Amy Heller and Dennis Doros are the team who founded Milestone Films. Milestone has been a leader in the restoration and distribution of classic and independent films for over three decades and is home to 21 Film Registry titles. Amy and Dennis are also the founders and co-presidents of Missing Movies, an organization dedicated to finding, preserving, and releasing films that would otherwise be unavailable to the public. Dennis served for three years on the National Film Preservation Board (NFPB).
I spoke with Amy and Dennis at a time of transition for Milestone Films. After thirty-five years, the pair is handing over the reins of the company to Maya Cade, the founder of Black Film Archive.
My deepest thanks to Amy and Dennis for the work they do—and the amazing stories they share below.
This interview was conducted on November 16, 2025.
Eric: Let’s start with you two. How did you meet?
Amy: We met briefly in 1986 when I was looking for a job. I interviewed at Kino International where Dennis worked. We weren’t too impressed with each other.
Dennis: Don Krim was interviewing people for a position at Kino. He was bringing in ten people a day, and they would come into my office and say hello to me, and I’d say hello back, and that was it.
Amy: So we really didn’t get to know each other. In 1988…
Dennis: …November 19th.
Amy: …our mutual friend Jeff Capp had a party grieving the election of George H.W. Bush. Jeff was living with Wayne Salazar, who worked at Cinecom, and they had this double-wide apartment near the Lincoln Tunnel, and that’s where we met.
Dennis: At a very large gay party.
Amy: Yeah, I always joked that Dennis was probably the only straight guy there. And we had many friends in common. We knew about each other because we had the same job, basically. We both did non-theatrical sales. I worked at New Yorker Films, and Dennis worked at Kino, so we had the same customers. We were both very good friends with Jeff, and also with Nancy Gerstman, who’s one of the founders of Zeitgeist Films and my first boss in film.
Eric: And not long after that, wedding bells?
Dennis: About eighteen months later.
Amy: We started going out…
Dennis: …then we moved in together, then we got married. And I was restoring Chang (1927) at the time. Grass (1925/1997) came later. I was starting to do exploration films like these with my ex-brother-in-law. Amy joined us, and she and I started Milestone.
Eric: And now Milestone is bringing Chang and Grass out on Blu-ray Disc!
Amy: It’s very nice. It’s a real 360 thing that Queen Kelly (1929), Chang, and Grass are at the end of our careers as they were at the beginning.
Dennis: We also wanted to clean up the company to make it easier for Maya Cade. So with Chang and Grass, we thought, let’s get them out before Maya has to work on those.
Eric: So how did you two go from working for different companies to forming Milestone?
Amy: I had been working at New Yorker Films for four years. They stopped giving bonuses, and then I didn’t get a raise, and I’d made them a lot of money, and I was just ready to go. So I thought I would quit and start working on the films that Dennis and I had been putting together. And when we started thinking about doing that, Philip Haas and his then-wife Belinda gave us…
Dennis: …they said, “If you do start your own company, you can have our films.”
Amy: Yeah, Philip had been making documentaries on art and artists. And I knew Philip because New Yorker Films distributed A Day on the Grand Canal With the Emperor of China (1988), and we’d become friends—and still are! So I left my job, and I started working on pulling stuff together. And then, after a couple months, Dennis joined me.
Dennis: That’s the simple version.
Amy: We were both ready to be our own bosses. Both of our fathers had their own companies, so I guess we had that role model of not wanting to work for other people.
Eric: And this was 1991?
Amy: 1990. We got married in June, and I left my job in August, and we started working on Milestone.
Eric: Dennis, when were you on the National Film Preservation Board?
Dennis: September 2018 to September 2021.
Eric: Chris Horak explained that you have to be a member of an organization to be on the NFPB.
Dennis: Not all the time. There are at-large members. But there is a set group of organizations: UCLA Film & Television Archive, SAG-AFTRA, the DGA, the Society of Composers and Lyricists… Everybody gets a primary member and an alternate member. But then, at the discretion of the members, the board adds authors or academics that they like…
Eric: …who aren’t necessarily part of one of those organizations?
