PIE SPOILERS!!!

Following up on my previous post on the matter, it now would appear that the Paley Center in New York City will be screening “Once More with Feeling” in July and August.

It is beginning to appear, at this point, that major institutions — or, really, major non-profit institutions — are being permitted to screen this episode, as this makes Comic-Con and Paley that have been granted a license to do so.

Smaller events, such as the Slay-a-Thon, appear unable to obtain a similar license but (in that case, at least) somehow are being permitted to screen Angel, another Fox-licensed show.

Seriously: Can someone in the loop and in the know on just what the Hell the current Fox licensing regime is doing please come explain it to the rest of us?

While this isn’t about television, it’s so monumental that it gets a free pass here. According to an article in the German magazine Zeit, negatives containing the long-lost footage from the original cut of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis have been discovered in Argentina. Plans for restoration and re-release (in some form) now are underway.

In any culture worthy of that term, this would be major headline news. It’s a phenomenal moment in film history that should be trumpeted by anyone who actually cares about our cultural heritage. I have no idea if outlets such as CNN (not to single them out) care. At least ones such as Sci Fi Wire and Ain’t It Cool News do.

Update: For the sake of posterity, there’s the search of Google News showing the news spreading.

Update: AICN has, from a .pdf file of Zeit’s print edition, photographs of some of the rediscovered footage.

Last year, in October, there came a sudden licensing crackdown on theatrical showings of episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (See here, here, and here for details.) We were, at the time, ultimately told (see the comments) that in fact Fox had suspended such licensing for all of its television properties.

There were many theories at the time (including speculation that perhaps getting a cut from such usage was on the table in the then-looming writers strike, although that does not appear to have been the case), and in the just-linked discussion there’s some suggestion out of the company that handled issuing the licenses that some “third party” in fact had demanded their “fair share” of such licensing.

None of that ever has been confirmed, so far as I know. And no one that I know of has been able to get a firm picture of the specifics and the details from anyone high up enough to know them.

I bring all of this up because now comes news that a charity event has been prohibited from showing any Buffy episodes but is being permitted to screen episodes of its brother series Angel. And that comes on the heels of the recent announcement that Comic-Con has been permitted to license the musical episode of Buffy to screen as the convention’s final Sunday event.

All of which, of course, only further complicates the already complicated issue, and makes it even more unclear than it already is just what the Hell is going on.

On the off-chance that someone actually in the know happens across this post: Please email me and help us all understand the reality of the issues involved and what properties are and are not affected by those issues.

Update: I had completely forgotten all about this MTV article which detailed the various positions, and pegged a large bill the Screen Actors Guild had “sent 20th Century Fox Television a six-figure bill for unpaid actor residuals”.