…is if the film in question is still locked in the DVD dungeon…no high-def streaming, no 1080 Bluray, no 4K.
This is the situation with Alan Pakula‘s Rollover (’81), a noirish thriller set in the world of high-stakes banking. Whoever owns the home video rights has calculated that it’s a loss leader…”fuck it…nobody remembers this film, and the financial world shenanigans no longer apply…and nobody cares about Kris Kristoffersion or Jane Fonda in a romantinc context”…something like that.
Rollover has been written off…extinct.
In ’81 I was treadmilling along as a Manhattan journalist when portions of Rollover were being shot there, and I remember talking to a very sharp, well-connected female journalist who had written a profile of Kristofferson, and she said that he and Fonda had an affair during production.
It was strictly one of those “only during principal photography” deals that never crossed over into their off-set lives, she said, and so nobody (including Fonda’s then-husband Tom Hayden) was the wiser. Or gave a shit…whatever.