Dennis: Right. You don’t have to be to be an NFPB member. It didn’t start out this way, but when I got on, every two years the board would review who’s on, and each organization would submit the names of who it wanted as at-large members, and the board would have to approve them.
Eric: But you were on as a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists [AMIA]?
Amy: Dennis was president.
Eric: Chris Horak said that board members are on various subcommittees. Were you on any, Dennis?
Dennis: I was on the independent film, student film, and DEI subcommittees, though I’m not sure DEI was technically a committee. But we had a self-directive to look for films that were outside of the mainstream and had not been considered by previous committees.
Eric: Tell me about the in-person meetings. I would love to be a fly on the wall at one of those.
Dennis: There would be seven or eight presentations first—what the archives are doing, the Film Foundation would present what they’re doing. People had to come in prepared—have titles to discuss, have titles to defend. All of the people took it seriously. Some were more active in presenting films than others, but almost everybody came in wanting to pitch a film that they believed in. There are times when people are on a board just to have it on their resume, and that wasn’t the case. It’s a very active, very thoughtful group.
Eric: Were there particular films that you advocated for during your tenure?
Dennis: Hair Piece (1984/2018) was one, and it got on the first year I was on the board. Before I was on the board, I advocated for the Milestone titles The Exiles (1961/2009) and Word Is Out (1977/2022). Chris Horak was also advocating for those because they were UCLA restorations. When I was advising Jackie Stewart [NFPB chair], I was coming up with a list of DEI films that hadn’t been considered, and Pacific Islander is a category that had never had a film selected—Hawaii, American Samoa, that region had never had a film, so I had to find one. So I went to the state film archive in Honolulu, and they recommended Mauna Kea: Temple Under Siege (2006/2020), and that was the one I championed through this DEI initiative.
Eric: To paraphrase something Chris Horak said, the current administration has declared DEI dead, and this is bound to affect the Film Registry. What do you think?
Dennis: I don’t know. Is Chris still on the board?
Eric: No.
Dennis: And neither am I, so I honestly don’t know. Because the people who still are on the board are very interested in diversity and coming up with films that people haven’t considered.
Amy: But whether or not the librarian of Congress is going to approve those films…
Dennis: I’m told that the acting librarian—Robert Newlen, who was Carla Hayden’s deputy director—is very good, so I can’t say whether that’s… That is a supposition I refuse to believe in until I hear otherwise. Jackie Stewart is still chair of the National Film Preservation Board, so DEI may be dead in American politics, but I can’t say that for sure about the board until we start seeing it.
[For all practical purposes, the acting librarian of Congress is Robert Newlen rather than executive branch appointee Todd Blanche.]
Eric: It will be very interesting to see the choices this year.
Dennis: Especially since the Act [Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2016] has to be approved again in 2026. So that’s another consideration the board might have. But I would like to believe that they are still firmly committed to finding films outside of the obvious. Put it that way.
Eric: What about conflicts of interest? Were these ever an issue?
Dennis: Yes, continuously.
Eric: What I mean is, what would you do if a Milestone title was suggested?
Dennis: I would shut up and not vote on it. I think that might have happened once or twice but not with Hair Piece; that didn’t become a Milestone film until after I championed it. I had no idea we’d get it. The board had been talking about selecting a Woody Woodpecker film, and I said, “You know, we should consider this film Hair Piece, the first African-American animated film.” I got a copy and showed it to everybody, and everybody loved it, and it got on. I didn’t know the filmmaker [Ayoka Chenzira] then. I’d met her for ten seconds back in college when she was presenting the film at my school. We’re not supposed to say who championed what or who selected what, but because someone told her I’d advocated for Hair Piece, and because Milestone had Kathleen Collins and Charles Burnett, Ayoka called me up after the film was selected, and that’s how Milestone got her films. I was very careful about conflict of interest. I was representing AMIA, not Milestone.
Eric: I think I saw Hair Piece for the first time in the 1990s. When it appeared on the Registry in 2018, I thought, I remember that! It was a very exciting addition.
