, the question of the role of women in the history of music began to gain a certain importance in my life as a musician. How could I have spent so many years without ever having played a piece composed by a woman?”

It inspired her to establish the project “Elles – Women Composers”, promoting female composers through a festival and a video channel.

The new record label is “expanding this mission” with a series of albums, each devoted to a single female composer. Its initial release in France in April proved “huge for someone who is unknown”, Luzzati said.

Extensive research is yet to be done into various British composers, including Lehmann, who wrote hundreds of solo and ensemble songs, many of which were well-received in their day.

Scholar Derek Hyde has described her as one of the three “most outstanding women songwriters” of the 19th century.

Luzzati said that Lehmann has been unjustly forgotten. She praised her emotion of her music, noting that “the quality of the writing is extraordinary”.

Next year, she plans to launch a music publishing-house: “Today, for example, we can hear Sohy’s music but, if a musician wants to play it, they must first write to us. You cannot find sheet music on a website or in a sheet music store. Editing works that are not yet published is essential to rehabilitate the works of female composers.”

She believes that, through such “positive discrimination”, forgotten female composers will finally be appreciated – eventually doing away with the need for their own record label. “Today this is not yet the case and there is still so much music of female composers to discover.”

Katherine Cooper, classical editor of Presto Music, who will be selling the recording, said: “I can’t think of another label solely devoted to female composers. It’s a great idea that someone is amplifying that and dedicating themselves to it. They are shining light on a lot of composers that are really poorly represented, if they’re represented at all.”