Watch the Lost Classic “Nothing Lasts Forever”

In 1984, MGM had a test
screening in Seattle for a film called Nothing Lasts
Forever. The story was about a young man who wants to be an
artist, but the movie wasn’t like any other picture you’ve seen on
that subject: It’s a dreamlike tale set in a world where the Port
Authority has seized dictatorial powers in Manhattan, a benevolent
conspiracy of tramps guides people’s destinies from a secret base
beneath New York, and the U.S. government first went to the moon in
1953, where it set up a secret shopping district for elderly
American tourists. The film was written and directed by Tom
Schiller, the guy who made those “Schiller’s Reel” shorts for the
original incarnation of Saturday Night Live, and it
harkens back to so many different film styles that it seems to take
place in the entire 20th century at once. That effect is
intensified by the cast, which is filled with half-forgotten former
celebrities — Eddie Fisher, Imogene Coca, Mort Sahl — as well as
a couple of Schiller’s old SNL pals, including Bill Murray
as an interplanetary bus conductor.

In short, it’s a goddamn great movie, and even if it
weren’t a great movie it’s the sort of picture that would
be worth watching just for being so weird. But that test screening
didn’t go well, and MGM shelved the movie. It turns up at festivals
and special events every once in a while, and it reportedly airs
from time to time on European TV, but it has never had a proper
theatrical release and has never been put out on DVD. I have wanted
to see this thing for at least two decades.

Thank goodness for YouTube:

Yes, that’s the whole thing. Watch it while it’s available.

People who talk about online movie “piracy” usually have
torrents in mind, but YouTube and Vimeo are filled with old movies
and TV shows that never got a proper DVD release. Some of them are
easy to find, and some are half-disguised to keep the copyright
cops away — the uploader might use a $ in place of a S or a /
instead of a V, or she might just indicate the picture’s presence
with its initials instead of its full title. A lot of them seem to
have been recorded off television at some point. It’s a vast but
poorly catalogued library of films that aren’t widely available
anywhere else: the sort of stuff that cineastes used to swap on
VHS, now available to far more people on a far more convenient
platform.

As we all know, piracy can cut into sales. But it can also lay
the groundwork for sales, creating or expanding a market by letting
people know what they could be buying if it were available (a point
Henry Jenkins made in
this 2006 Reason article about Japanese
anime). Schiller has
said that he likes the fact that pirated editions of
Nothing Lasts Forever are floating around out there,
and that he “would also enjoy it if it was available to a lot of
people.” Well, one day the first might lead to the second. I’d love
to own a copy of this movie, but until that’s possible YouTube will
have to do.