Dennis: And that’s exactly what the National Film Preservation Board is for.
Eric: Did Director’s Guild members recuse themselves if one of their films was being considered?
Dennis: I don’t recall any time when that happened, but everybody had best friends whose films they adored. That was allowed because you didn’t make it, you didn’t participate in it. Everybody had favorite films that meant something to them.
Eric: Chris Horak made a similar observation. He and Billy Woodberry are friends, and Chris championed Bless Their Little Hearts (1984/2013).
Dennis: Archivists would champion the films they restored. That, I do know. Again, they didn’t participate. They weren’t getting financially rewarded for choosing their own films. People were brought onto the board for their expertise and their knowledge.
Amy: And it’s a small world. The fact that people know each other, that’s just the reality.
Eric: Dennis, how did your tenure on the NFPB end?
Dennis: I wanted the board to diversify, and I chose a non-binary person of color to replace me.
Eric: Who’s also an AMIA member?
Dennis: Yes. They were on the AMIA board. I didn’t want to see all white men on the NFPB. That was an initiative that was started about the same time.
Eric: Was that before or after Carla Hayden became librarian of Congress in 2016?
Dennis: Carla Hayden’s focus was on Disney films. The initiative had more to do with Jackie Stewart.
Amy: Now that’s someone you should interview. She’s one of the most brilliant people.
Dennis: She teaches at the University of Chicago.
Amy: And she’s a TCM host.
Eric: She was also Chris Horak’s co-editor on the L.A. Rebellion book.
Amy: With Allyson Field.
Dennis: The initiative was about having the board reflect more of what people really look like rather than what 20th-century cinema looked like.
Eric: And the change in the makeup of the board is reflected in the additions to the Film Registry for the last five years or so.
Dennis: I’m not sure that’s true. The Milestone titles Killer of Sheep (1978/1990), The Exiles (1961/2009), and The Daughter of Dawn (1920/2013) were already on.
Eric: It’s true that every year since the beginning, there were one or two films by minority or women directors. But in the last five years, at least five out of the twenty-five films added each year were by minority or women directors, and that’s a pretty hefty chunk.
Amy: I think it also reflects the changed history of filmmaking. I mean there were very few African-American filmmakers working in the mainstream until…
Dennis: …the 1980s.
Amy: …until Spike Lee. He opened the door for more participation by African-American directors. So you move into an era when there were more black filmmakers. What would be interesting to look at is when the films that were added in the last five years were made… How many years does it have to be before a film is eligible? Ten? Fifteen?
Eric: Ten.
Amy: So in the last five years, were these films mostly from within fifteen or twenty years before?
Eric: It’s kind of been a mix of both older and more recent work. I happen to have the statistics at my fingertips.
Amy: I know you do!
Eric: There were just two films by black directors added in 2018. In 2019, there were four. 2020 had four. 2021 had four. 2022 had seven! 2023 had four. 2024 had five.
Amy: But were they more recent films?
Eric: Some of them were, some of them weren’t. Three films by black directors that were added to the Registry relatively recently were from the silent era: Body and Soul (1925) in 2019 and The Flying Ace (1926) and Hell-Bound Train (1930) in 2021. Some of the films by black directors that were added to the Registry closer to when they were originally released are 4 Little Girls (1997) and To Sleep With Anger (1990) in 2017; Eve’s Bayou (1997) and Hair Piece (1984) in 2018; She’s Gotta Have It (1986) in 2019; Freedom Riders (2010) and Losing Ground (1982) in 2020; The Watermelon Woman (1996) in 2021; House Party (1990), Pariah (2011), and Tongues Untied (1989) in 2022; 12 Years a Slave (2013), Bamboozled (2000), and Love & Basketball (2000) in 2023; and Compensation (1999) in 2024.
Amy: So the increase was partly because they were more recent films…
Dennis: …and partly the board’s directive. Not to choose “black films” but to choose films outside the Hollywood mainstream.
Eric: Were you guys aware of the Film Registry from its inception?
