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Originally Posted by Wes  Yes, it was wishful thinking on my part re Seven Veils - I knew there was some impedement to it's release/transmission - I think it was mentioned when the Ken Russell At the BBC boxset was released in the US. |
Yes, it was originally going to be included - and then they presumably tried to clear the underlying rights for commercial distribution.
The problem with that film from a legal perspective is that there's barely a frame that doesn't make use of copyrighted Richard Strauss material. So determined was Russell to put the boot in to the composer that he made sure that everything Strauss uttered on screen was sourced from his own copyrighted texts - so you can't even show clips of the non-musical scenes without getting into legal difficulty.
In 1988, Russell tried to clear the rights to Strauss's opera 'Salomé' in order to use an extract in
Salomé's Last Dance. The Strauss estate normally has no problem with licensing such usage - as we all know from
2001: A Space Odyssey - but when they found out who the director was, they refused point blank. And that was nearly twenty years after the first and only legal screening of
Dance of the Seven Veils!
But Strauss died in 1949, so provided there isn't another change to EU copyright laws the film will become legal again on New Year's Day 2020. Annoyingly, it would be legal
now if the term hadn't been extended in the 1990s from fifty to seventy years after the death of the creator of the copyrighted work.