"You’re sitting in the office, and on the desk there’s the old-style intercom. The operator takes an incoming call, and then it’s like: 'Michael Nash, David Bowie on Line 4.'"

Said Michael Nash, describing something that happened to him in 1992, a year after he became director of Criterion, quoted "Sure, It Won an Oscar. But Is It Criterion?/How the Criterion Collection became the film world’s arbiter of taste" (NYT). Much more at the link.

Bowie was calling about Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” in which Bowie starred as an alien visitor who masquerades as human and succumbs to the human condition. Nash remembered seeing the movie years earlier and finding it “amazing” but difficult to understand. “I was totally confused,” he said. The reason audiences couldn’t make sense of it, Bowie explained, was that the theatrical release for “The Man Who Fell to Earth” was missing 18 minutes of film that was cut by the distributor. “It got butchered,” Nash told me. Years later, its star was hoping that Criterion might consider releasing Roeg’s original cut of the film on LaserDisc....

Criterion’s respect for creators was what caught Bowie’s attention. On the phone with Nash, he offered to record an audio commentary for the Criterion edition of “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” which was released on LaserDisc in March 1993 and quickly became a cult classic. “The thing about ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ and so many of the other projects is you’ve got films whose greatness was squelched somewhat by the process of taking them to market, where the people who had the projects didn’t understand them and would recut them for commercial release,” Nash told me. His priority was to help make Criterion “an enterprise that would restore the director’s vision and get the film right for posterity.”

Much more at the link.