Dennis: Yes. Very early on because Tabu (1931/1994) was Milestone’s first film that was added to the Film Registry, and we got a letter saying, “Congratulations! Please send us a brand-new print.” This is why the myth continues that every film that’s on the Registry is preserved. Back then, in the first few years, the rule was, “We’re going to honor you, but you have to deposit a brand-new print with the Library of Congress.” And a brand-new print back then cost $6000, and we only had $10,000 in our bank account.
Amy: If that.
Dennis: So we said no. That’s mostly what everybody was doing. We explained that the film is preserved at UCLA, so they didn’t need it. But for the first few years, they were sending out these letters to everybody, and I would say the majority were ignoring the request. Still, the myth persists that all these films are restored and held at the Library of Congress.
Eric: But that was the original intention of the Film Registry, wasn’t it?
Dennis: I don’t know if it was the original intention, but it certainly became like, “Oh, we’ve got this list, it’s very beneficial, we should be getting something back in return.”
Eric: Milestone is home to twenty* National Film Registry titles, and that’s not counting a handful that are now out of print. Did inclusion on the Registry factor into your decisions about which films to acquire and release?
[*With the 2025 additions, the number is now 21.]
Dennis: It might have. Having a title on the Registry was a good way to get libraries around the country interested in owning it. But I can’t remember any title that we specifically chose because it was on the list. We never went hunting for that.
Amy: I think it’s more that we were always looking for films we thought were historically and culturally significant. So was the National Film Registry.
Eric: The Film Registry definitely seems to have had an impact on which films get distributed and released on home video. Obscure films like The Learning Tree (1969/1989) or Wanda (1970/2017) or Compensation (1999/2024) might very well have been forgotten altogether if they hadn’t been added. Now they’re all Criterion titles. And those are just a few examples. What are your thoughts? How much has inclusion on the Film Registry influenced distribution and home video?
Dennis: I think it definitely brings attention to the films, and distributors notice. I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t put “Chosen by the National Film Registry” on the front of their cover. Eventually, the studios started to work with Kino Lorber and Criterion. They stopped distributing themselves, and they were willing to listen to what other distributors wanted.
Eric: So now we have these boutique labels who are interested in restoring and releasing more esoteric titles.
Dennis: With the death of DVD, the studios are more willing to make deals with other companies.
Eric: Is Milestone ever going to start releasing 4K discs?
Amy: I Am Cuba (1964) and Killer of Sheep are in 4K.
Eric: Sure, but those are Criterion titles now.
Dennis: We did the 4K scans.
Amy: We’re working through Kino Lorber. If they want to do 4K, they’ll do 4K. What’s happening now that’s sort of disturbing to me is that on some titles they only want to do Blu-ray or they only want to do DVD. We recently got a frenzied e-mail from our friend at the New York Public Library: “We have no DVDs of I Am Cuba. Do you have any?” And we don’t.
Dennis: The last one we printed was in 2005.
Amy: And of course I Am Cuba is out now on Blu-ray and 4K from Criterion, but the New York Public Library doesn’t carry Blu-rays or 4Ks.
Eric: Yeah, my local library doesn’t either. On a more positive note, how did your friendship with Charles Burnett come about?
Dennis: We were at the 1999 AMIA conference in Miami. Ross Lipman, who we did not know yet, was rooming with our ex-brother-in-law. So we met Ross at an outdoor party behind the Hotel Fontainebleau, where everyone was staying. It was the nicest AMIA conference ever! Best weather, it had a beach, the world’s biggest swimming pools. It had everything.
Amy: And I was there with our three-year-old. The two of us just went to the beach every day. I didn’t do anything at the conference.
Dennis: We were talking to Ross: “What are you working on?” “Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.” I had seen it in college. I thought it was a good film, so I said I’d be interested. I didn’t realize what it was; I’m not going to claim any genius about this. That was a conference where all the archives wanted us to distribute their films, and none of the others came through. But they all came up to us and said, “We have a project for you. We want you to do this.” So I was offered like twenty films at that conference, and none of them came through. Then Ross e-mailed me Charles’s phone number, and I called Charles.
