Kahle v. AshcroftEl Topo and Holy Mountain
originally submitted by Kenneth Collins:
You should contact Alejandro Jodorowsky, director of both films, actor in both, but not owner of the rights to either.
They were released in 1970 and 1973 and became cult classics. According to legend, John Lennon personally persuaded Beatles manager Allen Klein to purchase the rights to El Topo and Holy Mountain for Klein's company ABKCO Records. According to this screed attributed to Jodorowsky, Klein has continually blocked re-release of the films in the US:
http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw16/0311.html
"Allen Klein insists to prevent my movies from being shown. Now he's trying
to bring me into a trial for having shown my movies in some festivals and
pirat copies. It would be good that all the people who admire my work demand
life-time jail for Klein, under the charge of cultural murder. Killing a
work of art is as monstruous as killing a human being. For 25 years now,
Klein has prohibited the public to see El Topo and the Holy Mountain. He has
destroyed the orginal negatives. It would be necessary to have a worldwide
campaign against him and his crimes. Please translate this message in all
possible languages and send it to as many people as you can. We will
establish the existence of cultural crime against humanity. Allen Klein is a
criminal, together with his accomplice lawyers. All of them deserve
punishment and prison.
Alejandro Jodorowsky"
I know from my personal experience that the films have been out of print in the US. I purchased a rare Japanese laserdisc of Holy Mountain in 2000, at a time when the only versions of the film available were illegal dubs of the discs. In the last two years, an Italian company released DVDs of both films, but the transfers are poor quality, and the disc is PAl encoded, so it can't be played on US DVD players without a converter. In 2003, SPO released DVD transfers from the Japanese laserdiscs, which suffer from censorship. I'm not sure what the legal status is of these releases, but Jodorowsky fans blame ABKCO for not releasing the rights to either show the film in the US or distribute commercial copies. See
http://www.angelfire.com/film/klein/
ABKCO's address is:
Jody Klein, ABKCO RECORDS
1700 Broadway, 21st Floor
New York, NY 10019
Stifled uses
Kenneth Collins:
I merely wanted to purchase a legal, quality DVD transfer in NTSC encoding of the original films, which given their cult status and critical acclaim, would have undoubtedly been released by now. Currently, I'm stuck with poor transfers or Japanese censorship of the original works.