See also the almost exactly contemporaneous Black Peter, which is peppered with popular Czech hits of the era - which Miloš Forman obtained for pretty much nothing because (a) he was best mates with extremely successful popular songwriters like Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr (basically the Lennon and McCartney of Sixties Czechoslovakia, both of whom are prominently featured in Forman's previous film Audition) and rock musicians like Pavel Sedláček, who plays a significant supporting role as an actor, and (b) Communist Czechoslovakia wasn't really into music licensing as a concept.Matt wrote: Wed Mar 30, 2022 8:47 pmAs for Scorpio Rising, Anger claims he cleared all the rights before the release of the film. Of course, he’s a notorious teller of tall tales, but the licensing of pop music for motion pictures would have been in its infancy then, and I don’t doubt he could have licensed all these recordings very cheaply and in perpetuity. Who could have foreseen then that pop singles would have lucrative afterlives on movie soundtracks?
One of the reasons why Forman's career was so meteoric was because Black Peter was a big local hit that also brought in substantial hard-currency revenues despite being made for a budget so low that it barely registered - indeed, the fact that it barely registered was how Forman was able to get away with making it largely unsupervised in the first place, because the upfront risk was minimal. But had he had to pay out licensing fees proportionate to today, things might have panned out very differently.