Two years later, Charles and I had a conversation about Milestone distributing Killer of Sheep. He was interested but not very actively. This was at the 2001 AMIA conference in L.A. He was supposed to be on the panel and an hour before the panel, Linda Tadich, the president of AMIA, said, “Charles isn’t showing up. You know Charles Burnett. You have to get him onto this panel.” And I said, “I’ve talked to him maybe three or four times on the phone. It’s not like we’re friends. But I’ll call.” So I called him from the hotel lobby, and he came to the panel.
After the panel, an archivist from England came up to me and Charles. We were sitting in the hotel lobby, and he said to Charles, “You’re a black man. Why don’t you tell them why Milestone has to distribute The Birth of a Nation.” We had been distributing silent films, so he insisted we do The Birth of a Nation (1915/1992). I insisted no. He sent us the video master anyway, assuming that if we have the video master, we’re going to do it. We still said no.
Amy: Absolutely!
Dennis: I mean, it was never going to happen. Other people may distribute it. That’s wonderful for them. The Birth of a Nation, Triumph of the Will (1935)… There are a number of titles we won’t touch. There are things that we will do for money. That’s certainly not one of them. Integrity does count. Anyway, I said, “Look, it’s never going to happen. We’re just not going to do this.” And he got belligerent, and I got upset, and I just said, “Go away.” And he did—in a huff. And I turned to Charles to start apologizing. I was mortified and horrified, and I couldn’t believe we just had this conversation in front of Charles Burnett. I started to apologize to him, and he said, very quietly, “You have my film.”
So that’s how we got Killer of Sheep. But then I asked him about music rights, and that’s why it took six more years to release.
Amy: And so much money.
Eric: Well, thank you. It sure was worth it because now that film is out there for everyone, and it’s a masterpiece.
Dennis: We cleared the rights a second time for perpetuity. That was another we-have-to-do-this-before-we-retire project.
Amy: We put a lot of our own money into it.
Eric: It’s a real labor of love. Thank you so much.
Amy: You’re very welcome.
Dennis: It’s our privilege.
Eric: And props to the Film Registry for picking Killer of Sheep in 1990, when it hadn’t even had any real distribution.
Dennis: When I met Paul Spehr [assistant chief of Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division at the Library of Congress, 1979 – 1993] after we had acquired the rights to the film, probably after we had distributed it, he said, “I want you to know that the National Film Registry did not legitimize Killer of Sheep, Killer of Sheep legitimized the National Film Registry.” And that was…
Amy: …classy.
Eric: I love The Learning Tree, which was added the first year. I think it’s a really good film, and it’s of course historically significant because it’s the first Hollywood studio film by a black director. But I had actually seen Killer of Sheep before it got added to the Registry. Just before To Sleep With Anger came out, Facets in Chicago showed Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding (1983). Jonathan Rosenbaum was an early champion of Burnett. I’m friends with Jonathan and had always read his Reader articles, so my friends and I all flocked to see these films he was writing about. I even brought my mom. She was never a big film person, but she loved them! She said, “I have a favorite director now.”
But the fact that Killer of Sheep got picked the second year of the Film Registry, along with some other less predictable titles like Meshes of the Afternoon (1943/1990), felt very significant and quickly identified the Film Registry as not just another film list. The first year was all Hollywood classics—great films, nothing against them—but the reach of the Film Registry broadened in the second year when they added Harlan County USA (1976/1990), Meshes of the Afternoon, Primary (1960/1990), The River (1938/1990), and of course Killer of Sheep.
By the sixth year, the trend was well established. That was the year—1994—Shirley Clarke first got a film added to the Registry. Twenty years later, Milestone began releasing her films. How did Project Shirley get under way?
Dennis: One day, I turned to Amy and said, “How about Shirley Clarke?” I knew Amy had distributed her films.
Amy: I had talked briefly with Shirley at some point when I worked at New Yorker Films.
Dennis: The funny thing is, after Amy agreed, I started thinking about it and wondering, why are we doing this? Isn’t Shirley too popular for Milestone? And then I started telling every programmer in the country I was thinking of doing Shirley Clarke, and ninety percent of them said, “Who’s that?”
