Films bought and sold like works of art

Can films be works of art that can be bought and sold.....like a Matisse, a Picasso or a de Kooning.

Spun around politics, sexual identity and cinema, "Kiss of the Spider Woman," nominated for four Oscars and the winner of one in 1986, is the consummate art film. But is it a collectible work of art? Those who own it are trying to find out...... it was also a great musical that stared Brent Carvey and Chita Rivera, ...the best musical I have ever seen....

In an unusual twist even for a picture outside the norms - its Oscar-winning lead, William Hurt, paused his red-hot career to play a film-struck homosexual for almost no fee when that still seemed more suicidal than savvy - David Weisman, the movie's producer, and David S. Phillips, who joined him later in acquiring its rights, are planning in coming weeks to offer "Kiss of the Spider Woman" for sale as an artwork.By that, they mean an object of beauty. The film is now available in its entirety - its copyright, negatives, prints, digital video masters and more - along with a carefully preserved archive that includes 313 boxes of 35-millimeter outtakes, five drafts of the screenplay by Leonard Schrader and a stack of rejection letters from studio executives who were sure that the movie would never work."I'm not aware of its having been done before," said Grey Smith, who specializes in film collectibles at the Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, and is not involved in the "Spider Woman" sale."I wish them the best," Mr. Smith added. "This could open up avenues for people who own rights to other feature films."After their commercial release, feature films are typically held in clumps, like the 4,000-title library owned by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or the smaller collection of about 700 movies and television shows at Miramax Films, which is now being sold by the Walt Disney Company.But independent films sometimes fall out of the system, as agreements under which they were licensed for distribution expire, and the copyright remains with, or is acquired by, individual owners who are not aligned with any of the major film companies.Such outlying works normally have little value for large distributors, which may buy them for a relatively small fee, based on future returns in the home video and television markets, but which remain far more interested in fresh films or mass transactions."It's really difficult to sell just one film to that universe," said Stephen Prough, a founder of Salem Partners, a Los Angeles investment banking firm that handles entertainment transactions. Mr. Prough said it was unusual even to find a single film with its rights held by one or two individuals.About 10 years ago, however, Mr. Weisman, an independent producer whose latest passion is a proposed Bollywood gangster project called "Xtrme City," joined Mr. Phillips, a lawyer who had come to view "Kiss of the Spider Woman" as an important event in the history of public art, in consolidating their ownership of all rights to the film, as licensing agreements with Island Alive and other distributors expired.They released the picture, which was shot in Brazil by the Argentine-born director Hector Babenco, along with a documentary, "Tangled Web," about its making, on a DVD from the Independent Cinema Restoration Archive, an operation managed by Mr. Weisman.But as Mr. Weisman and Mr. Phillips explained during a tangled luncheon conversation in Los Angeles last week, they also conceived the idea of selling the movie - along with its extraordinary archive of negatives, prints and associated materials that Mr. Weisman had kept in a Los Angeles warehouse - to an institution or private collector who would value it not as a library title, but as art."Actually, I said we should give it away," said Mr. Phillips, who spoke intently of things like "heteroglossia," the diversity of voices and viewpoints, in a literary work.Not as eager to part with an asset on those terms, Mr. Weisman, who at lunch mostly out-talked Mr. Phillips, argued for a sale modeled on his earlier experience with a collection of more than 8,000 movie lobby cards. Those were amassed by the screenwriter Mr. Schrader, a close friend, then sold intact after his death in 2006 to a film buff in India.So Mr. Phillips, with help from Mr. Weisman, designed a prospectus for their film and its archive. With the sale, it promises, " 'Kiss of the Spider Woman' transcends mere commodity and reclaims its aura as a unique work of art." .And John Wronoski, the proprietor of Lame Duck Books, a Cambridge, Mass., dealer, now says he expects to begin offering the film privately to a small group of potential buyers in the next month or so.While he generally deals in books, Mr. Wronoski explained in a phone interview this week, the large collection of film and papers associated with "Kiss of the Spider Woman," including early drafts of a script written by Burt Lancaster, who once meant to star in the movie, and Manuel Puig, who wrote the underlying novel, make it an attractive proposition."There aren't many archives that would be even remotely similar to this," he said.(Props and costumes from "Kiss of the Spider Woman," which took in $17 million at the domestic box office after its release in 1985, have long since been destroyed or dispersed.)At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Katie Trainor, the film collections manager, said her institution held the copyright to only a tiny handful of the roughly 26,000 shorts and feature-length movies, none well known, of which it owns prints.Most often, Ms. Trainor said, the museum is simply authorized to screen its movies on site, and may get permission to lend them to others.For their own film - with which remake rights and everything else are included - Mr. Weisman and Mr. Phillips declined to say what they would accept as a minimum bid. Mr. Wronoski said he had a number in mind but also declined to discuss it.And what a buyer might ultimately do with the movie is an open question. Over lunch, Mr. Weisman and Mr. Phillips suggested, for instance, that a new owner might digitize all of the filmed material and offer admirers the chance to rebuild it according to a vision of their own.Reached by e-mail, Mr. Babenco said he hoped that the scripts and other material associated with "Kiss of the Spider Woman" would become accessible to the public after their sale. "I would love to keep historical elements of all my movies alive," he said.In any case, Mr. Weisman said he and Mr. Phillips expected to find a buyer who would remove the film from an industry that, in his view, no longer respects its own wares."The diminishment is appalling to me," Mr. Weisman said of the movie business.Asked whether he would accept a good offer from a Warner or a Paramount that wanted to add a jewel to its existing collection, Mr. Weisman dismissed the notion as fantasy."If the Hudson River were made out of grape juice, you could drink it," he said.