Amy: Even the really good ones. They had never seen her films. They knew nothing about her.
Dennis: They didn’t even know her name.
Eric: Had she passed away by then?
Dennis: Yes. She died in 1997; we started the project in February 2009. I wrote to Wendy Clarke [Shirley’s daughter]. I found Kathelin Hoffman Gray, the producer of Ornette: Made in America (1985). We had to do this piecemeal. At the 2008 AMIA conference, I saw Maxine Fleckner Ducey [film archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, 1980 – 2014, and custodian of the Shirley Clarke archive]. I didn’t really know her. She was an older woman, I had too much respect for her, and I didn’t want to bother her. But in 2010, at the conference in Austin—and you can see how important AMIA is—I went up to her and I said, “I’m thinking of doing Shirley Clarke, could I have access to the archive?” And she said, “What do you need?” And I said, very quietly, “Well, all of it.” And she put on a big smile and said, “Well then fuck yes!” She really appreciated that we wanted to explore all of Shirley’s work—and there is an enormous amount. Almost all of the films in the Shirley Clarke collection had been identified by Susan Dalton [film archivist at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, 1969 – 1980]; she was the one who made the discoveries—every film, every outtake—not me. I would send Mary Huelsbeck [assistant director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, 2012 – present] a list of ten films at a time, and if they weren’t shipped out the next day by FedEx, she would call and apologize. We had never had this experience with an archive.
Amy: We should tell the MoMA story: We got the rights to Portrait of Jason (1967/2015) from Wendy, Shirley’s daughter, but then the question was, where do we get the materials? And MoMA had restored the film, so we went to meet with them. And we meet with them, and…
Dennis: …they say, “Well, we distribute the film.”
Amy: So what they tell us is that we could have access to it, but this is what we have to do: We have to make a dupe internegative off of the restoration of their print. Then we have to make an interpositive, and then we have to make another negative, and then we can make our 35 mm prints off of that. We were like, wow. It would have been so many generations away from their restoration. And then later on we realized their restoration wasn’t even good.
Dennis: How are we going to handle this? What are we going to do?
Amy: Literally! While we were sitting there, I said, “She was a New York filmmaker. Can’t you find the original elements?”
Dennis: At some point, I got the DVD from Second Run in England, and I’m looking at their restoration, and it’s scratched and marred, and I didn’t even know this at the time, but it was missing seven minutes. Because a lot of the reels started off in black—just soundtrack. The film is supposed to look like outtakes. But guess what was happening to the print: Projectionists would take it, build the reel, and cut off the black. So all three of the reels were missing the black opening.
Amy: Also, it was really contrasty. It looked terrible. So we began the search for the original elements of Portrait of Jason, which took years, and Dennis was e-mailing and calling archives all over the world.
Dennis: Susan Dalton knew what it was, but she didn’t label it precisely, and it turned out to be the early fine grain of the print that Shirley had shown to her friends to get their opinions in June of 1967.
Amy: At MoMA!
Dennis: She still spent two months editing after that, but everything was there. She just rearranged all of it. Then we found a 35 mm print at the Swedish Film Institute. I e-mailed Jon Wengström, saying, “How good is your print?” And the next day, I had a DVD from Sweden. He sent it international overnight to get it to me. And it was the complete version. And that’s how we were able to go back to the fine grain and re-order it digitally.
Amy: To conform to the print from Sweden.
Dennis: Jon Wengström gets a Blu-ray from Milestone whenever he wants.
Amy: Project Shirley is a perfect example of what AMIA has made possible, these connections between people—the community aspect. It didn’t exist before AMIA.
Eric: I hate to bring this up, but the one film you weren’t able to include in Project Shirley is The Cool World (1963/1994).
Amy and Dennis: Yes.
Dennis: For four years, Fred Wiseman, who produced The Cool World and owns the rights, said yes to our contract. And then when I finally went to him and said, “We’re bringing out the other three films next month, I’d like you to sign the contract,” he said no. Rumor has it that Mr. Scorsese is willing to intercede on our behalf. We’ll see if we can arrange that.
Eric: Fingers crossed.
Dennis: It would be a nice final acquisition, but if not, a 35 mm print of the film is still preserved at the Library of Congress.
Eric: Are there any particular films you guys wish were on the Film Registry?
Dennis: A number of ours. Alma’s Rainbow (1994) hasn’t been named yet. It would be nice if Sherman Alexie’s film The Business of Fancydancing (2002) got added. There’s a ton of films that I’ve been promoting for decades. I’d have to get you that list.
Amy: I think there are still a lot of gay films that need to be added. And women-directed films. And frankly, films that are towards porn because that’s always been a big part of the business. And pornography has always been a leader in technology.
Dennis: There are obviously two big films: Deep Throat (1972) and Behind the Green Door (1972). I haven’t seen either one of them.
Amy: Nor have I.
Dennis: The archives are ignoring a large part of American culture.
Eric: It’s interesting you bring that up because it’s literally the one genre that’s never been touched by the Film Registry. But even before the current administration, I could picture the outcry: Your tax dollars are being used to preserve porn!
Dennis: Well, the biggest fear was about Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971/2020). That if we accept this monumental, landmark film, Congress is going to look bad.
Eric: Well, it’s been five years now…
Dennis: Twenty-five years ago, TCM couldn’t show Killer of Sheep, because there was language in there they couldn’t get past the Turner Entertainment Network censors. But they said, “We’re showing Raging Bull (1980/1990), and if there are no complaints from audience members, we’ll show Killer of Sheep.” And that’s when TCM stopped editing films for language.
Eric: And Pink Flamingos (1972/2021) got added to the Film Registry, though it includes some graphic scenes. But that film is in a class by itself.
Amy: Definitely! Also, there should be more student films, more home movies, more industrials. To reflect the wide variety of what filmmaking has really been in this country will take some time.
Dennis: Is there a Nancy Savoca film on the Registry?
Eric: Not yet. Hopefully Milestone’s Household Saints (1993) will make it soon.
Amy: True Love (1989) is just a masterpiece.
Dennis: And Dogfight (1991). I mean, we adore Household Saints, but…
Amy: …it’s weirder.
Eric: Dennis, now that you’re no longer on the board, do you ever nominate films just as a member of the public?
Dennis: No. But I have placed some calls to say, “Would you nominate these?”
Eric: How about you, Amy?
Amy: I have in the past but not in recent years.
Eric: Tell me about the Missing Movies project.
Amy: Mary Harron, Nancy Savoca, Rich Guay, and Mira Nair had all had the experience of having a film programmed and not being able to find even one single print. They are involved with the DGA in New York, and during COVID they got together with media and entertainment lawyer Sue Bodine—Sue’s been our lawyer for decades—and set up a Zoom meeting about this issue.
Dennis: They called it “The Unstreamables.”
Amy: And they said, “Dennis would you be a part of this?” And Dennis said…
Dennis: “…No way is another white man going to be on the panel. Why don’t you ask Amy?”
Amy: So I was on, and I also got Ayoka Chenzira on. So we did the Zoom meeting, and the thing that I was struck by was that nobody in this group seemed to know that there were other ways to get films cleared besides paying your lawyer a lot of money.
Dennis: They would just immediately go to the lawyer and say, solve this. Because this is what they always paid their lawyers to do.
Amy: And they seemed to not know very much about underlying rights, materials, labs, archives. So I was the one who said, “But wait! There are other ways to do that!”
Dennis: This is what archives and distributors can do for a director. And so, it was such a successful Zoom meeting that Mary, Nancy, Rich, Sue, and Ira Deutchman said, “Let’s start an organization.”
Amy: Well, at first it wasn’t an organization. We just kept meeting and talking and thinking about it. “What can we do?” Eventually it turned into an organization, but we met for years before we incorporated as a nonprofit.
Dennis: And we’ve been fairly successful. We have repatriated negatives to filmmakers. So the Missing Movies project has given us a voice, and the studios are listening and restoring some films at our request, which is all to their credit because it’s their money, their necks.
Eric: Milestone has some exciting current projects. Can you tell me about those?
Amy: We opened The Business of Fancydancing on Friday [November 14, 2025] with Sherman Alexie, which was really fun. He’s a lovely person. And then Queen Kelly is going to open in New York for a week [January 16 – 22, 2026]. While we were researching Queen Kelly, I was reading all about Gloria Swanson’s life, and I kept reading about this film The Humming Bird (1924). And so I went to Dennis and said, “What’s the story with The Humming Bird?” So of course we’re doing The Humming Bird, which is a silent film set in Paris. Swanson plays a cross-dressing pickpocket.
Eric: Who’s the director?
Dennis: Sidney Olcott. It’s very well made. The sets are gorgeous—shot in Long Island.
Amy: Swanson is adorable in it. It’s very charming.
Eric: I’m so grateful you guys have been such champions of silent film.
Dennis: It’s funny because it’s not something that Maya Cade ever considered, but she’s having a blast with these.
Amy: Maya really loves film, and she loves filmmakers, which is why we’re working with her. It’s like, here’s a person who’s really smart and has really good values.
Eric: That was going to be my next question: Milestone will be under new management shortly; how is that going, and do you have a timeline?
Amy: It’s going slower than we might have thought. Maya is in L.A. now but is moving back to New York. But it’s been a good year.
Dennis: She’s acquiring films already.
Amy: Some are going to happen, some won’t. She’s working on it. I don’t think she’ll be back on the East Coast until the fall of 2026, so she’ll take over some time in 2026. She had her first chance to look at royalty reports, which is so much fun.
Dennis: She helped restore Killer of Sheep and My Brother’s Wedding.
Amy: You know, there are a lot of different aspects to what we do, so she’s now consulting on poster design and trailers, and she’s talking to George Schmalz at Kino Lorber about distribution plans. So she’s getting her feet wet.
Dennis: And she’s working on the branding of Milestone.
Amy: And she’s probably going to take it in different directions, as well she should.
Eric: Are you guys going to stick around in an advisory capacity?
Amy: Whatever she wants, we’ll do it.
Eric: I understand My Brother’s Wedding is a Blu-ray Disc we can look forward to? Will it include both cuts?
Dennis: I’m assuming so.
Amy: That restoration should be done very soon—within a week.
Dennis: The picture has been restored. The soundtrack has problems, but UCLA and the Pacific Film Archive are splitting the cost to restore it. There are lovely people out there.
Amy: The community we work in has enabled us to do the things we do. It’s not all us. Our deal with Criterion has allowed us to keep going. Our deal with Kino Lorber has allowed us to keep going. AMIA. TCM. We were paid consultants for Turner Classic Movies for fifteen years. We didn’t consult very much because they never asked us anything.
Dennis: But they paid us to keep us going.
Amy: So we’ve had a lot of support from a lot of different places.
Dennis: We’ll continue to do what we’re doing.
Amy: And we’ll do other things. There have always been serious challenges—like what Missing Movies is dealing with. But especially now, there are a lot of things we need to be thinking about and doing to preserve our community and to preserve the work that we’ve done. God forbid Congress doesn’t renew the National Film Registry [the Library of Congress Sound Recording and Film Preservation Programs Reauthorization Act of 2016 comes up for renewal in 2026]. The current administration could even expunge the National Film Registry! It’s good you’ve got your site up because they could eliminate the Registry if they wanted to. And since they knocked down the East Wing of the White House, I think almost anything is possible.
Dennis: Texas congressman Joaquin Castro leads an initiative to get more Latino movies on the Registry. He fields suggestions from the public and sends a list to the librarian of Congress. In the last few years, several of the films on the list have gotten on the Registry—with good reason. This is interesting because the National Film Preservation Board has to take the recommendations as if they come from ordinary individuals, not from within the government.
Everybody loves movies, so we’re hoping Congress will renew the National Film Registry. Film is a universal language.